A RARE WARRIOR
Tesuque veteran served in three branches of U.S. military, fought in World War II, Korea and Vietnam
TESUQUE Marine never smiles,” Vicente Jimenez tells the photographer.
The 92-year-old Tesuque resident stands proudly at attention as he poses for photographs in his spotless U.S. Marine Corps dress uniform — black shoes shining as if he had just spent an hour conducting a spit-and-polish job on them.
The jacket’s sleeves are too long
now, but there was a time, some 55 or 60 years ago, when the uniform was a perfect fit, and he was perhaps the perfect Marine.
But first, close to 70 years ago, he wore the uniform of the U.S. Army.
And a decade before that, he donned U.S. Navy wear.
Jimenez is a rare warrior, one who served in three branches of the military in a career that took him into combat zones in World War II, Korea and Vietnam.
With Memorial Day approaching,
Jimenez may not smile as he relives memories from his days in the service. But he will shed tears, reaching for a nearby tissue as he recalls the men he served with — all gone now — and the way war turns young men into reluctant killers.
Taking lives, he says now, was something that had to be done in the name of peace, honor, duty, country. Survival played a role, too.
“They used to say to us, ‘You want to go home? Do what you are
“A
told.’ So I did what I was told,” he says.
He came home to New Mexico in one piece, though he had to survive so many firefights, mortar attacks and kamikaze raids through the years that he can only say, “I was supposed to be dead — three times.” And maybe more than that. It was only years after he retired, not just from the military but from a number of postservice civilian jobs — baker, maintenance man, security guard — that the nightmares began, his wife, Gloria, says.
“I blame it on the fact that he had nothing to do, so he stayed at home and thought about it,” she says.
Now, still a proud veteran trying on his dress uniform in preparation for Memorial Day, Vicente Jimenez thinks about it again.
He was born on April 3, 1926, in the small Texas town of San Elizario, near El Paso. His mother died within a year of his birth. His father, an alcoholic with a mean temper who Jimenez says once rode with Pancho Villa, worked for a local farmer.
Jimenez soon found himself living in the small town of Hot Springs, N.M. — now known as Truth or Consequences — with a stranger who served as a surrogate mother so she could take advantage of state welfare checks, he says. She paid little attention to him, making him feel more and more like an orphan living in a strange land.
One day, his older brother Jimmy showed up to take care of him. “I didn’t even know I had an older brother,” Jimenez recalls. Soon, he was living with his brother in Las Cruces and working in a bakery.
On Dec. 7, 1941, Japan attacked the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, initiating America’s entry into World War II. Upon turning 17 in 1943, Jimenez signed up to fight.
He joined the Navy and became a cook, and was taught how to fire a 40 mm gun during training in San Diego. Soon after, the kid from the desert watched in awe as a fleet of warships sailed into the harbor, ready to take men into the Pacific theater of war.
“I’d never seen a ship before,” Jimenez says. “And then here comes this great big monster right at us.”
He took part in sea campaigns in and around the Marshall Islands, Iwo Jima and a number of atolls whose names he cannot recall. Japanese submarines harassed the fleet, and he watched as kamikaze pilots trying to destroy his ship crashed and burned in the ocean around him in the waning days of the war.
One day in August 1945, all the ships were suddenly ordered to pull away from Japan, he says. Not long afterward, the news came: The U.S. had dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and a few days later, Nagasaki. The war was over.
Jimenez stayed in the Navy until March 1946. Then he shipped home. Returning as a civilian to Las Cruces and other old haunts, he found everyone gone — his brother, the guys he knew, everyone.
So after a hiatus as a civilian, he joined the Army in August 1948.
“I didn’t have anything else to do,” he says. “I was an orphan boy, no mother, no father. Nobody.”
By 1950, he was again put on a ship — this one headed toward the Korean conflict. There, he was assigned to an artillery unit with the 2nd Infantry Division. A scrappy 5-foot-3 street kid, Jimenez also took part in regimental boxing matches — earning a flyweight championship in 1951, according to a faded photograph and accompanying caption he keeps in a scrapbook.
He was always fighting, he notes, regardless of whether it was in a bar with officers or with sadistic drill instructors who tried to pummel his spirit out of him.
That toughness helped, particularly during a nighttime North Korean mortar attack.
“I was going crazy,” he says. “When it was over, I looked around and there were only 42 of us left … out of about 300.”
All these decades later, he says atrocities were committed by both sides, both in World War II and in Korea. It’s how it was; prisoners were not always well treated.
“If we heard they messed our guys up, we messed them up,” he says.
He made it through combat in Korea only to be injured in an accident involving a field stove while out on maneuvers. He was in the hospital for about six months, he says. His four-year term nearly up, he was discharged from the Army in June 1952.
Jimenez joined the Marines the very next month.
“I wanted to find out how tough I was,” he says. “I had to learn how to shoot, how to kill and how to stay alive all over again.”
The Marines, he says, “were tough sons of a gun,” providing the atmosphere in which he felt most at home. (He says he tried to join the Air Force, but it would not take him because he lacked a formal education. He never earned a high school diploma.)
While assigned to a noncombat mission on Okinawa in the mid-1950s, Jimenez connected with his future wife via mail. One of Jimenez’s pals noticed that he never received any mail, so he told Jimenez to write to his own girlfriend, Gloria Montoya of Santa Fe.
Jimenez did. Gloria liked what she read — and dumped the boyfriend.
Jimenez visited Gloria for the first time in the summer of 1957 during a 30-day leave. It was love at first sight. When he went to her mother to ask for her hand in marriage, she said: “Why do you want just her hand? Take all of her.”
So he did. They married on Aug. 20, 1957. They have six children, 20-plus grandchildren, 15 great-grandchildren and several great-great-grandchildren.
Despite his new marriage, life in the Corps called. Jimenez escaped being killed a third time (by his count) in Vietnam, where he was briefly assigned at the tail end of his tour. He says he was sent on assignment to Cuba and discovered in his absence that most of his company had been wiped out in a battle back in Southeast Asia.
When his enlistment period ran out in July 1965, Jimenez finally decided after 20-plus years of service to call it quits.
“I wanted to go home for good,” he says.
More than a half-century after his discharge, Jimenez downplays his role in any of the conflicts. “All I know is that I went out and fought for my country and peace,” he says. “I’m not a hero. I just went and did my duty.”
Though his Marine dress jacket is adorned with 30-some ribbons and a half-dozen medals, he won’t talk about them.
“I went out to fight for my country, not win goddamn medals,” he says.
But New Mexico Department of Veterans’ Services Secretary Jack Fox says Jimenez deserves to be honored for serving in three different branches in three different wars.
“I’ve known people who served in World War II, Korea and Vietnam, but they are usually in one service,” he says. “I’ve known people who have served in two different branches. I would say in my lifetime Mr. Jimenez would be the rare exception of a warrior who served in three branches for his country — that’s very unusual and very commendable. … What a life he must have lived.”
Every Memorial Day and Veterans Day, Jimenez tells his wife he doesn’t want to attend another service honoring veterans.
And yet, every year, twice a year, he puts on his uniform and shows up.
He acknowledges it’s tough duty, because it makes him think of the men with whom he served. Men who are long gone. And then the tears fall. The Marine (and sailor and soldier) can’t smile.
But he can cry.