Soldiers in la Guerra

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/05/opinion/soldiers-in-la-guerra.html

Version 0 of 1.

The Edgewood Independent School District, located in a predominantly lower-income Mexican immigrant and Mexican-American west side neighborhood of San Antonio, suffered 54 casualties during the Vietnam War, one of the highest rates for a single school district in the country. All but three of those casualties were Latino, and 10 of them were from Edgewood High School’s class of 1967. Faced with these statistics during the planning of their 20-year high school reunion, members of the class of ’67 undertook efforts to honor their fallen classmates. On Memorial Day 1988, they dedicated the granite-and-brick Edgewood Vietnam Memorial at the district’s football stadium.

My father, Gilberto C. Villarreal, came back from Vietnam. And though he attended another high school in the neighborhood, the Edgewood story is in many ways his story — and the story of so many Latino Vietnam veterans. My father shared much with others from San Antonio’s west side who served in Vietnam: He and his parents immigrated from Mexico in 1957, grew up in public housing and eventually in a modest home in the neighborhood, received his citizenship papers and his high school diploma in 1968 and his draft notice the following year. He went on to serve as a sergeant and surgical assistant in the 56th Dental Detachment in Phu Bai from March 1971 to January 1972.

What this meant was that my father spent much of his days in Vietnam peering into the dark: extracting rotten teeth, mending unhinged jaws, mining the hollowed vessel that carries the voice. My father came back from Vietnam knowing much about what an open mouth reveals. But he mostly kept his mouth shut about the war.

Statistically, it is difficult to account for the full impact of Latino service in Vietnam because throughout the war the military categorized Latinos racially as white and did not keep records of separate “ethnic” affiliation. The figures that are known are largely a result of the research conducted by the late political scientist Ralph Guzmán during his time as a doctoral student at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1969. Without official records of “racial” categories to rely upon, Dr. Guzmán calculated the number of Spanish surnames from five Southwestern states with large concentrations of Mexican-American residents — Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico and Texas — based on casualty reports from January 1961 to February 1967 and from December 1967 to March 1969. His study, “Mexican-American Casualties in Vietnam,” was released in 1970 and published in the Chicano-movement newspaper La Raza in 1971.

What he found confirmed what many Latino communities from school districts like Edgewood had already come to know: Latinos made up a disproportionately high number of the war’s casualties. According to Dr. Guzmán’s findings, although Latinos made up only 11.9 percent of the total population, they accounted for 19.4 percent of the casualties in Vietnam. His research also found that a substantial number of Latinos participated in “high-risk branches” of the service, with Latino casualties accounting for nearly a quarter of all Marine Corps casualties from the Southwest during the time periods he studied.

Dr. Guzmán’s research, the Edgewood class of 1967 and my father’s story serve as reminders not only of the vexed relationship that Latinos have to documentation within the United States but also of the very limits and biases of official methods of documentation. For even in their most valorous acts as citizens, Latinos remain largely undocumented or appear at most as a fleeting spectral presence in the stories often told about the war in Vietnam. In the epigraph of the final chapter in his iconic chronicle “Dispatches,” Michael Herr records graffiti scrawled across the walls of the Tan Son Nhut airport: “Mendoza was here. 12 Sept 68. Texas.” and “Color me gone. (Mendoza is my buddy.).” This is the only reference to a Spanish-surnamed soldier in Mr. Herr’s otherwise perceptive rendering of the war. In this way, it joins other American portraits of Vietnam that color Latinos gone.

