“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?”