Historic Laredo

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Above, left: President of the Selective
Service Draft Board Guerra gives the
oath of office to Edward Lightner.
Appointed by President Lyndon B.
Johnson in 1967, Guerra served with
Richard Buitron, Guadalupe Martinez,
Fernando Vela, and Arturo Benavides.
COURTESY OF JOSÉ MARÍA GUERRA
Below, right: Frank X. Leyendecker
joined the U.S. Navy just before his
18th birthday, seeing service during
World War II in Okinawa and
Yokohama.
COURTESY OF ELIZABETH LEYENDECKER
Below: Leyendecker carried with him
throughout the war this photograph of
his mother, Emma Jordan
Leyendecker, who died just after his
return in 1946.
COURTESY OF FRANK X. LEYENDECKER
all for one. He completed 35 missions with us.
His name was John J. Werdell from Los Angeles.
Our crew had been formed in Tonapah,
Nevada in 1943. We knew each other well. We
would travel on leave from Tonapah to Los
Angeles and on one of our excursions we
stopped in the middle of the night at a restaurant,
finding a table that seated the 10 of us.
Then, my crew members rose abruptly and filed
out, none of them speaking. I followed them and
got back in the rented car. One of the crew
members pointed me to a sign on a bench as we
drove off. The sign read, “No dogs or Mexicans
allowed.”
These are the things I remember about being
a young man in the war.
—José M. Guerra
A REMEMBRANCE OF WAR
“Our serial numbers were contiguous,” Frank
X. Leyendecker remembers of joining the Navy
with fellow Laredoans Jimmy Gallagher and
Richard Ortiz.
Leyendecker joined in 1944 just before his
18th birthday and traveled to boot camp on a
troop train to San Diego with Gallagher and
Ortiz. “One of our instructors was Freddie Peña.
We seemed to run into people from Laredo
wherever we were,” he recalled. “The purpose of
boot camp was to tear all your thinking apart
and discipline you so that you would learn to
make every minute and every action count.”
After five weeks in San Diego, Leyendecker
came home briefly before reporting to San
Bruno, California to learn how to handle small
boats and landing craft. “We traveled after that
on the U.S.S. Lagrange, a troop carrier of 2,300
men, to Okinawa. The men who manned the
Lagrange had been in combat before. They sort
of prepared us emotionally for all that we didn’t
know about what we would experience. That
was something, not knowing what was going to
happen. You were trained. You wanted to come
through all of this without any scratches. You
prayed a little harder. We were sent there to
mop up the island which had been invaded a
few weeks before. The war was winding down.
We were met with strafing,” Leyendecker said.
“So much of Okinawa was still beautiful, even
though it had been devastated,” he said.
“My good friend Roberto Volpe had been
killed in Okinawa. I found his grave and shaved
off a sliver of wood from the cross that marked
his burial. I brought it to his mother as well a picture
of Roberto’s grave. The war was devastating
to all of our mothers. At one time, my mother
had four sons in the war. She wrote to me all the
time, and I missed her. I carried her picture with
me. It never left me, and neither did her words or
her love,” Leyendecker said, reading the inscription
on the back of a water stained photo of
Emma Jordan Leyendecker that remained in his
wallet throughout the war. A simple inscription
reads, “To my beloved son, Mother.”
“All of us served,” Leyendecker said, naming
his brothers, “Albert, Dick, Sam, Gilbert, Peter,
48 ✦ HISTORIC LAREDO