Historic Laredo

thing back through the nose when they went to
the camp.” Late in the war, during a prisoner
relocation by train, Al was able to escape, and
was hidden in a basement by a German civilian
for a few days until the train had left. “They didn’t
count any more at that time,” Sanitzki said.
“They left the train open, and people would run.
Whoever wanted to run away was running.” Al
lived in Germany until 1949 when he came to
the United States. Sanitzki’s oldest brother
Nathan made his way to Belgium and then came
to the United States.
“It’s not imaginable,” Sanitzki said. “Even
myself. But this is what happened to me. I was
at the time 16 years old, 17 years old. I was still
a boy. I grew up without my parents. I grew up
on my own.
“Sometimes I get up in the morning, and I say
to my wife, ‘I had a very bad night.’ It’s already
fifty years, more than fifty years. She says,
‘What’s wrong now?’ I said, ‘I was running, and
they were chasing me. I couldn’t catch my breath
and I was running and they were right behind
me but they couldn’t catch me. And I was running
and I was running and I was running....’
And the rest of the night is shot, finished.”
The dreams and the memories are all that
remain of that time for Sanitzki. From before the
war, there are no physical mementos. “I was too
young,” he said. “Who had time to think about
things? Everything was burned. No birth certificates,
no pictures. Nothing. The Germans
burned everything.”
Sanitzki sighed. “But I’m here in America and
I’m a very happy man, especially here in Laredo.
People are nice, I live in a nice neighborhood.
What can I tell you?”
—Tom Moore
AFTER VIETNAM: A WORLD ASKING
US TO RE-WEAVE THE TAPESTRY
THAT HOLDS US TOGETHER
“We came from an era in which we were told
that we could make this a better world, and we
believed it. The war in Vietnam did not make
this a better world. It was a waste of lives and
that waste lives with us now in lives ruined by
injuries, disease, heroin addiction, and deep
psychological scars,” said Dr. Reynaldo Godines
who served in Vietnam from June 1967 to
October 1968.
“Don’t write this unless you make mention of
President Kennedy’s NSAM #263 (National
Security Action Memorandum) of October 11,
1963, which would have returned all U.S. personnel
from Vietnam by the end of 1965. NSAM
#263 is one of the ‘whys’ of the Kennedy assassination,
according to L. Fletcher Prouty,” said
Godines, who upon his return from Vietnam
resumed his college studies.
“At the time that President John F. Kennedy
was assassinated, the U.S. had spent one billion
dollars on the war in Vietnam. During the LBJ
and Nixon administrations, the government
spent 200 billion dollars. By the end of the war,
over 500 billion would have been spent. The
government that wanted this war was a government
away and apart from that of the people. It
was run by then CIA director Allan Dulles and
the military industrial complex of great proportions,
which President Eisenhower warned us
about in his farewell speech,” he said.
“I had never heard of Vientam in high
school,” said Godines, noting that he had joined
the Naval Reserve in the last half of his senior
year, 1966, at Martin High School. “I started to
hear about it while I was at Laredo Junior
College. My friend Mundo, Edmundo Ramirez,
and I were called to active duty at the same
❖
Reynaldo Godines, now a Laredo
physician, believes Vietnam was “not
a good war, a war that cost this
country 58,000 of its best and
brightest young men and women.”
Godines said that Vietnam was waged
by the military industrial complex at
a cost of the equivalent of a trillion
dollars today. He believes that the
Vietnam War was layered with
conspiracies including the assasination
of President John F. Kennedy.
DR. REYNALDO GODINES
Chapter VI ✦ 53