Category: Veterans

WWII prisoner’s photo album returns to New Mexico roots

Kate Nash | The New Mexican

Roberta Koishi held the photo album in front of a Santa Fe crowd that included World War II veterans and slowly began to turn the pages.

From the outside, the album, which includes images of New Mexico soldiers in the 1940s, might have seemed at first glance like any other keepsake of wartime and military buddies past.

Unlike other albums, though, this thick, time-worn tome filled with black-and-white snapshots of people, horses, training sites of another time, had just been flown across the Pacific Ocean to Santa Fe. And the book is about to start another journey — one to find its owner.

A former member of the Imperial Japanese Army found it in a bunker when he worked at a prisoner of war camp in the Philippines. He searched for years for the owner, but only recently discovered that seven of the names listed in the album match records of former members of the 200th Coast Artillery of the New Mexico National Guard.

Members of that unit were among thousands of U.S. and Filipino soldiers who surrendered at the outset of the war in the Pacific. The Japanese forced most of the weakened men to march for several hundred miles — what became known as the Bataan Death March.

The man who found the album, Tokio Watanabe, enlisted a Japanese man and his wife — Roberta and her husband, Takao — to bring the book to Santa Fe.

The trip here ended Monday, with the Koishis presenting the album at the Bataan Memorial Military Museum, where Roberta’s turning through the pages unleashed a flurry of emotions for those who watched.

Ret. Tech. Sgt. William Overmier said he recognized some things in the album, including a view similar to one he had from the Mitsubishi shipyards while he was a prisoner of war in the early 1940s.

“All we had to do was look out the west and there it was, 60 miles away, every day,” he said. “I sure recognized that.”

Overmier took his time looking over the photos. He even recognized a car similar to the one he had owned in days gone by — a Chevrolet Club Coupe.

Others in the room recognized ships, a recreation area, names of people lost. Their ships, their recreation spot, their people.

None was the album’s owner, however.

The people in the book whose names matched those of state records are all dead, National Guard officials said. But officials soon will start writing to family members to see if they can determine where the album should go.

During the event, Roberta Koishi delivered a message from Watanabe, who wrote a history book on the second world war.

“He said he’s so happy he can give the album back and he can feel an ease in his own heart,” she said.

For now, the book will be kept at the museum.

As some pieces of the mystery begin to fall into place, National Guard Adjutant General Kenny Montoya said he’s optimistic the book will go where it needs to be.

“I think what’s going to happen is whoever owns it is going to not come forward,” he said. “I’ve seen this over and over with the Bataan veterans: They want to share.”

If an owner comes forward and claims the book, the Guard will hand it over. If not, it will go on display at the museum, Montoya said.

The men whose names are in the album are Fred Swope, George Milliken, Lloyd Harman, Walter Kiefov, Errett Lujan, Jesus Silva and Francis Van Buskirk.

Van Buskirk, a 1939 graduate of Santa Fe High School, was believed to be one of only a couple of dozen Bataan survivors at the time he died here in February at the age of 86.

Published Dec. 01, 2008.

Healing war’s scars: New VA rules help local veterans with PTSD find relief

By Kate Nash | The New Mexican

It took one New Mexico military veteran three decades before he sought help for his nighttime “dragons.” After that, it took about a year to get benefits from the government.

Another veteran, who battled depression after serving in the Marines during the Vietnam War and later in the Army, only sought help after retiring in 2001. It took about four years for him to receive benefits, including aid for a major depressive disorder.

Both men note they ultimately were able to get help from government agencies and veterans groups, and describe the system to help veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder and related problems as one that is improving. Others, however, say the system could do much more to help those who have served our country.

“The (Department of Veterans Affairs) has gotten good at treating battle wounds and injured soldiers,” said John Garcia, a Vietnam veteran and former head of the New Mexico Department of Veterans’ Services. “But these injuries reach farther. They are injuries of the soul.”

To help treat those wounds, the VA more than a year ago adopted new rules aimed at quicker diagnoses and treatment for soldiers returning from war.

Those rules allow a veteran’s testimony about traumatic events to be accepted instead of tedious paperwork and record searching. However, it’s still unclear whether the rules are working, and whether more vets are seeking help because of the changes.

The regional VA office doesn’t keep track of the number of PTSD claims in the state. National figures provided by the office show 437,310 veterans were granted compensation based on PTSD claims in 2010, up from 133,745 in 2000.

At the Albuquerque VA hospital, there are no exact local numbers, either. Officials there say there are 174,324 veterans in the state, and the estimated number of veterans with PTSD ranges from 15 percent to 25 percent.

