The next morning, Hardy reluctantly left the company of the tankers and went down to complete his primary mission, which was to interview the soldiers from Puerto Rico.
At his arrival, a few soldiers had emerged from their foxholes. While it wasn’t unusual for discipline to be relaxed on the front line, this was the most motley crew of soldiers that he had seen by far. Their uniforms were new enough, but the troops had a disheveled look that ranged from untucked shirts and ragged, muddy trouser cuffs to several men wearing wide-brimmed hats rather than helmets. Compared to the rest of the U.S. Army, their appearance was certainly unique.
Hardy had seen a few Aussies wearing similar hats, but no Americans. Anyhow, who wouldn’t prefer a steel helmet on his head?
These Puerto Ricans were in stark contrast to the well-disciplined tank unit that he had just left. Under Lieutenant Dunbar, the tankers were not necessarily spit and polish, but they were battle ready. They drilled relentlessly, followed a strict schedule, and maintained everything from their rifle and uniforms to the tanks themselves religiously. Could the same be said of these men?
Hardy didn’t think so.
While Hardy sized up these soldiers, they were busy staring curiously back at him, mainly because he carried a notepad and a camera.
There was something else different about these soldiers and he stared back, not quite able to put his finger on it.
Before Hardy could figure out what had caught his attention, an officer appeared from the dugout. The man was not as dark-complected as the men, but like them, he wore a carefully trimmed mustache.
That’s when it dawned on Hardy that all of these men wore mustaches — the ones who were old enough to shave, at least. In an army where most men were required to be cleanshaven, this instantly set them apart.
During a few days in the field or under combat conditions, soldiers weren’t expected to shave. A few days of stubble was the norm. But once they were back in camp, out came the razors as the soldiers cleaned up their appearance.
“Who the hell are you?” the officer with the mustache demanded. To Hardy’s surprise, the officer did not look or sound Puerto Rican.
“Private Hardy, sir. I’ve been sent by Stars and Stripes to write about the 65th Infantry. I flew in yesterday. Didn’t anyone tell you I was coming to do a story?”
“Hell, no,” the officer said, looking Hardy up and down skeptically. “That was you who flew in? When we saw the chopper, we were expecting General Ridgeway. Or somebody important, at least. Not a reporter.”
“No sir, just me. I hope that I can have a few minutes of your time, sir.”
“Here we are facing the Chinese, and this is what division sends. A guy with a notebook and a camera? It figures. We could use some ammo. Better yet, why not ship us a crate of steaks on that chopper?”
“I’m not sure, sir.”
The officer muttered something in Spanish. “Que desastre. Qué idiota.”
“Sir?”
“That’s Spanish for hello and welcome.”
Having caught the word idiot mixed in there, Hardy thought that he wasn’t getting the full story. However, he wasn’t here to antagonize the officer. Just the opposite — he needed this officer’s blessing to write the story. If he didn’t get it, it was going to be a long trip back and a chewing out by the editor out once he returned to Stars and Stripes.
“Do you have a few minutes to talk to me, sir?”
“All right, all right. What do you want to know?”
“If you would, sir, please tell me a little about the unit.”
Up until then, the officer had seemed annoyed. Now, he threw back his head and belted out some good-natured laughter. “Private, this is one of the most unique units in the whole army. Where should I start?”
“It’s best to start most stories at the beginning, sir.”
The officer scowled at him and said, “I can’t tell if you’re serious or a smartass, Private, but I will give you the benefit of the doubt. Walk with me. I’m Captain McDaniel by the way, and as you have probably deduced, I am not Puerto Rican. That’s a whole different part of the story, believe me.”
The captain gave him a run-down of the unit’s background, which Hardy appreciated. He knew some of it, but McDaniel gave him more details.
“Here in Korea, the Puerto Ricans feel that they have something to prove,” McDaniel said. “They want themselves and their island to be seen as the equals of the rest of the United States. Their actions on the battlefield might even prompt a first step toward statehood.”
“They don’t have any representation in Congress,” Hardy said. “It’s like the colonies back in the days of King George.”
“More than that, the Puerto Ricans intend to prove that their soldiers were very much the equal of their mainland military counterparts,” McDaniel said.
“Are they, sir?”
McDaniel did not answer the question directly. “There are three things that you need to know about the 65th Infantry,” Captain McDaniel said, leading the way along a narrow path that ran behind the unit’s placement along the MLR. “First, we’re known as the Borinqueneers.”
“What’s that mean?” asked Hardy, who was busy scribbling in his notebook while simultaneously trying to watch where he was walking.
