Army

By Pierre Bertrand

It seems as if Army infantryman Julian Medina, who was drafted in 1943, was on the frontlines of every major World War II European campaign, from the Normandy Invasion to the Battle of the Bulge.

“I was in every fight. I was in every battle,” said Medina, who was part of the Army’s 119th Infantry Regiment, 30th Infantry Division in 1943.

His European service began in Scotland, where he was among thousands of American soldiers being trained for amphibious assaults.

By David Muto

Trinidad Martinez remembers the little things.

Like the long list of vegetables he helped his family grow on their ranch in South Texas before World War II broke out.

Thoughts like that punctuate Martinez's recollections of his time at war, during which he endured years of incredible hardship at the hands of enemy combatants and even walked in the infamous Bataan Death March. He seems amused while recalling these smaller, seemingly trivial memories of his youth, as if they've been uncovered for the first time in years.

By Sara Delarosa

When Willie Luna Moreno entered the Armed Forces in April of 1943, he was only 19.

Moreno began basic training at Camp Robinson in Arkansas, and later in Massachusetts and Maryland. Afterward, he went to England, France and Germany.

Starting as a Private First Class, he was involved in the infantry and military police, as well as the 1st Infantry Division, nicknamed Big Red One partially due to a shoulder patch emblazoned with a red numeral “1.” As a part of Big Red One, Moreno was in Omaha Beach, Normandy, on D-Day.

By Soren Silkenson

When Alfred P. Flores was 16, his brother Robert, was lost in an early guided missile attack that sank his ship, the Rohna, three miles off the coast of Italy.

The sinking in the Mediterranean of the British troop transport vessel on Nov. 26, 1943, killed more than 1,000 U.S. troops in one of the worst losses of U.S. maritime history.

Details of the disaster were initially shrouded in military secrecy. Flores was determined to help find his brother but was told he was too young to enlist. Shortly after turning 17, he was finally allowed.

By Hope Teel

Out of work with eight mouths to feed, Henry Rodriguez’s family left California in the early 1930s during the beginning of the Great Depression.

For Rodriguez, the family’s youngest member, the trip marked his first experience with racial discrimination.

“People didn’t know anything about backgrounds,” Rodriguez said. “People thought there were only Anglos and Indians, and we were Indians.”

As the family traveled across several states, Rodriguez watched his parents persevere, despite weather, racial and financial obstacles.

By Hasive Gomez

Cleaning land mines and building bridges in front of enemy lines leaves little room for luck. Yet former combat engineer Placido Peña says luck is one of the reasons he survived the war under hazardous conditions.

Peña had more than luck on his side, however, as he also says he had an instinct for survival.

“[Some] of the soldiers were lazy;” laughed Peña as he talked about covering for shelter. “They would only dig their foxholes a couple of feet deep. I would always dig deeper.”

By Erin Brady

Puerto Rican Jose Medina-Negrón put college on hold when he volunteered to join the United States Army on July 15, 1943. He simply wanted to do his part, and says he didn’t know he was on the road to his future career.

Medina-Negrón’s path to cryptology unfolded in stages, beginning with a single test.

By Prisilla Totiyapungprasert

Corporal Joseph Davila had a choice during his military occupation in the Southern Philippines: He could stay with the other soldiers to hold up enemy advancement toward American military headquarters, or he could race his way through an incoming banzai attack to rescue a fallen comrade.

It was 1944, a year before Japan surrendered to signal the end of World War II, and Sergeant David Fayard found his wounded, blood-covered body being pulled from the ground.

Davila had chosen to come back for him.

By Cheryl Smith Kemp

Number 10 in a brood of 16, Jesse De los Santos was well accustomed to being a mere piece of something much larger than himself by the time he joined the United States Calvary in 1939.

Little did he know, however, that in a couple of years he would be part of an event significantly bigger than the Calvary, the Army, all of the armed forces combined, even the U.S. itself. For on Dec. 7, 1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and everything changed. World War II was on.

By Rachel Vallejo

As his unit hit the beaches of Guadalcanal, a small island in the South Pacific, 18-year-old Isidro Ramos witnessed for the first time the bloody price of war: dump trucks full of Marines’ bodies “stacked up like wood,” Japanese soldiers littering the ground.

A moment of insight washed over the private first class that day in 1942 as he said to himself: “There really is a war.”

More than sixty years later, Ramos says he was glad to serve, but has mixed feelings about the experience. He notes differences between then and now in the tools of combat.