As for the time it takes for PTSD to be diagnosed at the hospital, that has decreased to 14 days or fewer, one official said, down from the approximate 30 days it took five years ago.

No matter the statistics, recent interviews with local veterans show there is help widely available — and it is coming in new and innovative forms.

Increasingly prevalent problem

Diane P. Castillo, a staff psychologist at the Albuquerque VA hospital and coordinator of the Women’s Trauma Clinic there, started a PTSD program for men in 1987.

Since then, she has seen an increase in the number of veterans seeking help for PTSD — and she expects it to continue increasing.

“The lethality of wars has gotten less and less, so we’ve having more soldiers survive combat,” she said. “That’s a good thing. But the flip side is, we are going to see more PTSD.”

Some figures say about 30 percent of those returning from Iraq and Afghanistan suffer haunting memories of trauma — a number that could rise in coming years as more troops come back to the United States from places such as Afghanistan and Iraq.

Under past VA rules, veterans had to go through a lengthy process to show evidence they experienced on-the-job “stressors,” or events that later caused them stress or anxiety. That process used to involve adjudicators who typically were required to collect extensive records to corroborate whether a veteran really experienced what he or she claimed.

With the new rules, soldiers’ testimonies can be used to establish that they were exposed to incidents on duty that caused stress. At the same time, a Department of Veterans Affairs doctor has to diagnose those symptoms as PTSD.

U.S. Rep. Ben Ray Luján, D-N.M., said in statement, “These new rules are an important first step to help veterans get the benefits they have earned and deserve, but more must be done. We have seen cases in which the rules appear to have made the process easier for some veterans; however, many continue to face unacceptable delays and other challenges. We must keep working hard to ensure the brave men and women who served our nation get the care they need.”

About half the veterans that the Northern New Mexico congressman’s office hears from each month have a PTSD-related issue, a spokesman said.

Therapies old and new

Vietnam-era veteran and 1972 Santa Fe High School graduate Jerry L. Martinez didn’t know he was battling depression after his time in the Marine Corps, which included being stationed off Vietnam in 1974.

But little by little, the things he saw and heard about — including the 1981 state penitentiary riot in Santa Fe that occurred while he was working in law enforcement — began to accumulate.

“I did have the experience of being friends with some of the ones that had been in Vietnam and the war, and they talked to us and told us about some of the things they went through, and some of the things they went through were really hard to accept,” he said in a recent interview.

Later, as a deputy, he went through a harrowing shootout with prison escapees, then the riot. A deputy close to him was shot and killed while responding to a domestic-violence call.

“A lot of these things triggered (memories of) some of the things my friends had gone through,” he said. “It just started creating problems with me.”

Martinez, who spent 26 years in the military, went to work as a transport officer after retiring from the Army in 2001.

“That’s when I started feeling these problems with depression and carrying a weapon. Something was wrong, something was going wrong. … I finally said, ‘I better just stay out of that line of work because something may happen.’ ”

Soon after, he retired and pursued disability benefits. He already had been diagnosed with diabetes, herniated disks and hearing loss from his time in the service. He then got the diagnosis of major depressive disorder.

To deal with the disorder, Martinez attends counseling once a week at the Santa Fe Veterans Center. The group of men talk about anything and everything.

“What really comes out of those meetings is, one looks at the other and says, ‘I thought I was the only one having those problems, but I’m not,’ ” Martinez said.

Martinez and his wife, Teresa, also recently attended a retreat in Angel Fire for couples with at least one person suffering from PTSD. Such events are part of a new view of PTSD as something that affects more than just the veteran.

“It allowed us to open up to each other,” Teresa Martinez said. “There were things that I didn’t know that were hurting him. Now I know what he was missing, and I can understand what he is going through.”

The Martinezes will be among as many as 150 couples who this year attend the retreats, which are paid for by federal stimulus money. Roughly 25 spots remain for the weeklong programs, which continue through September and feature yoga, acupuncture and other alternative therapies.

Aside from attending counseling, Martinez, 57, keeps busy with something that helps him cope just as much: Color Guard and Honor Guard activities, as well as flag ceremonies.

When he visits local schools, he likes to read a poem about the importance of respecting the flag, and he talks to children about the military. He also gets geared up for events such as Memorial Day ceremonies and spent last Friday placing flags on graves at the Santa Fe National Cemetery.

Honoring those who died, he said, helps fill an emptiness he feels.