“Well, it doesn’t really have a translation,” the captain said. “It comes from the name of an Indian tribe, like the Cheyenne or the Cherokee. You see, the Borinque were one of the main Indian tribes on Puerto Rico before the Spanish came, and a lot of the men trace their ancestry back to the tribe. Hence the nickname, Borinqueneers.”
“Got it.”
“The second thing is that we wear mustaches,” he said, touching the impressive stash on his upper lip. “We’re the only unit in the United States military allowed to skip the razor on a regular basis.”
“What’s the third thing?”
“I saved the best for last. You see, as Borinqueneers our rations officially include rice and beans. It’s what most Puerto Ricans live off, you see. It seems our boys can’t fight without a belly full of rice and beans.”
Hardy smiled. “No offense, sir, but I think you should have told the army that you couldn’t fight without a belly full of prime rib.”
The captain laughed. “The army got off cheap, wouldn’t you say? Don’t put that in the article.”
“Again, no offense sir, but you don’t look Puerto Rican.”
“I’m not,” Captain McDaniel admitted. “I got assigned to the unit because I’m from Texas and picked up a little Spanish over the years. Most of these boys don’t speak a word of English. They were short on officers, so here I am.”
“I can’t think of any other unit that doesn’t speak English. You’d have to go back to the Civil War, when there were units made up mostly of immigrants who only spoke German or Gaelic.”
“You know your history,” McDaniel said. “Of course, the fact that most of the men don’t speak English has caused more than a little confusion at times, believe me.”
“I can imagine, sir.”
“I’ve got to tell you that I wasn’t thrilled at first about being assigned to this unit, but since then, I’ve seen how the Borinqueneers got the short end of the stick over the years. For starters, up until this war, the dark-skinned Puerto Ricans were sent to serve in colored units. Never mind the fact that they were every bit the equal of the other men who signed up to serve. The Puerto Ricans don’t judge people by their skin color, the way that we do. In that regard, you might say that they are more advanced than mainland Americans.”
“It doesn’t seem right, sir.”
“It’s not. It’s an attitude that’s changing slowly. If these fellas do a good job, minds may change faster.”
It was all a lot for Hardy to absorb. He reassured himself that his editor didn’t want a piece on the sweeping history of Puerto Rico. Stars and Stripes wasn’t looking for a unit history, either. Hardy found it all very interesting because he had a natural affinity for soaking up stories and information, but he knew those paragraphs would have been deleted with a few strokes of the editor’s sharp pencil.
He would try to sum the unit’s history in a few sentences and focus on the present, instead. McDaniel was giving him plenty. He was here to write about the contributions that the Borinqueneers were making to holding the line against the enemy.
In other words, he had been sent to write a puff piece. Being a budding wordsmith, Hardy knew that the term came from “puffery,” which was when male birds puffed out their feathers to make themselves look bigger to scare off rivals and impress females. He couldn’t help but wonder if the Borinqueneers’ mustaches were a similar form of puffery. Or did they have the stuff to be good soldiers?
Up ahead, someone waved at Captain McDaniel and shouted something in Spanish.
He turned to Hardy. “Look, I’ve got to go. I’m sure that I talked your ear off enough as it is. Why don’t you go talk to some of the men? There’s a handful that speak English, but you might have to look.”
“I’ll do that, sir.”
“Here’s a tip. Start with, ‘Hola.’ At least you’ll be speaking their language.”
Leaving the captain, Hardy approached a group of men sitting in a rough circle, heating water for coffee over a fire. They looked up at him with questioning expressions that were not entirely friendly.
“Hello, uh, hola.”
For someone like Hardy, who had grown up in the Midwest of the 1940s, the Spanish language was something exotic. In America, it was accepted that most people spoke English, just like the Pilgrims did. Spanish was the language of brown-skinned foreigners. Thus, it wasn’t much of a surprise that the Puerto Ricans were seen as second-class citizens by everyone from the U.S. command structure to other troops.
His hope was to find at least one soldier who spoke enough English that he could get the common soldier’s perspective to include in his article. Considering the blank looks that he was getting, maybe that was too much to expect. He wondered how on earth these men were supposed to understand orders if they were not spoken in Spanish. And then the answer came to him that they would not.
He shook his head and was just about to move on the try elsewhere when one young soldier spoke up. “Yes?”
The soldier had been sitting, but now he stood. Hardy looked him up and down. He was shorter and slighter than the reporter, whose hefty build betrayed his roots as an Indiana farm boy. The Puerto Rican soldier was barely more than a teenager, by all appearances. Like the other Puerto Ricans, he wore a mustache, but it was struggling to get itself established, like spindly corn stalks in a drought. Some of the other men were much older, with hard, lined faces and mustaches shot through with gray. They might have been veterans of the last war. Their dark eyes were cold and appraising.
