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RECOLLECTIONS: Old Juarez During the War Years

By Jeff Danziger

When I was in the Army, studying Vietnamese in the late sixties, I was stationed near El Paso, Texas for about a year. On weekends I visited the city of Juarez, just over the Mexican border. I hadn't thought about Juarez much until it showed up in the news recently as a drug gang slaughterhouse where nearly five hundred killings have been recorded in just this year alone.

More than fifty gangs are in protracted battle with each other and the Mexican police. The Mexican Army has been brought in for effect. The level and creativity of violence is higher, if it can be believed, than the worst cities in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Calling this a war is not just journalistic exaggeration.

It's very sad. In 1968, the El Paso-Juarez metroplex was hot and dusty, but it was peaceful. Juarez was especially attractive if you were on enlisted pay, which was little more than a hundred a month. The army's Vietnamese Language School was at Biggs Field, next to Ft. Bliss, and in acknowledgment of the intellectual nature of the training language, students were given the full weekends off. In Juarez we could get a full steak dinner for $1.50 and all the Sol beer we could drink. We could also take Ferrocarril Nacional south to Chihuahua City, where the dinner price dropped to an even buck.

The border was lightly officiated. You could walk across and wave at the guards both ways. Most amazing was the world's only (according to them) international trolley. The trolley cars were ancient and powered by overhead wires that sparked dramatically. This scared the Mexican women, who preferred to trudge across the International Bridge on foot, coming to clean and cook for Texans. Beneath the bridge the Rio Grande oozed along.

Juarez welcomed Americans with a sign that wished us all Bienvenidos, and it was a welcoming place, especially if you were bringing any dollars. Men in police hats would offer to guard your car for ten cents an hour. They weren't really policemen, but it wasn't worth arguing about. They would also give you dog-eared maps of the city and little coupons for discounts for meals and other things.

I never partook of the other things, but several of my fellow soldiers did. One friend, Larry Hirschhorn, was a frequenter of a brothel known as the Navy Rose. Mysterious choice of name since the ocean was many hundreds of miles away. At the Navy Rose we had Mexican food and bottles of Sol, and then I would leave to go back to the base. Larry stayed there and enjoyed the full Montezuma, so to speak. Larry wasn't a married man and I was. I kept up with things vicariously.

Then disaster struck. Larry fell hopelessly in love with one of the girls at the Navy Rose. I can't remember her name but she was definitely beautiful. Larry was so smitten that he thought the only solution was to buy her out of the clutches of the management and send her back to his mother in Minneapolis or somewhere. He worried that she was so beautiful she would find him insufficiently guapo. And actually he wasn't all that guapo. His appetite for dissipation up until he fell in love contributed to poor posture and an unattractive girth. For a time he sought to lose some weight running with me in the evenings when the day had cooled. To speed up the slimming effects of running he obtained a diving wet suit. He reasoned that the increased perspiration would melt the pounds away. It didn't have the effect he wanted. Later I found a box of sugar donuts from the PX under his bed.

She was beautiful indeed. Lovely thick onyx hair, and eyes so black and deep you couldn't see the pupils. She told Larry the story of her life so far. She was working to support her family, in a poor village in the mountains to the south. Her younger sister needed an operation, and so on. By this time Larry was fully nuts. The relationship, if you could call it that, was robbing his sleep, making him run in a wet suit and interrupting his study of the Vietnamese language. His new plan, and there had been others, was to desert the Army, go to Mexico, take the girl to the poor mountain village and hide out there until the end of the war, or forever, whichever came first. He was thinking of what he would name his children.

He did not desert and go to the mountain village, but he did stay in Juarez one night without leave. He had gotten in a fight and was jailed by the policia for nearly a week in the Juarez lock-up. I went with an MP to bail him out. The Juarez jail was rather a basic structure with an unpleasant clientele. Not a good place to wake up from a hangover. For one thing there was no roof. But the police were easy-going and, once the bail had been forked over, there were no problems. Mexico was suffering ruinous inflation then. The dollar was king.

The language school, forty-seven weeks long, came to an end, and we separated for other training. But we had one last dinner at the Navy Rose. The band played all his favorites tunes, and Larry got miserably drunk. He struggled with the thought of what would happen to the love of his life after he had shipped out. She seemed to be bearing up remarkably well. He toyed further with the desertion plan. There had been four other disappearances from our language class during the year. And no one seemed to care.

The war went on, which I had hoped it wouldn't. My orders for Vietnam finally showed up. And three months later I was delivering some POW's for interrogation in Saigon. Walking across the American Embassy compound I ran into Larry. He had landed in a wonderfully soft job working for Ellsworth Bunker, the US Ambassador during the last war years. Larry even got to wear civilian clothes. And you will be unsurprised to learn that he was once again in love. I didn't get to meet the woman because I had to get back to my unit, but his description rounded up the usual superlatives. He looked better, too. Thin and tanned. I didn't ask him about the whatshername, the blooming rose of Juarez, the previous love of his life.

But the current news of the killing fields now on the Mexican border brought her back into my thinking. She'll be along in years by this time. If she's still alive I can only hope that she has made enough money to go back to her poor village in the mountains and take care of her sister who needed the operation. And I hope, at least, that she is no longer in Juarez.

Jeff Danziger is a Vietnam vet and syndicated political cartoonist and author.