Army

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 BROOKE MEHARG

Juan Martinez smiled as he remembered receiving letters from proud siblings while he was stationed in the Philippines, telling him he was in their prayers.

"Thanks to God that their prayers went up to heaven," Martinez said.

Born in 1923, he grew up in La Gruya, Texas, between the cities of Mission and Rio Grande City, living with his grandmother until the age of 9 because of his parents' divorce. Unlike many families, his did not struggle economically by virtue of his father's successful bakery and Mexican food restaurant.

By Tony Cantú

Jose Fuljencio Martinez remembers the minutest details of his tour of duty's defining moment, his unit's surrender at Bataan, recalling virtually every tear and each bead of sweat he shed as he faced his captors.

"I could feel the tears coming down. They would burn. And then a drop of sweat would run down. It would be so cold and all of a sudden it would burn like fire! Like you got a lit match and put it against your skin."

By Ismael Martinez

Gilbert Lopez was born Sept. 30, 1919, in Azusa, northeast of Los Angeles. His father, Victorio Jose Lopez, worked for the Works Progress Administration (WPA) as a stonemason. Lopez' mother, Dephene Lopez, was a homemaker, raising the couple's eight children.

During the Depression years, Lopez remembers growing up in poverty and attending Irwindale School without shoes. As a small boy, official segregation forced Latinos to sit in separate sections of public buildings, such as movie theaters.

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 Andrea R. Williams

In the midst of conflict, Robert Leyva sometimes would think the enemy troops killed in World War II could have been among his friends in another time and place. This kind of love of mankind is a mainstay in Leyva's life.

Leyva was born into poverty in Chihuahua, Mexico, on May 10, 1915, to parents who were poor farm laborers. At age three, he's been told, Leyva's father, Jesus, left the family. At the age of five, his mother, Justina Ovalles Leyva, took his brother, Jesus, and sister, Justina, to El Paso, Texas.

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.

By Nikki Muñoz

The son of a laborer, Lupe Hernandez has been defined by the concept of hard work, having spent much of his childhood alongside his father in the fields.

Hernandez's parents, Guadalupe Hernandez and Isidora Garza Hernandez, moved to the border town of McAllen, Texas, from Mexico in 1918. After having immigrated to Texas, his mother was visiting relatives in Mexico and gave birth to Hernandez in Reynosa, Mexico, where his grandmother lived.

Hernandez has many memories of his childhood, but mostly he recalls working with his father in the fields.

By Nikki Muñoz

Rafael A. Guerra has always had an optimistic outlook on life, relying on an affirmation for help through life's rough spots, including his tour of duty: "If the sun comes out today, it is going to shine on me; if it doesn't come out, it won't," said Guerra, relating the mantra.