“You speak English?” Hardy asked hopefully.
“A little,” the soldier said. “My grandmother was American and she taught me.”
“Excellent,” Hardy said. The soldier’s accent was thick, but the meaning was clear enough to Hardy’s ears. “What’s your name?”
“Francisco Vasquez.” The youngster grinned. “Mis amigos call me Cisco.”
“Thanks for talking with me, Cisco. My name’s Don Hardy.” Cisco seemed momentarily taken aback, and Hardy remembered something about “don” being an honorific like “lord” in the old Spanish empire. He hurried to explain. “Don as is Donald, not Don Quixote. How long have you been with the 65th infantry?”
“Just a few weeks.”
Hardy was surprised. “Didn’t you have basic training in Puerto Rico?”
Cisco shook his head. “They gave me a uniform and put me on a boat for Korea,” he said. “Once I got here, they gave me a rifle and estos soldados viejos taught me how to shoot. A lot of us here are like that.”
Hardy stopped writing. “That’s it for training?”
“Si. Esa es la verdad.”
Hardy shook his head. If that truly was the extent of the training Private Vasquez — and possibly the others had received — it explained a lot about their less-than-military appearance. At least this young soldier spoke some English. For those Puerto Ricans who only knew Spanish, Hardy couldn’t imagine what it must be like not to understand what the officers were saying.
Hardy felt sympathy for these men. He could see that they had drawn the short straw in more ways than one, both as second-rate soldiers and citizens. The trouble was that many officers expressed only disgust for these men who were fighting for their country. Hardy thought it wasn’t right and was glad for a chance to write about it.
“I’m not all that surprised by what you just told me,” Hardy responded. “I wasn’t here then, but I heard that there were a lot of guys rushed through basic training so that they had troops over here, especially last year when it looked like the Chinese and North Koreans were going to overrun the peninsula. Sometimes, basic training was shortened to two weeks.”
Cisco held up two fingers and grinned. “Dos semanas? Wow! More like dos dias por mio!”
What Cisco Vasquez didn’t add was that life as a Borinqueneer wasn’t so bad, once you got used to it. So far, he had come through the limited fighting unscathed. There was enough to eat, including the daily beans and rice, and plenty of camaraderie among the enlisted men. Many tended to treat Cisco like their little brother and took him under their wing. The fact that he spoke English gave him a small measure of importance because he could communicate with the officers and mainland soldiers.
He had come from a large family of eight brothers and sisters in Puerto Rico. That was a lot of mouths to feed, and so it was with some relief that his parents received the news that he had enlisted. There were a few middle-class Puerto Rican families — doctors and business owners or higher-ranking officials of the government. For everyone else, life was mostly a struggle. Many young people left for places like New York City or joined the military like Cisco because it was their best option for a better life.
He wasn’t even eighteen yet, but that didn’t stop the recruiter. The United States needed soldiers to fight the war in Korea, and Puerto Rico was eager to do its part.
Always, there was the carrot that the United States held out that Puerto Rico might someday become a state if the island did its part in the Korean War.
“You will grow to be a man,” the recruiter had said, giving Cisco’s thin biceps a squeeze. “When you return, you will need to beat the girls off with a stick!”
That had sounded good to Cisco. But in his first skirmish, Cisco had quickly realized that he would be lucky to get home to his island again. War proved deadly and terrifying. Everything had been so confusing, with explosions and bullets whistling overhead. He had struggled to load and fire his unfamiliar rifle, but he did the best he could. He was a Borinqueneer now, and the Borinqueneers did not run from a fight.
But when one of the officers shouted an order in English, the men around him had not known what to do. “Que? Que?” they asked. The noise of battle added to the confusion and uncertainly.
Cisco had found himself translating the orders as best he could. He soon found himself assigned to be a runner, carrying messages from the officers to the Spanish-speaking squads in the field. It was a dangerous task, but Cisco had never shirked from danger. It was also an assignment of some importance. The others depended on him now, never mind the fact that he was young and inexperienced. He was glad that his abuela had made him practice English.
Of course, he did not share any of this with the reporter. It was more than the reporter wanted to know.
“How’s the food?” the reporter asked. “I hear that you guys prefer rice and beans over C rations.”
Cisco smiled and nodded. Here was a question that he could answer.
“A Puerto Rican soldier fights on rice and beans. What good will canned food do him? Canned food feeds the belly but not the soul.”
The reporter wrote it all down.