San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
World War II vet didn’t expect to see his 100th birthday.
World War II veteran, a former POW, never expected he’d make it to the century mark
Excited at the chance to mark the milestone of his birth to the minute, Odon Cardenas stayed up until midnight, even as the whole family fell asleep.
He was, after all, turning 100, and if you ask how he’s feeling these days, Cardenas will say great — but of course he never expected to live so long.
“Never! Never,” he said. “Now that I’m 100, I feel the same like 20 years back. I really don’t know how I felt 20 years back and 20 years forward. I really don’t know the difference. All I know is I’m here, I came from the war, and that’s it.”
If 100 is the new 80, there are reasons he feels good. At a big birthday bash Saturday evening at the Plaza Club downtown, five cakes were set out for him and the guests.
He might have indulged himself with a small slice along with a little ice cream, but he’ll skip most of the sweets and is disciplined that way, having oatmeal for breakfast and lunches and dinners with lots of vegetables and beans, some chicken but not so much meat.
No pork, and no alcohol — he’s had only one beer in his entire life.
Cardenas was an Army staff sergeant who fought in World War II. He’s been a fruit picker, mechanic, barber, devoted father and survivor of fierce winter battles in Europe that closed with a short stint as a POW. He never was wounded.
How Cardenas made it home is a miracle of sorts. There were firefights, mortar attacks and close calls with the dreaded German Nebelwerfer, a rocket launcher GIs called the “Screaming Mimi” and “Moaning Minnie” because of its high-pitched sound.
Sitting in an overstuffed chair in his South Side home a short walk down the street named for the general who led him, George S. Patton, he talked of guiding his men through thick snow. They’d throw themselves into the drifts as rockets whistled past and crashed around them. At times while telling the stories, he would mimic the sound of the infamous Nebelwerfer.
Cardenas fought under Patton in the Ardennes, Rhineland and Central European campaigns. His most vivid memories center around the fighting during one of the coldest winters Germany had seen in ages. On the front lines, Cardenas and his unit were ambushed. Several comrades were killed. Crawling through the thick snow, they retreated over the next 24 hours.
Trapped in a house at one point, he was surrounded by Germans. Time was running out.
Like many veterans of Europe during the winter of 1944 and 1945, Cardenas never has forgotten the subfreezing temperatures that were as deadly to troops as enemy fire. He talked at times in almost a stream-of-consciousness recollection, pinpointing exactly where he was before repeating the memory.
“Some places where we went were very cold because it was winter when I got there,” he recalled. “It was snow, cold, my rifle kind of wanted to get stuck. Outside of that, it was cold, but it wasn’t too cold that we couldn’t operate. Some places, the snow was about that high.”
Raising his arm, he indicated that the drift was 3 to 4 feet high.
“Going up the hill, and the Germans were firing bombs but they didn’t have no specific point because they could not see. They were on the other side and we were here,” he said. “Every time you hear the Screaming Mimi you’d better hit the ground. We didn’t know where they were going to land.”
Cardenas took the point. Finding the way forward was tough. The snow made it hard to see, and next to impossible to know who — or what — lay ahead. The Germans had the same problem and often fired blindly, starting the fight with machine gun fire and following it with mortars.
“I was guiding, going up different places where you could not see nothing. If there were some trees, they look white, so you couldn’t see nothing,” Cardenas recalled.
At one point the squad probed, and another sergeant sensed the Germans nearby.
“‘Go back!’” Cardenas said the sergeant told the men. “‘Go back!’”
The Americans lived on chocolate bars, canned food and cigarettes. They occasionally stopped to change out of their wet socks and were careful to keep their weapons ready to fire.
No one slept much.
The war came to an end after Cardenas took shelter in a house. A German armed with a bazooka took aim. The explosion came, knocking him off his feet and rendering him unconscious.
“I really don’t know how long I was there with my feet up, full of bricks and those things, but when I came to there was a German 88 gun shooting,” he said, adding that “it went through the wall … and when I came to I finally got all the bricks that I had around me and I came to my feet.”
A big hole appeared in the house. More shells flew over his head.
Eyeing the hole, he said, “‘I’m going to hit the ground and get out through this opening in the house,’ ” he said. “That’s exactly what I did.”
Cardenas saw a ditch, ran to it and began crawling along its banks, tracers whizzed over his head. He kept crawling until he thought he had put some distance between himself and the Germans.
“When I stood up, some Germans were camouflaged and they saw me and got up and they grabbed me and said, ‘Candy! Candy! Cigarettes! Cigarettes!’ And I said, “hijo!’ ”
“That’s the end of Cardenas,” he thought.
Under interrogation, he was asked how many men the Americans had.
“We have a lot of men!” Cardenas replied. “Pretty soon, you’re going to be running.”
That was prophetic. Two weeks later, he and other American POWs were liberated. He came home that spring, was discharged from the Army that October and settled down, picking fruits and vegetables and marrying Maria Inez Valadez.
They had four children over 60 years, and he adopted five others from Maria’s previous marriage. He had one child from a previous marriage. He embraced a family life that circled around St. Martin Catholic Church, and even adopted an orphan.
“He was a good father,” said Delores Kotilaidze, his caregiver and daughter. “He didn’t know how to swim, he wasn’t very athletic, but on the weekends I remember he always had us in the river and he would roll up his pants and put his feet in, and we all would swim and he just sat there at the edge of the river.”
The only beer Cardenas ever had came after she baptized her daughter, Karen, in 1980.
It was a Schlitz.
“He’d have us in the parks, he would take me to the swimming pool,” she continued. “And church every Sunday, having dinners at Malt House. Remember the Malt House? He was a hands-on father. No friends. Too many kids.”
Kotilaidze said he would talk about the war, his capture and liberation. He brought home a Nazi flag taken from the prison camp.
Cardenas was proudest of being a dad, and would take in nieces and nephews when they needed a home, she said, adding, “The door was always open.”
Asked what he was proudest of in his life, he paused.
“The most thing that I like is being what I am right now,” Cardenas said.
When Kotilaidze reminded him that he had taught all of his 10 children and most of his 18 grandchildren to pray, he quickly added, “Oh, yeah! I make it a point that every night that we go and pray. Every night, we go and pray.”