Until the Enemy Had No Face, the continuing story

                                                                               

La Raza no se raja
  

In the last post, "The Way It Started," Anthony Reza remembers the day he was the only survivor in a squad surrounded by enemy soldiers. This is the continuation of Anthony's story.

                                                                       PART 1

                                                                   Los Angeles

                                                                         2013

                                                                            1.

     Again, the American Airlines terminal, like stepping into a time machine, not sure if I'll be hurled into the past or remain, here, in the present, or spit out into the future. I don't fight it, the past, the same place, different terminal, nearly fifty years ago, my mom jittery, her eyes glazed over when they announced my flight. We hugged tightly, with some shyness. When her arms loosened and dropped, I stepped back. I picked up my bag. “Bye Mom.” She stood there awkwardly, not knowing what to do next. We weren’t a hugging family. She said to a sergeant, a stranger standing beside me, “Please take care of him.”

     Young, mid-twenties, he’d recently arrived from a skirmish in Santo Domingo, and like me, new orders for Vietnam, he said, good-naturedly, “Yes, mam, he’ll be home before you know it.” We exchanged nods, and he was gone. I had no reason to doubt him.

     My father knew better. He’d been through it, a real war, not a “conflict,” a government concept nobody understood. Some said, “More like Korea than Europe or the Pacific.” Stoic, like his Mexican father, my dad stood there, hands in his pocket. “Mi ‘jo, take care of yourself,” no smothering kisses like the Italians, my dad more Indian than Spaniard. 

     In the 1940s' war, my parents had lost friends, neighbors who never returned, killed in foreign lands, their families forever changed. Earlier, back in the 1900s, their parents escaped the ravages of the revolution in Mexico and the deaths of millions, mostly civilians. My parents knew the jetliner waiting for me outside on the tarmac meant this might be the last time we’d see each other, ever.

     To me, 19, it was abstract, vague, no context, like the movies, pure fantasy, still a blur, an American kid like any other, one day here the next day there, visions of adventure in an exotic land.

    Never on my radar, the military scooped me up when I took a semester break from community college to save money. I was one of the few kids from my neighborhood to enroll in college, more to fulfill my parents’ dream than my own. My friends found jobs, bought their first cars, and enjoyed the freedom of youth, oblivious to the government’s war drums rumbling around them.

     As the oldest, I was the role model my parents molded for my younger siblings, the first on the path to graduate college, a feat out of reach for my parents but a reality for their children.

     My dad quit school in the eleventh grade to work and help his family. A few years later, wars broke out in Europe and the Pacific. Uncle Sam came calling. My dad received his draft notice, shipped out overseas, did his time, returned home, wounded, and faced the aftermath, something he rarely discussed, his emotions evident whenever he drank, which, for us, was too much. A union man, an expert at anything to do with cement, he was a reader, whatever he could get his hands on, newspapers, magazines, and novels by Steinbeck, Hemingway, and Styron.

     My mother graduated high school, only two in her family of seven kids to finish. For the next few years, she boarded the bus each day from her home in Santa Monica to work at Saks Fifth Avenue in Beverly Hills, no real plans except to wait and see, so different from her girlfriends on the prowl for men to marry and start families. My mother savored her independence and enjoyed working. She gave a portion of her paycheck to help her family after her father’s early death. She’d been an excellent student, A’s and B’s, but for a young woman with Spanish last name, her teachers encouraged to work instead of going to college.

     To my parents, education meant freedom for their children to choose their own future. To jump-start  our interest in reading, they purchased the Encyclopedia Britannica, one book a month to fit the family budget, my mom suspicious of the Lay-Away-Plan, no credit on her ledger. She proudly displayed the prune-colored, golden filigreed collection on a low shelf in our living room, so to see me in uniform had to have disappointed them.

                                                                                   2.

     My letter from the Draft Board with instructions to report to the Induction Center in downtown Los Angeles, put my friends on notice, some going so far as to marry and start families, hoping the draft would pass them by.

     “That’s bunk,” said Mario Martinez, when he heard I’d been drafted. A tasty blues guitarist and lead singer in rock band, totally anti-war, Mario had started calling himself a “Chicano,” like how my dad and his friends referred to each other, but only in private, with friends, never in public. We called ourselves, “Mexicans,” if asked where we came from.

