Saturday, October 18, 2014

Latinos' Vietnam Stories: From Fieldworkers to Warriors


Thank you to Susie for providing this article.

The following are selected quotes:

“I was happy to come back but the guilt made me feel trapped. Often I would ask myself and continue to ask myself ‘who’s better, those who, like me, came back, or those who died overseas,’” said Larry Holguin, one of the five Vietnam veterans from Corcoran featured in the documentary.

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Holguin volunteered himself to the draft in 1967 “because we thought it was the right thing to do,” he said. One of his best friends died in Vietnam. When they brought back his body, his family and friends couldn’t see him. They wouldn’t let them have an open casket. 

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They learn to live with all the consequences of war. They have friends and then they loose them.“You get to know them but you don’t get to know them,” Holguin said. “You have a friend and then you turn around and he’s gone.”
This is the reality of war.

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“The military trains you, they program you but they don’t program you to release all that pressure. You never go back to normal,” Holguin said. “The hard part is having people to try to understand you. I cannot tell them about something that I’m not proud of.”

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At first you suppress everything. You didn’t want to talk about it and people didn’t want to really know,” Delgado said. 
“When we came back we thought that everybody was going to support us but that didn’t happen. Only my immediate family gave me that support. War taught Delgado a lot of things. He has now taught his family to value and support those men who fight in wars, but he also has taught them to hate war.

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“Me and my family are anti-war. We support our troops 100 percent but not the war. I was a warrior, I was there,” Delgado said.

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