My name is Valente Valenzuela, I'm 62 years old.
We were born in Palomas, El Marqueño, Chihuahua, and we come from a farming family.
When I was six, six years old, I remember grandmother was a Taramara midwife, and sometimes
the ladies who were delivering would die, and I would help grandmother clean the babies.
So I was exposed to death at a very young age.
And I think that helped me later on during the Vietnam.
I enlisted there in Roswell, but I was flown to Fort Bliss in Texas, and I held up my hand
there, and from there they flew me to Louisiana, Fort Polk, Louisiana, where I went to basic
training in the swamps.
At that time, everyone that was training in Fort Polk, Louisiana was going to Vietnam
sooner or later.
The people were demonstrating in Washington and all over the U.S., but I was in the service,
and we would hear all these things that were going on, and especially when I landed in
Vietnam in 1968, and it was hard to do your job in Vietnam.
When you had all these riots, bring the troops home.
We have no business fighting in Vietnam.
And this is beginning to take place right now with Afghanistan.
The bronze medal is kind of hard to talk about because I blocked off a lot of things that
happened to me.
I was trained to do certain things, but I never did that job.
I was sent to an airborne unit in Hue during the heavy fighting, and I was assigned to
the 101st Airborne.
My bronze star, I prefer not to get into details because it's very hard for me to say, but
when I was awarded the bronze star, it was for killing the enemy, and I have different
issues with that.
My name is Manuel Valenzuela, and I'm the fourth in the line, so I was three years old
when it came to the United States.
When I was in the Marine Corps, I wanted to be going to a force recon.
That's what you call it in the Marines that time, and it still is.
It's like special forces in the Army.
I signed for that, and so I was shipped to Okinawa to train in the jungle.
And from Okinawa, I went to the Philippines for more advanced guerrilla world war training.
And then from the Philippines, that's when we head out to Vietnam.
So I was there in 71, 72 in Vietnam.
So we're going to stand up, and we're going to bring those Spanish veterans back, because
all the veterans have been deported, over 3,000 that we know of, that have benefits that
they're supposed to receive.
And my God, that's billions and billions and billions of dollars that you're talking
about.
Now when they get deported, everything's taken away.
That's why we put our uniforms on, and we feel like we're at war.
But this time, it's not with weapons.
This is by pencil, court appointments, lawyers, talking to people who know the law.
We feel like we're at war without the Department of Homeland.
I am so wide awake, so wild, I don't like to stay, I'm seein' in despots, that now under
the sky, I fall for my God, and when my sleep, the dust remains, I'm going to go, it takes
you no one knows, all now, and you come out, and you often do, we go looking for illusions,
anything at all, anything at all, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,
we come up, and we often do, and we often