     Mario complained, “They’re starting to take Chicanos left and right, man. I don’t dig school, but I’m getting into J.C. until this thing blows over.” Mario stayed in school so long, by the time the government stopped the draft, he’d become an attorney.

     Albert “Guero” Samaniego, was a good kid. He excelled in school, and was star second baseman in Little League. Tall, handsome, and a pretty good vocabulary, until junior high when he started greasing back his hair, wearing pressed khakis and a white T-shirt, gang-banging, and talking tough. Guero had told me, “Shee—it, Reza, let them call my number. I ain’t going, no way, homie. Check out Terry Weems, dumb as a tamale wrapper, man, got a deferment ‘cause his jefa had connections with someone on the draft board. White boys talking about going to Canada to wait it out. If they come after me, I’m bookin’ it to Mexico.”

     A year later, after Guero got his draft letter, he had a cousin drop him off near the Tecate border. His clothes in tatters, no I.D., Guero tried passing himself off as a bracero to get deported to Zacatecas, which might as well have been Timbuktu, since he’d never been there. The judge gave him a choice, jail or the army. Guero fell on a grenade and saved some guys in his squad on an operation in the Mekong Delta with the 9^th Infantry. He should’ve received a Medal of Honor instead of a Silver Star. His death opened an empty space inside the rest of us. “Hear about Guero Samaniego,” people whispered, even years after the war?

    We only lived six miles north of L.A.’s International Airport, near the National Soldier’s Home in the western part of L.A. known as Sawtelle. As kids, we’d watch the passenger jets make a wide loop over the Pacific, fly high above our homes, and head east, I imagined, to magical places, with names I’d read in the encyclopedia, like the Cairo, the Balkans, Bavaria, Bali, and Segovia.

                                                                                    3.

     The first time I stepped into an airport and onto a plane was the day the Army flew a load of us, more Mexicans than I’d see in one place, from L.A. International to El Paso’s Municipal Airport, for Basic Training. My emotions so scrambled I had no idea what to think. I might as well have been on a spaceship to Mars. When we landed, they loaded us onto military buses and transported us inside the gates of Fort Bliss, the name a cruel irony for what we were about to experience.

     A gaggle of drill instructors met us. Under the stiff brims of their Smokey the Bear hats, they put their faces up to ours, and shouted as we stepped onto the pavement, calling us ladies, girls, pussies, and panty wipes. Oh, the barracks, once inside, black and brown faces everywhere, nothing like my college campus where white faces crowded the sidewalks, cafeteria, library and classrooms.

     The D.I.’s did everything they could to break us psychologically and physically, to remove “the civilized kid and replace him with a violent killer,” was how my friend from New Mexico, Rudy Morales, analyzed it.  Most recruits hung tough and made it through those first weeks. If you were athletic, social, and fairly smart, you had the best chance of surviving.

     The guys who failed, as our drill instructors said, “Couldn’t get with the program.” An Undesirable Discharges wasn’t as bad as a Dishonorable Discharges but nothing any of us wanted on our records, weighting down our egos, and our plans for the future. Nobody wanted to be the one who couldn’t cut it.

     In the mess hall, we couldn’t talk. Get your chow, eat, and get the hell out. The only thing we heard was music on the P.A. and the banging of trays, dishes, and silverware, or the mess hall staff hollering at someone, “Idiot! Get a move on there,” embarrassing as hell in front of everybody.

     One guy, Waltzer, a tough bastard, big, well over six-foot, melted down at lunch when the Rolling Stone’s “19^th Nervous Breakdown” came on over the speakers. He jumped up, tossed the table over and sent everything flying. He blew right past a sergeant who tried to stop him. We could hear him hollering outside, a looney escaped from the asylum, his voice getting fainter the farther he ran.

     The rest of us continued eating in silence, like nothing had happened. It rattled us. Later, we heard from a kid in Waltzer’s squad that Walzer had been talking about his wife and kid non-stop, obsessing about how much he missed them and wanted to see them. He finally snapped. If Walzer could snap under the pressure, what about the rest of us?

