Fifty-six years ago, I graduated from high school. Right at the precipice, I backed out of my enlistment in the Marine Corps. I knew that I would be fast-tracked to a Vietnam posting.
The Palestine-Israel campus protests remind me of the anti-war demonstrations roiling today’s United States. I viewed those actively opposed to the Vietnam War as unpatriotic cowards. Yet, I changed course at the last moment.
This excerpt from my book relates how that happened.
As a high school sophomore in the summer of 1966, I began a full-time job at Price-Pfister, a plumbing hardware plant, one of Southern California’s largest factories. For the next year and a half, I worked as an “expediter.” My function was to keep assembly lines supplied with parts: faucet bodies, stems, valves, and the like.
It was far more demanding than I could have imagined. What I most remember about the job is hoisting boxes of brass fixtures and packing assembled faucets while scrambling. The pace was unrelenting. Bathroom breaks were grudgingly granted because someone had to cover for you during the few minutes you dashed off to relieve yourself. The assembly line just kept rushing along.
Price-Pfister gave me a brutal introduction to blue-collar labor. It also introduced me to the reality of undocumented labor. The plant sat adjacent to a largely black section of Pacoima on Paxton Avenue. Yet, only about five percent of the workers were African Americans. The rest were Mexicans, and many of them were undocumented and eager for work, no matter the level of exploitation.
Working a forty-hour week made high school a total afterthought. I did not have much homework assigned, and the classes lacked valuable educational content. My focus was on making money.
I was in turmoil by early 1968, along with every other American youth. Now eighteen, I had to find a grown-up pursuit of some sort. Nearing high school graduation, my close friend Buster and I agreed we would join the Army or Marine Corps. A two-year stint would allow us to learn a job skill and get a better fix on what to do with the rest of our lives. We knew we would be deployed to Vietnam. We were unafraid of going off to war. Stupidly, we were sure that our rough and tumble-Pacoima upbringing would allow us to dodge death, injury, or psychological trauma. We would outfox the perils of war.
The war would not get us.
At some point, my dad asked about my post-high school plans. He was aghast, a rare emotion for him.
“The Army will send you to Vietnam, and you’ll come back dead or all messed up,” he said. “Go to college. The Army already has plenty of Mexicans.”
When I pointed out that he’d enlisted just days before America joined the Second World War, he replied, “There was no opportunity for me to go to college. Only rich people could afford to go. It was a different time. Young Mexicans in El Paso couldn’t get good jobs even with a high school education. And this is a stupid war. The US isn’t threatened like in World War II. “
Seeing I would not take his advice, my dad offered a compromise: I could attend community college for one semester. I could drop out and enlist if I decided higher education wasn’t for me.
“That way, you could go with my blessing.” Getting his blessing struck me as out of character for him. He had never offered to bless anything I did. I ended up deciding there would be no harm in humoring him.
Ricardo Chavira Chicano 