By Raquel C. Garza
As a child, Jesus Ochoa once spent the 16th of September, a Mexican holiday celebrating independence from Spain, at home with his family. When he returned to school the next day, his teacher admonished him, saying missing classes was inappropriate because he was an American, not a Mexican.
When Ochoa returned from World War II, September 16 took on a new meaning -- he came back to the United States a veteran after being injured in battle.
By Tammi Grais
Eliseo Navarro and his three brothers found a positive experience, overcame the hardships and returned home safely.
Born in 1925 in Asherton, Texas, a small town 100 miles southeast of San Antonio, Navarro suffered through a segregated world. The whole town was divided into Anglos and Mexican Americans.
By Frank Trejo
When Antonio F. Moreno stormed ashore Iwo Jima as a U.S. Marine medical corpsman, a familiar odor greeted him.
Moreno, who grew on Texas' Gulf Coast, knew there was no mistaking the smell that wafted up to him as he dug into the earth to prepare a foxhole. The sulfur bubbling under the volcanic island smelled just like the sulfur of his childhood a half a world away.
"It smelled like rotten eggs; that's why it reminded me of home," he said.
By Celina Moreno
Tomás Martinez, a veteran of the Normandy Invasion and the Battle of the Bulge who became a barber, has lived by a "do-it-yourself" philosophy since his youth in southern New Mexico.
Born Dec. 21, 1923, to Amador Martinez and Manuela Mendoza Martinez, Martinez was the fourth of 12 children who grew up in the New Mexican farm village of Vado, where the Mendoza side of the family had lived since the 1590s, before the United States annexed what is now the Southwestern United States.
By Brian Villalobos
Raul Martinez's hands, thick, square and accented by a crest of jagged, walnut-sized knuckles, don’t seem to match his large, soft eyes.
Over the past 76 years, these hands have handled everything from cement to machine guns to mortar charges.
Martinez was born and raised in Cementville, Texas, a small cement company village north of Alamo Heights in San Antonio. One of 10 children born to Teofilo and Manuelita Martinez, both Mexican natives, he soon got a job at the same local cement factory where his father and grandfather had both worked.
By Robert Mayer
Johnnie Marino was working as a tinsmith in Houston, having learned the trade from President Roosevelt's National Youth Administration program, when he heard about Hitler's running amok in Europe.
By Nikki Muñoz
Before he reached the age of 22, Ernesto Pedregón Martinez had already worked as a painter of bullfighting posters, helped liberate a Nazi concentration camp and returned home to start a new life, which would eventually lead to his becoming a nationally known artist.
Martinez was born in El Paso, Texas, in 1926 to a hardworking tailor and a mother who was a homemaker. Martinez proved to be a survivor: All six babies his mother bore died at birth before he was born.
By Denise Chávarri
In the Army, Agustin Lucio, a 10th-grade dropout from a farming community outside San Marcos, Texas, noticed that many other young soldiers were educated or had finished high school. So, while in training, he decided to educate himself, asking for books and learning from those around him.
After two years at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Lucio was sent to Camp McCoy in Wisconsin, where he received elite Ranger and ski training. He would be sent to fight in Europe as part of the D-Day invasion.
By Antonio Gilb
In the first days of the Battle of the Bulge in 1944, in Schmidt, Germany, American scouts reported that a division of German tanks and soldiers lay on the outskirts of town, ready to attack. To minimize casualties, officers hastily ordered the unit to abandon the area. But in their haste, the unit commanders left behind a handful of soldiers. Catarino Hernandez, an 18-year-old from Seguin, was among them.
By Beth Nottingham
Roberto Gonzalez had a Sunday tradition of listening to news about World War II on a big old radio in the living room with his dad, Catarino Gonzalez. Little did he know that his love of radio would be his ticket to making his father proud by serving his country.
