San Antonio

By Brent Wistrom

Jose Sena remembers how his best friends suckered him into enlisting in the U.S. Army at the start of World War II.

As a 17-year-old, Sena was hanging around with his twin brother and some of his friends one day when they began talking about how good soldiers looked in their uniforms.

After bantering about the redeeming qualities of wearing a soldier's uniform, Sena and his friends convinced each other that they would volunteer for military service the next day.

By Ernie Carrido

Jose M. Lopez is one of the 12 Latino World War II veterans to have received the Congressional Medal of Honor, the nation's highest military accolade. He had a difficult childhood, but maintained a fervent belief in the Virgen de Guadalupe, the patron saint of Mexico.

Lopez's father died in the Mexican Revolution; his mother eight, years later, when he was eight. Lopez never went to school, but worked in the cotton fields to help support himself.

By Andrea Williams

For Edward Vasquez, the war years represented the ultimate adventure for a boy given to impetuous feats.

A Mexico-born mother and Texas father’s middle child of seven, Vazquez remembers being taunted by his older siblings and pestered by the younger ones. As a result, he learned early to find entertainment outside of the home.

By Unity Peterson

Even though August R. Segura spent World War II stationed in Laredo, Texas, working on aircraft, he says he came away from the experience a skilled mechanic and "a better man."

Segura was born Feb. 11, 1922, in San Antonio to parents Augustin Segura and Leonor Rodriguez Segura. He grew up in the inner city as the firstborn of a close-knit family that included four sisters. He also was close to his grandparents, who helped raise him and his siblings.

By Whitney Mizer

Eighty-two-year-old San Antonio resident Ester Arredondo Perez always worked hard to accomplish her goals, whether they were traveling the world or becoming the first Latino high school graduate in Fort Bend County, Texas.

By Guillermo X. Garcia

José Navarro, a 20-year-old farm boy with a limited education from segregated South Texas schools, went to war in 1942 to better himself.

By the time of his discharge, due to injury as a member of the U.S. Army's 99th Infantry Division, Navarro had fought in two of the most decisive Allied victories in Europe: the Allied invasion of Normandy and the Battle of the Bulge.

After the successful Normandy invasion, the Allies drove through the French countryside, engaging the Germans in major battles at Lieges and St.-Lo.

By Celina Moreno

Jose Ruben Moreno attributes his success in life to a journey on the "line of least resistance." But enduring economic hardship and performing dangerous wartime duties as a counterintelligence spy in Panama proved anything but effortless.

Moreno was born in 1917 to Melchor Moreno and Lydia Saldivar in Brownsville, Texas. He attended a Catholic school to avoid the Protestant-run public schools, to which his parents had an aversion. At the school, courses were conducted in Spanish the first three years and thereafter primarily in English.

By Monica Flores

Feeling like a full-fledged American despite lacking a U.S. birth certificate, Luis Leyva never let his Mexican citizenship status affect his dedication to his adopted homeland.

By Juan de la Cruz

As the only Mexican American in his troop, Anastacio Perez Juarez experienced problems not normally encountered by other soldiers.

Because of his limited English, even the simplest commands -- forward, march, halt, and others -- were a challenge for the young enlistee.

"It's like in music," he said. "If you don't know a note, you don't play. In the Army, it's the same thing. You got to walk at the same time the others walk."

By Tony Cantú

Among his siblings, four of whom would join him in the war effort, Jose Ramirez "Joe" Jasso is remembered as el cabezudo, the hard-headed one of the bunch, always getting into trouble as a youth.

Jasso had grown up quickly by the time he joined the war effort. Serving as a surgical technician, he helped treat victims of the Bataan Death March in the Philippines and the Corregidor battle. Amid the wounded and dying, the playfulness and mischief of childhood quickly became a thing of the past.