A Hero Passes

Don't moss this one. The obituary is in the San Antonio Express-News. You have to do the stupid registration thing to see it, but here's a condensed version:

Jose Mendoza Lopez, the oldest living Hispanic recipient of the Medal of Honor and one of fewer than 40 surviving World War II veterans with the honor, died Monday in San Antonio. Lopez, 94, a Mexico-born Army veteran, received the nation's highest honor for bravery for single-handedly repelling German infantry forces advancing on his unit near the start of the Battle of the Bulge.

"He was a great hero, a super guy and a super dad," said his son, John Lopez of San Antonio.

In frail health and using a walker in recent years, Lopez attended presidential inaugurations, as well as the funerals of other Medal of Honor recipients. In January, he made his last inauguration, as President George W. Bush was sworn in for a second term in Washington.

Many had become concerned about Lopez after his wife of 64 years, Emilia, died in February 2004. In one of his last interviews, in January, though too weak to speak at length, he sang from memory a Spanish love song he'd often crooned to her.

"They're dancing up there now," his son said, commenting on the couple's faith that they would meet in heaven.

On Dec. 17, 1944, Lopez, with the 23rd Infantry, 2nd Infantry Division, fended off dozens of German troops and tanks trying to overrun his Company K near Krinkelt, Belgium. He lugged a .30-caliber Browning automatic rifle, jumped into a shallow hole and killed 10 German soldiers.

"Ignoring enemy fire from an advancing tank, he held his position and cut down 25 more enemy infantry attempting to turn his flank," his Medal of Honor citation states.

Lopez kept firing, despite having to reload and being blown backward by the concussion of enemy fire.

"Sgt. Lopez's gallantry and intrepidity, on seemingly suicidal missions in which he killed at least 100 of the enemy, were almost solely responsible for allowing Company K to avoid being enveloped, to withdraw successfully and to give other forces coming up in support time to build a line which repelled the enemy drive," the citation reads.

Lopez was immediately promoted from private to sergeant. Nearly 50 years later, he returned to the site in Belgium with journalist Bill Moyers and a PBS documentary film crew. Questioned by Moyers about his bravery, the man who had prayed to the Virgin of Guadalupe as he fired at Germans replied, "I believe any man would do the same thing."

Though his medal citation and most biographies list his birthplace as Mission, Texas, Lopez was born in Santiago Huitlan, Mexico. To join the Merchant Marine, he bought a false birth certificate in 1935.

In his youth, Lopez held a variety of jobs, from picking cotton to working on ships. As a lightweight boxer using the moniker Kid Mendoza, he accumulated a 52-3 record.

Returning to the United States from Hawaii after the Dec. 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Lopez almost was arrested. Authorities thought he was Japanese.

"I let them see my papers, that I was Mexican, and they let me go. They were going to put me in the prison," he told an interviewer for the U.S. Latinos and Latinas & World War II oral history project.

His son reflected Monday on a man who lived a humble life.

"He was a hero, without being a hero around his family," John Lopez said.

Lopez died with only a nurse in the room, she said. Pedraza said she doubted Lopez had any fear of dying, because he'd always told her, "Fear is the one thing that will hold you back in life."