My father went into the Navy and Uncle Nick and Jack in the Army and Uncle Benny in the Marine Corps. My father served aboard a battleship and according to his sea bag after he crossed over, was in Saipan, Tarawa and the Philippines etc. My uncle Nick, who was the oldest was in Hawaii, Jack was in Germany and Benny was in Iwo-Jima. I was raised alongside them until I was eleven years old and later in life, I attended all their funerals.
I became aware at the age of four that something seemed to guide and protect me; perhaps the culture and the respect we had for each other. When my sister and I left the grandpas to live with our mother in East Los Angeles, life under the circumstances was that I explored life in the streets of the mining villages of New Mexico and later in the streets of Los Angeles and other cities of the southwest and finalized by joining the Marine Corps on my seventieth birthday and traveled in all those foreign lands and cities. I guess I became a “Vago.”