During a recent interview, Martinez showed off an album of photos taken during a ceremony for fallen soldiers he helped with at Arlington National Cemetery. It is one of the few times in the interview when he really smiled.

Another veteran, Garcia, the former state Veterans’ Services secretary who spent time in Vietnam in the Army, uses massage therapy to help him unwind.

After Garcia got home from a year in Vietnam in 1970, he had a hard time adjusting, he said.

“It was definitely a transition for me,” he said. “I went over there 18 and came back feeling 40. My world had changed, and it took me a while to catch up with it,” he said. “My family expected me to be the same kid I was. I felt like they had changed, and they felt like I had changed.”

Garcia went through a rough adjustment time, and although he initially tried to connect with the VA system right when he returned, he got frustrated with long waits and shied away. It would be 30 years before he got linked with the VA through a veteran-service officer.

“My wife got tired of me waking up at 2 a.m. and chasing those dragons with me, so I finally went,” he said. “She said, ‘If you’re not going to do it for yourself, do it for us.’ ”

It wasn’t until a year later, when Garcia received word that his benefits had been approved, that he felt like someone recognized what he had done. “I had to pull over and break down that they finally recognized my service,” he recalled. “I didn’t care about the benefits and services. What really mattered was the VA … validated me, said that my service meant something.”

Some local veterans are getting therapy from four-legged creatures.

At an arena at the Santa Fe Rodeo Grounds on a recent weekday, volunteers with Listening Horse Therapeutic Riding and the NARHA Horses for Heroes program worked with two veterans.

The vets spent an hour and a half riding around the Northern New Mexico Horseman’s Association arena, learning how to trot, steer and communicate with their 1,200-pound partners. They also learned how to groom and equip the horses.

But the ride is more than that. At the same time, the men are learning skills that will help them sort through their feelings, communicate their emotions, and connect with others.

“There’s a self-esteem that comes with learning a new skill and building your confidence, which naturally fits into dealing with other people,” said Flannery Davis, who runs the program with her partner, Gus Jolley.

Horses live in the present, Davis said, and are able to instantly tune themselves in to human emotion.

“You can always see what you are feeling in the horses,” she said. “If they are telling you that you are angry, you are angry.”

For many of the program’s participants, the time with horses, which the group provides for free, also is a time to relax.

“With PTSD, you are used to your emotions being numb,” Davis said. “You don’t recognize your emotions when they come up. In working with horses, you realize it’s OK to let yourself feel again.”

For Navy veteran Gary Self, the eight-week program he was completing recently helped him connect with the horses, including Sugar, whom he rode for most of his time in the program.

“It’s a bonding thing,” he said. For him, that connection started immediately, and Self, like others who have completed the program, said he would come back and volunteer to help others.

Castillo said those kinds of therapies are complementary to more traditional forms of therapy she uses at the clinic.

At her office, Castillo incorporates help known as exposure therapy, which has vets go through their trauma repeatedly as a way to get over it. She also uses cognitive therapy, which helps veterans change the way they think about what happened.

Something else that is helping veterans is the fact that society is more supportive of them, Castillo said.

“I think the one thing we have learned as a society is to not blame the vet, the soldier,” she said. “They know more than anybody how bad the war is.”

And Garcia, who is headed off to start a new job with the VA in Washington, D.C., said he’s glad to see so many treatment options available for today’s veterans — something veterans of his era didn’t see when they returned from the war.

“They are not like draftees, they are volunteers,” he said of current soldiers. “We have an obligation to them to make sure when they leave, they come out as strong as they went in.

“Have we done enough in the past? No, we haven’t, but we are starting to.”

Published June 01, 2011.

Santa Fe 400th: Sense of duty spans generations

Like many in Santa Fe, the Chavez family has deep ties to the military

Kate Nash | The New Mexican

Alexine Chavez was a senior in high school when she passed by a military recruiting center on St. Michael’s Drive.

With a spur-of-the-moment feeling egging her on, she did a U-turn and headed into the center.

Inside, the Air Force recruiter persuaded her to join, and she was hooked, joining not once but twice since then.

More than nine years later, Chavez, 27, has seen two tours in Iraq, plus deployments to Saudi Arabia and Japan, and countless weekends of training.

While her decision to join seemed spontaneous, she had a grandfather who served in World War II, a father who put in 20 years with the New Mexico National Guard, and an uncle who served in Vietnam — the service might just be in her blood.

Her contribution to the country, and the contributions of her father, Ray, and grandfather, Refugio, who joined her in a recent interview, represent the city’s military history dating back more than 60 years. In a broader sense, they also embody the men and women of the City Different who have served since Santa Fe was founded 400 years ago.

