Tio Angel went to war and didn't return

By MAGGIE RIVAS-RODRIQUEZ
HISPANIC LINK NEWS SERVICE
I was in eighth grade on Oct. 10, 1968, when word came that my Tio Angel had been killed in Vietnam. He was a medic, and the helicopter he was riding in was shot down. He was 33 years old, had a newborn baby boy when he left, another son about 4 years old, three stepchildren and a wife who was crazy about him.
So were the rest of us.
Angel Luna was my mother's dearest sibling, the man who acted like a brother to her children, who wrote letters to me and my sisters from Vietnam. Once, when I wrote to him that I was sitting in English class, he wrote back and gently chided me: I must be awfully smart to have finished all my schoolwork and have time to write in class.
One Christmas when I was about 5 years old, he bought me a black baby doll. I think it was his attempt at racial acceptance. I cried, and he asked if I didn't like the doll. Oh, no, I loved the doll, I answered, but I also wanted the pink plastic make-up kits he gave my two little sisters.
The day after we got the news about Angel in1968, I couldn't eat my breakfast. My father accused me of being dramatic, but my mother, whose own heart had just been broken, knew better: "Los ninos tambien sienten," she said. Children also have feelings.
This Memorial Day, I'm reminded of how the deaths of our military men and women have also impacted children. That fact has come to shape an important component of our U.S. Latino & amp; Latina World War II Oral History Project. Besides the 500-plus interviews with men and women of the WWII generation, we have also accepted a few dozen tributes to men and women who have passed. This part was added at the insistence of Fred Flores of Houston.
Flores attended one of our interviewer training sessions on an autumn morning in 1999. A few weeks later, he sent our project a thick packet of carefully photocopied letters from his uncle, Johnnie W. Flores. He also attached a narrative, recalling New Year's Eve 1944, when Johnnie's death was confirmed.
"I recall all of us going to Grandmother's house," he wrote. "I remember her crying pretty much non-stop. This was not a place I wanted to be at that age of seven. Our Aunt Teresa was keeping us busy outside, playing 'Ring around the Rosie' by the dim light of a kerosene lamp which was coming through the door.
"My generation is the last to have seen or known Johnnie, though only through short, fleeting, youthful memories. For this reason I have gathered all that I could of Johnnie's life to provide it for the next generations of this family."
Preserving memories
Another Latino killed in WWII was David Towns, born in 1917 in Eagle Pass, Texas, to Pedro T. Towns and Luz Pineda. Lt. Towns was serving with the 207th Combat Engineer Battalion in Germany when he was killed. Back home in Eagle Pass, his young wife, Lilia Martinez Towns, was left a widow. His son, David, born after his dad left, would grow up fatherless. But David Towns Raphael, the son, who now lives in Los Angeles, has used his considerable resourcefulness to learn more about his father and to preserve memories of him, including producing a video that features interviews with men who recalled him in the last months of his life as a serious soldier who also had a sense of humor. That video is part of our project's archives.
The men and women who died in service to their country are mourned forever -- not only by the adults, but also by those too young to have grasped death or notions of duty. But we grew up feeling a tremendous sense of loss. Our lives have been forever changed because, in a remote part of the world, men and women in uniform gave the ultimate sacrifice.
This Memorial Day, we honor them and wish they could have grown old, surrounded by family and friends. Instead, they are frozen in time: photographs and letters of young people still looking forward to coming home. We will never forget them.
Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin, is director of the U.S. Latino & amp; Latina World War II Oral History Project