An urgency in vets’ voices.

On Veterans Day, Sal Mier took his regular morning walk with his wife Grace, in their neighborhood just outside Dallas.

I wasn’t the first to thank him for his military service. On Facebook, his son Robert had already posted his father’s 1959 Air Force photo with a tribute.

Mier, 79, is a military vet, a former public health official and former San Antonian with lots on his mind as the nation continues to grapple not only with rising COVID-19 infections and hospitalizations but its racial history.

Mier has reached a point in his life in which he must tell his stories.

Journalists hear from such men. A lot. They’re bursting with memories and eager to share their photographs. They’re running out of time. Some may be running out of people who’ll listen. There’s an urgency in their voices.

Mier’s stories begin with grandparents who fled the Mexican Revolution and suffered discrimination, some at the hands of Texas Rangers.

He’s a son of San Antonio’s South Side, a Burbank Bulldog who lived in Palm Heights and as a teen worked for the original Tommy’s, when it wasn’t a Mexican restaurant.

He might have gone to college straight out of high school, had there been the money, encouragement or expectation.

More obstacles stood before young men like Mier then. They were poor but intelligent, hardworking but not considered college material. He was part of a generation of young Mexican American men, Chicanos, he says, who were steered toward vocations.

He says teachers, most of them white, as was half of the student body, didn’t think students like him had the “protoplasm” for advanced studies. So, he spent three hours a day in a shop class.

He resents it, not because it affected his own successful career in public health; or that of his brother, who worked at NASA on an Apollo mission and became a software development engineer. But because those obstacles held back so many others.

“The injustice has never left me,” Mier said.

He began his military stint as a Morse intercept operator in Turkey near the Russian border. After four years, he worked, raised a family and graduated from the University of New Mexico

He enjoyed a long career with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, beginning as a public health adviser in New Orleans, working on the prevention of sexually transmitted diseases.

Some of the stories he tells about that part of his life, and what his colleagues believed about the Black population they served, are hard to hear. They’re graphic and cruel.

Mier did similar CDC work in New Mexico and on the Navajo Reservation, then in Puerto Rico.

He joined the U.S. Public Health Service in Dallas, and in 1990 became Region VI director of the CDC’S Division of Prevention, covering Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas.

In retirement, he and his wife led an effort to study the health impact of exposure to air emissions in his Dallas suburb. It was a 10-year project involving the Texas State Health Department and the CDC’S Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, he said.

Mier testified on the subject before the House Committee on Science and Technology in 2009, facing many of his former CDC colleagues.

He underscores he wasn’t any smarter than his fellow students at Burbank. He isn’t against vocational programs either, he added, but about students who weren’t given options. He worries about students today experiencing different, yet similar barriers.

He joins a chorus of those calling out injustices, ones that scholars have brought to light in recent years, as has Monica Muñoz Martinez in her book, “The Injustice Never Leaves You: AntiMexican Violence in Texas.”

The Yale-educated scholar, now an associate professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin, wrote about statesponsored racial terror that ethnic Mexicans endured in the borderlands from 1900 to 1930.

She’s part of the Refusing to Forget project, which developed a remarkable 2016 exhibit documenting that racial violence at the Bullock Museum. It was the first to recognize the state’s role in such violence with evidence locked away in state archives that hadn’t seen sunlight for decades.

“I’m almost 80 years old,” Mier said. “I didn’t realize, until I got older, that it took a lot to overcome these resentments.”

Telling the stories of his life helps.

Mier didn’t give up on me when I didn’t call him back, as other stories enveloped my time. He doesn’t give up easily.

“I wanted to tell my story and convey a message to educators that their assessment of any individual shouldn’t be based on the skin color, ethnicity, race or gender of the student. Our potential to succeed shouldn’t be based on your name, what you look like and where you were from.”

On Veterans Day and any day — in 1959 and in 2020 — that’s important to hear.