The military history of Santa Fe — capital of a state with more than 200,000 veterans — includes tales of the Pueblo Revolt, a role in the Civil War, sons lost in Korea. It is flush with stories of those who survived a death march in the Philippines, of Buffalo Soldiers and Rough Riders, of those who went to Afghanistan and of a strong anti-war movement. It includes the yarn of Pancho Villa and the creation of the atomic bomb.

And it includes the Chavezes.

Each signed up for the military in a different era and for distinct reasons.

Each had unique experiences.

And each puts a face on Santa Fe’s sacrifice.

Refugio: POW in WWII

Refugio Chavez was 20 and living in Santa Fe in 1940, without a stable job in sight. With an eighth-grade education, he had been working construction when he could.

The Army seemed like his best option, paying $30 a month. He enlisted and was shipped off to World War II with the 8th Cavalry Division, against his father’s better judgment. To sign up for the training, he needed parental permission.

“My dad signed for me,” said Chavez, who recently turned 90. “He didn’t want to do it, but finally he signed.”

In France, Chavez was captured and taken to Germany. He was held for 18 months. For meals, he got two bowls of cabbage soup a day. He did all right, he said, even without meat or bread, but worried about his family in New Mexico.

“My mom didn’t know where I was. At first they got a telegram that I was missing in action, then that I was a POW.”

When he was liberated in 1945, he said, he had never been so happy to see American soldiers. He then was able to call his parents back home to give them the news. It would be several more months before he would see them in person, given the logistics of returning to Santa Fe after being discharged.

So much has changed since that war, Chavez said, including the number of troops who come back alive. Some 2,263 New Mexicans died in World War II.

“Thanks to God I came back,” he said. “I didn’t think I was going to make it. They didn’t kill me. I was lucky.”

Lucky to be alive, Chavez said, and grateful to be back home.

The first thing he did was eat a steak, he recalled, then rest, then look for work. One of more than 50,000 New Mexicans who served in World War II, he ended up as a mechanic working the bowling machines at the now-closed Coronado Lanes.

Later, when his son Pete went to fight in Vietnam, Refugio Chavez would watch television news every night for word of the U.S. troops.

By coincidence, Refugio one night saw Pete in the background of a scene a reporter had filed from Cambodia.

Although Pete had been sending letters to his family with some information on his time in the service, there was such a lag time, and Refugio often wondered whether his son was OK.

He was.

“By 10 o’clock, the whole neighborhood knew about it,” said Ray Chavez, Pete’s brother, as he gestured up and down the Third Street neighborhood where Refugio still lives.

These days, Pete doesn’t like to talk about Vietnam. And Refugio doesn’t watch the news as much.

Ray: Better off in Guard

Ray Chavez thought about the Army after his brother Pete joined. But Pete made him change his mind on a trip back home six months before he was discharged.

“He said, ‘You don’t want to join the Army. If you can join the National Guard, you’d be better off,’ ” Ray Chavez said.

So in March of 1971, Ray joined the Guard, where his brother also ended up when he came back from Vietnam.

Ray put in six years, finished his advanced individual training with the supply section for a heavy-equipment maintenance company, then got out in 1977 with no intention of going back.

Again, Pete made him change his mind.

“He said, ‘Go back and finish your 20 years,’ ” Ray Chavez said.

He was 40 at the time. The physical training was the hardest part.

But Chavez, now 57, was glad to see some of the old friends he’d had in the Guard, something he had missed.

At work, he played a key role in keeping the military equipment going, ordering all the mechanical parts needed. He trained with Army members and traveled to Germany, Italy and Panama for annual training.

One of the highlights for him was running a whole supply unit during a drill weekend in Camp Dodge, Iowa.

“I was kind of thrown in there,” he recalled. “Usually, when you go for drill weekend, you kind of help them out.”

Then deployments to Iraq started coming for his unit, something in which Ray Chavez wasn’t interested.

He switched to the 93rd troop command, a nondeployable unit that supports those who are sent overseas.

“Deployments for me are good for a single person,” said Ray Chavez, who has two daughters and a son.

He retired in 2002 and now works in the Human Resources Department at the National Guard.

Military life has changed for him, too, now that his daughter Alexine is in the Air Force — something he said he at first discouraged.

“I told her to join the Guard and get a taste before you decide to join,” he said. “I didn’t feel comfortable with her doing it … being all the deployments, I figured she doesn’t belong being exposed to that kind of danger. She surprises me, though.”