Work by Latino veterans, artists and scholars have sought to fill in the silences left by the official archive and by the limited sampling of Dr. Guzmán’s foundational research. Some of these works include memoirs by decorated servicemen, like Everett Alvarez Jr.’s “Chained Eagle” and Roy Benavidez’s “The Three Wars of Roy Benavidez”; Charley Trujillo’s “Soldados: Chicanos in Viet Nam”; John C. Trejo’s “Carnales: A History of Chicano Vietnam Veterans”; Z. E. Sanchez’s “Tiger Mountain: Hispanics in the Vietnam War”; Juan Ramirez’s “A Patriot After All: The Story of a Chicano Vietnam Vet”; George Mariscal’s “Aztlán and Viet Nam: Chicano and Chicana Experiences of the War”; Lea Ybarra’s “Vietnam Veteranos Recall the War”; Lorena Oropeza’s “Raza Sí, Guerra No!: Chicano Protest and Patriotism During the Vietnam War Era”; Mylène Moreno’s 2015 documentary film “On Two Fronts: Latinos & Vietnam”; and two oral history projects, Tomás Summers Sandoval’s “Vietnam Veteranos: Latino Testimonies of the War,” based at Pomona College, and Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez’s “The Voces Oral History Project,” based at the University of Texas.

The voices recorded in these works reveal how the story of Edgewood is not exceptional to but representative of Latino experiences during Vietnam. Across the country, barrios in places like Greenlee County, Ariz.; Corcoran, Calif.; and the Bronx produced significant numbers of servicemen and suffered high casualty rates, largely because of limited economic and educational opportunities that left young Latino men especially vulnerable to the draft (as they were often ineligible for college deferments) or led them to enlist as a means of escape from foreclosed possibilities in jobs or schooling.

Yet, while Latino veterans share many commonalities, their experiences in the war are as diverse as the category of Latino itself. Some, like Mr. Alvarez, a Navy pilot whose plane was shot down in the Gulf of Tonkin incident and who spent eight and a half years as a prisoner of war, enlisted as a way to follow a family tradition of military service and patriotic duty. Others joined the service as a means of exerting control over their destiny in response to what they understood as the inevitability of the draft. A few, like the Chicano student activist Rosalío Muñoz, bravely staged public protests refusing induction; many more, like my father, received their draft notice and reported for duty.

This broad range of Latino veteran experiences, coupled with Dr. Guzmán’s research, galvanized the robust Latino antiwar efforts that culminated in one of the largest antiwar demonstrations during the Vietnam era: the Chicano Moratorium on Aug. 29, 1970, in which nearly 30,000 Latinos marched through Los Angeles. Latino antiwar activists were as diverse as Latino veterans and included university students like Mr. Muñoz; draft board members like Julian Camacho, a Korean War veteran who resigned from the Santa Cruz County draft board to protest the class inequities of the induction system; and family members of servicemen, such as Mr. Alvarez’s sister, Delia Alvarez, who, as a modern-day Antigone, spoke out against the state in an effort to honor her brother.

The history of Latino participation in Vietnam, then, not only deepens our understanding of American involvement in the war but also, according to Dr. Summers Sandoval, “acts as a prism for a larger social history of the Brown Baby Boom generation and offers lessons about the terms and costs of integration for Latinos in the United States.” Or as the Vietnam veteran Charley Trujillo observed, “They wanted us to come out here and work in the cotton fields and call us Mexicans but as soon as there’s a war, all of a sudden, we’re American.”

A few months after the Edgewood Vietnam Memorial’s unveiling, I entered my senior year at a high school across town. By then I had already begun to consider myself an aspiring writer and a child of the war. These two facts were, for me, profoundly connected. My first poem, written when I was 12, was a poem about Vietnam. So many of my poems since then have also returned to Vietnam and its particular impact on Latinos. Like Tomás Summers Sandoval, whose father also served, I am part of a generation of writers and scholars who are now adult children of Vietnam — the descendants of veterans or refugees — who grew up with the war and who try in our own work to do as my father did: stare into that dark hollow in an effort to extract what’s painful or to heal what’s broken. We write our way toward our parents, we write a way back from the war.

As the recent anthology “Inheriting the War: Poetry and Prose by Descendants of Vietnam Veterans and Refugees,” edited by Laren McClung, suggests, we recognize our profound connection to one another precisely through our attempts at documentation. My father came back from Vietnam, and together we create space to move through the silences left by the historical record, by the lasting effects of war, and by those Edgewood neighbors who never returned.