     One time, my friend Joaquin Ornelas had trouble keeping up on our morning runs. The D.I.’s started getting on his case about other things, his messy footlocker and personal area, the loose blankets on his bed, the corners not tucked in correctly, and his boots too dull to pass inspection. Agustin Para, a high school wrestler from San Antonio, who mashed Spanish, calo, and English when he talked, led a group of “Chicanos,” his word, the rest of us spoke mostly English, warned, “Ornelas, aguantate, carnal, y get your shit together. Don’t make the raza look bad.” It was a message we all heeded and knew we could lean on each other during tough times.

                                                                                 4.

     After Basic and Advanced Individual Training (AIT), I changed. It happened slowly, thinking myself in the collective us, part of the institution. My body hardened and my mind sharpened. No experience with a rifle, I could hit, with cool regularity, a popup carboard target at 100 yards. I’d toss a grenade into a bunker, holding on to the pin until the last second, my heart rate surging. I could handle any mortar, rocket, or grenade launcher they put in my hands.

    Something about hand-to-hand combat got my blood racing, using my rifle as a cudgel, deftly dodging opponents, and stabbing stuffed dummies with a bayonet, light on my feet, from so much boxing, I moved like a dancer. We marched in time and sang ditties, like, “I want to go to Vietnam/I want to kill some Vietcong,” over and over, drilled into us until the enemy had no face.

     At Fort Gordon, Georgia, we slogged through alligator and cotton mouth infested swamps, day and night, in full combat gear, without sleep, and little food, spring football training a walk in the park, in comparison. After a time, we were ready to kill something, needed to kill something. We started hearing stories from returning soldiers about ambushes and guys dying, hard to wrap our heads around. It became real, something serious, yet exhilarating. 

     They primed us like fine-tuned engines. The military turned on the key, started us up, and we hummed, no hesitation about taking another person’s life, the abstract enemy, obstacles to our freedoms as Americans. We thought of ourselves as invincible, and the death of an American inconceivable.

     My dad got it. When I received my orders for Vietnam, he told me, “Stay alert, always.” He taught by telling stories. “You know, Nino Vela? Nino’s brother Nico made it through North Africa into Italy, and in a village, he saw a fountain. He went over to get drink. A sniper got him.” He waited, to let the story sink in. “Remember, think first, keep your eyes and ears open, don’t panic, and Mi’jo, don’t volunteer for nothing.”

     My dad had me working from the time I could hold a rake. He pointed out a flower from a weed. We worked every Saturday, cleaning the yard. In summer, my uncle picked me up in his truck and took me to work in his gardening and landscaping business. He taught me to use tools and equipment. A good job meant a slap on the back, a bad job and I got an ass chewing.

     I watched other guys, no shame, guys who had never worked a day, and didn’t know how to follow the simplest orders. They floated, talking their way out of duties they didn’t like or feared. They bitched and questioned everything, sometimes pretending to be sick, making themselves miserable. The ones who couldn’t hack it went AWOL, ignorant of the consequences.

     Even if I couldn’t stomach some D.I.’s, I respected them, their toughness, and value as teachers, under their steely surfaces. Others I admired, even if we feared them, like Sergeant First Class Eugenio Villareal, from Colorado, an infantryman in WWII and Korea, who did a tour in Vietnam, and his sidekick, Sgt. Saul Mendoza, another Chicano WWII, Korea, and Vietnam veteran. No joke, Army all the way.

     The two NCOs came up on a group of us drinking pitchers of watered-down beer at the post Enlisted Man’s Club. The sergeants had a few too many. When we saw them, we clammed up. The strolled over to our table. “Looky here, Sgt. Mendoza,” Villareal said, turning to his partner, “who we got?” He leaned over our table, and said, “Carne fresca. Let me tell you one thing, babosos, La Raza no se raja.” In his heavy-accented English, Mendoza, enunciating each word carefully, said, “When you get over there, show the cabrones you got balls.”

     Then came the day I stood over Irish Red’s body, our squad’s first casualty. Red’s best friend Teddy O’ Shay, both of them Boston boys, the Charleston area, cried like a baby as they zipped Red’s body bag. So much for our invincibility and the racist myth that a lowly Vietnamese couldn’t kill Americans. I told Kenny Bolger, “Man, dig it, Irish Red’s folks back in Charleston don’t know their son’s gone, and here we are, right now, we know it, and thousands of miles away, his family has no idea. They’re just going about living their lives.”

     Kenny answered, “That there’s some deep shit, Reza, man.” 

     Kenny's day came at Pleiku. I didn't even get to see his body.