To get through Alexine’s deployments, Ray Chavez looked forward to hearing from her, just as he once had waited for news from his brother, and just as his grandparents waited for news of his father.

“I just prayed and thought, ‘Let God take care of her,’ ” Ray Chavez said.

Along with e-mail instead of telegrams, and with cross-oceanic flights instead of boat rides, attitudes toward military members have also changed, he said — even in a town that’s known for its active peace movement and dotted typically with anti-war signs.

“I think people in general have made an extra effort to recognize our work. When my brother came back from Vietnam, they didn’t have anything … anybody waiting. I think the recognition has changed.”

Alexine: 9/11 marked start

Alexine Chavez knew she didn’t want to go to college, so as her time at Capital High was ending in 2001, she was searching for her path.

The stop at the recruiting center set her on her way. At first, her parents didn’t know anything about her plans.

“Finally I told them I am going to join, and they said, ‘What?’ My mom was really … she didn’t want me to go.”

But go she did. And she became a member of the U.S. Air Force Security Forces, which provide base security.

Basic training was supposed to start Sept. 11 of that year. Because of the terrorist attacks of that day, however, the training started a week late.

Still, Chavez went. During her nine years in the Air Force, including six on active duty and three in the reserves, she went twice to Iraq, and to Japan and Saudi Arabia.

If her father and grandfather hadn’t been in the service, she might not have known so much about being deployed, about serving a country from thousands of miles away.

“It actually did help. I don’t think I would have known anything about the military,” she said.

She got out of active duty in early 2007, after her first tour in Iraq, but that didn’t last. Within a few months, she joined the reserves.

“I wasn’t going to go back into the military. I decided to be a civilian, but I missed it a lot and I felt like I need to be in the military,” Chavez said.

“I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I was kind of lost, I guess. I needed to get into the reserves to transition to civilian life again.”

By 2008, she was back in Iraq for six months. She kept in touch with Santa Fe through the Internet. Her family kept her linked in to life back home.

“I missed the food bad,” she said.

At training in Missouri, Chavez’s mom, Santanita, sent her green chile. It wasn’t the same.

“It was in baggies and on dry ice.”

To Alexine Chavez, one of a growing number of women in the Air Force, life in the military is nothing new.

To her grandfather, it’s a bit of novelty. The women of his generation played a different role in the military.

“They were nurses,” he said.

At the ready for 400 years

The story of the Chavez family is similar to that of many in the Guard, said the New Mexico National Guard adjutant general, Maj. Gen. Kenny Montoya.

“Almost all of us have a father and grandfather who served,” he said. “Traditionally in New Mexico, I think it’s part of our culture that we have to serve.”

Working for the Guard is also increasingly popular, Montoya said. Its numbers have increased for the past few years, helping the Guard meet its recruiting goals. It has a membership this year of 4,050 and will be able to add several new units of about 180 people, including a military police company, a special operations unit and an intelligence unit, Montoya said.

Many of the new recruits sign up straight out of high school, Montoya said, a shift in recent years from men and women on active duty or other walks of life who joined the Guard in their older years.

“Younger people are seeing the Guard is doing everything the active-duty (soldiers) do and more at home. If people in Chama are snowed in and elderly people need their medicine, the Guard is going to get it.”

The seeming ease with which Montoya is signing up new members in New Mexico appears to track with national recruiting numbers.

According to information published by the Department of Defense for the 2010 fiscal year, both the Air and Army Guards had successful recruiting missions.

The Air National Guard signed up 6,983 people, 109 percent of its goal of 6,430, and 57,204 people joined the Army National Guard, 95 percent of its goal of 60,000, the Defense Department reported.

The Army Guard had 362,015 members, while the Air Guard had 107,676. Both branches had retention rates above 90 percent.

Montoya said the National Guard system traces its roots back to New Mexico and to Don Juan de Oñate, who, when he came through the state in 1598, left some of his troops behind, telling them they were no longer on active duty.

It was also the Guard that played a key role when Villa crossed into New Mexico.

“He raided the regular Army, but it was the Guard who was called out to track him down,” Montoya said.

While more might be signing up with the Guard, and while the work is rewarding for many, it comes with a somber task. The men and women of the Guard this year alone have buried 600 veterans, many who served in World War II.

“Our World War II vets are passing away in large numbers, and that’s really hard seeing great New Mexicans that you looked up to your whole life,” Montoya said. “That generation is going away.”

Published Nov. 06, 2010.