MI

By Caren Panzer

Arnif G. Nerio felt his life was really coming together in the fall of 1942. While so many were still out of work, he’d just landed a job at General Motors in Saginaw, Mich.

Just three months earlier, he’d married Trinidad Ayala, and they were expecting a child.

When he was drafted into the U.S. Army on Dec. 4, 1942, his life changed.

Nerio pleaded with the officials to let him wait until his daughter was born. The Army assured him that his family would be taken care of and shipped him to Little Rock, Ark., for basic training. He was 20.

By Leigh Cole

Manuel Najera certainly made his presence known in the service during World War II, flying 35 missions in Europe before coming home.

"If I would have died, it would have ended my family," Najera said.

But he took that risk and became an aerial machine gunner in the Army Air Forces in 1943.

By Christa Desimone

She remembers the telephone call like it was yesterday. A man had rushed into the office where she was working in May of 1946, yelling to her that she had a phone call waiting for her across the street.

Victoria Partida dashed to the phone and heard the voice of the man from whom she’d been waiting to hear for two long years. It was her fiancé, Luis Guerrero, who’d been at war in the South Pacific. He said the words she’d long wanted to hear.

By Christine Pev

On Dec. 7, 1941, 20-year-old Pablo Gonzales heard on the radio in his hometown of Sabinal, Texas, that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor, and he immediately wanted to enlist in the military to help defend his country.

His mother, Julia Bocanegra Gonzales, wasn’t pleased. The second of 10 children and the oldest son, he was a significant contributor to the family’s income. Ever since Gonzales and his father, Rafael Gonzales, had worked together on a job mending fences and cutting cedar, they’d labored as a team.

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."