By Edna P. Carmona,
For 10 days in 1944, Margarito Correa and nine of his fellow soldiers were lost -- tired and hungry and unsure where to go or what to do. But even in the midst of the chaos, Correa held on to hope, believing his mother's prayers would pull him through.
"In the letters I sent my mother, I asked her to pray day and night for me and I know that it helped," he said.
Still, times were so rough that he was sure he wouldn’t survive.
By Katherine Sayre
Lina Cordova prayed each night for her husband's safe return to her and their two children during World War II.
"I used to pray every night, every night I would pray, 'Please God, bring him home,'” Cordova said. "I didn't care how he [came] home – without an arm or without a leg – as long as he came home to me and the kids.''
While Alfredo Cordova was away fighting on Europe’s battlefields, Cordova wrote him two or three times a week. When he wrote back, the letters were sometimes censored, some passages blacked out, she says.
By Julia Zwick
Seventy-nine-year-old Alfredo Cordova is one of the thousands of American men and women who served in the Army during World War II. His story starts in a poor town in New Mexico and takes him to California and Europe, and eventually back to his friends and family in New Mexico.
"My parents were very good people," Cordova said. "My wife and I took care of them when they were older, and we enjoyed doing it."
By Shan Dunn
One night in December of 1941, the world changed for Robert John Chavez. He was in the 9th grade and a 15-year-old teenager, attending a dance marathon, when word came over the radio that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor.
Not long after, Chavez dropped out of school and went to California, where he worked in a shipyard, assisting in the construction of U.S. warships. He worked there until he was drafted on Sept. 4, 1944.
By Erin Dean
Everything is "beautiful" to Ralph Chavarria, an 88-year-old World War II veteran of the Pacific Theater, who is, to this day, a well-known musician in the Phoenix, Ariz., area.
Chavarria survived a tough childhood full of discrimination and segregation and was drafted at the age of 27, by which point he was already a husband and a father. But he describes nearly everything in his life as beautiful.
"It was very interesting and beautiful, but it's war and it's dangerous, ok," he said about his missions as a firefighter in the Air Force.
By Rebecca Eng
With 18 pairs of boots and 15 cowboy hats, Seventy-eight-year-old Pablo Cavazos is a walking specimen of Texas pride.
His advice to young people is simple: Get a good start in the military.
"If they go into the military, they'll learn a lot of things there," Cavazos said.
By Nicolas Martinez
When the government called Hilario Cavazos Jr. to war in October of 1943, he was in his senior year at Laredo's Martin High School, working his way toward college. He asked for an extension to finish high school, but to no avail -- the need for capable men was too great during World War II.
By Maureen King
It had always been a fascination to him, something he’d seen in the movies.
He knew he could do it and do it better than anyone else, he says, because he was a Mexican. The fascination: jumping out of an airplane.
The challenge led George M. Castañeda to serve as an Army paratrooper in the 11th Airborne Division during the Korean War.
"I'd do it again if they asked me to," Castañeda said. "If I had to go, I'd go on to the airborne. It's in my blood. That's when you know what you're made of. Either you got it or you don't got it."
By Laura Radloff
As a young man, Julius Casarez didn’t know exactly what he was getting himself into when he enlisted in the Army.
"My brother told me that if I enlisted sooner rather than later, I could pick where I wanted to be stationed," said Casarez, 82, who now lives with his wife, Trinity Castruita Casarez, in Austin, Texas.
Little did he know that when he enlisted, the Japanese were only a few days away from bombing Pearl Harbor, and he’d be forced to go where the Army told him to go.
By Anjali Desai
Cayetano Casados had a floating, front row seat for the historic Normandy Invasion of World War II.
"We were the first ship to be fired on and the first ship to fire in the invasion," said Casados of the campaign that led to the allied victory over Germany.
"We had some very close calls. Sometimes there would be shrapnel all over you. But I was very fortunate, I only lost one man," he said.
