Authors: Reed Sprague
Much later on, perhaps twenty years down the road, they might even settle in Florida where their children would attend and graduate from the University of Florida. They were not sure why, but UF represented to them all the success America had to offer. The only extended break they were able to take each week was their late lunch break on Saturday afternoons. At each Saturday break in November and December, and occasionally on Saturday night while they were in Florida to harvest the crops there, Alejandro rigged up the rabbit ears to their television set and he and Felicia watched UF pound their opponent in a game called football. American football was a game he and Felicia grew to love. Alejandro didn’t understand, though, why the game he knew as football was played different in America from the way it was played in Mexico.
Alejandro Jr. was born at 3:32 in the morning, 18 August 1983. He was beautiful. All babies are, but he shined. His skin glowed. His features were those of the Gerber Baby, except that his skin was dark brown and he wasn’t blond. Felicia and Alejandro Sr. said that anyone observing him would say that God had to have planned him because he was perfect. They had no relatives in the U.S., and they were private people, so they were content to enjoy the birth of their son and his first few days of life with a small handful of friends, all of whom were fellow farm workers.
Felicia cried and cried as she stared endlessly at her new son. She would nickname him “Nino.” As is the case with most husbands, Alejandro Sr. didn’t get it; he didn’t understand the tears.
“What’s wrong, Felicia? Why do you cry?” Alejandro asked.
“Our son. Look at him. He’s so beautiful. We are in a country where we are only farm workers, and yet—”
Felicia was unable to complete her sentence because her tears would not stop, and her head and neck jumped with each syllable she tried to utter.
“And yet, what?”
“Our son could be an important man some day,” Felicia exclaimed. “Our son has the opportunity to achieve greatness because we have settled in the greatest country in the world.”
Alejandro and Felicia wanted their family’s life in America to be fair to them. They did not want handouts. They continued to work hard, brutally hard. Soon after giving birth, Felicia went back to work in the fields. She and Alejandro Sr. did not want Alejandro Jr. to stay with a sitter all day — even if they did want that, they couldn’t afford a sitter — so Alejandro Sr. carried the baby into the fields each day.
In the business of harvesting, productivity is the name of the game. Alejandro Sr.’s supervisor in Crimpton, Dean Rodgers, couldn’t have cared less if one of his workers carried a tiny baby or a locomotive into the fields all day so long as he was at least as productive as the other workers.
Alejandro Jr. — “Alex,” as he came to be called in order to avoid confusion with Alejandro Sr.’s name — was a good baby. He was easier to care for than the average baby, but still a great deal of care was required.
At regular intervals each day Alejandro would bring Alex to Felicia for feeding. Felicia would hide herself as best she could from others in the fields, especially from Dean Rodgers, if he happened to be around at the time. Alejandro shaded Alex and Felicia with a makeshift umbrella while Felicia breast fed her baby, providing him with all the nutrients and love only a mother could offer.
At the end of most days, Alejandro and Felicia had produced as much as any other worker. On days when his or her productivity was less than average during the normal hours of the workday, Alejandro would return to the fields at night, dodge the rats and foxes, and harvest whatever was needed to bring their daily totals up to the level expected by Rodgers.
Alex grew into a fine young boy. By age ten, Rodgers looked the other way when Alejandro asked if his son could work along side him in the fields during the summer. Rodgers had the ethics and empathy for others one would expect from the offspring of a cross between an anaconda and Adolf Hitler. He saw an opportunity, and he took full advantage of it.
“I’ve got an idea, Alejandro. You would like your son to work the entire summer, June through August, right?”
“Yes. We need the money. We’re saving for his college.”
“Okay, yeah, sure. Look, I want to help you. But, you know, it costs me money when I have a worker in the fields. Each worker costs money in paperwork, management time, and so on. You understand, don’t you?”
Alejandro understood no such thing, but he knew the game fairly well. “Yes, I know.”
“Okay, here’s the deal. No one, and I mean no one at all, is to know about this.”
“No one will know.”
“I’ll pay him five dollars an hour, but only if he gives me twelve hours a day, seven days a week. He’s young and he should be able to do that. That will work out to be over $5,000 for the summer. He’ll not only have money for college, he’ll be a rich college student,” Rodgers said, in an obvious attempt at condescending humor. “Do we have a deal?”
“And in the weeks he works less than twelve–hour days?” Alejandro asked.
“He’ll earn four dollars an hour,” Rodgers said, calmly and reasonably, making the math sound fair to both parties.
Alejandro knew the game with this proposal as well. Rodgers would make certain that Alex would not average twelve hours a day most weeks, justifying the lower hourly pay. Felicia and Alejandro talked it over and decided that realizing the long–term goal of graduating from the University of Florida outweighed the humiliation of the abuse the family would endure at the hands of Rodgers.
Rodgers stood to make a bundle each summer. Young workers between ten and twenty could be counted on to produce twice as much as older workers. Rodgers was paid by the pound for the harvest. He stood to make an extra ten thousand dollars each summer on the back of each underage worker he employed.
Alejandro and Felicia deposited all of Alex’s earnings, and much of their own, into a savings account for his college costs. In spite of the fact that he worked often in the fields — during the summers and after school during the non–summer months — Alex earned top grades in the little schools he attended.
The schools weren’t much. Each of the communities in which the Perez family worked and lived had a school that provided at least a basic education for farm workers’ children. For the generations before Alex, local governments often did not provide education to farm workers’ children, even those children born in the U.S., who were themselves U.S. citizens. Times were better for Alex. He and his parents were grateful.
Alex worked hard. His intelligence, drive and high ethics were clear to his parents and teachers. Though he attended several schools each year, he did not let the constant moving back and forth to different communities adversely affect his school work. When he received a grade of, say, ninety–three percent on a math test, he would try for a ninety–seven on the next math test. He was never satisfied.
By the age of fifteen, Alex fully understood the system in Crimpton and in the other farm communities in which he and his parents worked. He also understood that by the time he graduated from high school he needed to be out of that cycle of institutional abuse and into a system that would improve his life and the lives of his parents.
“I want to go into the Army and serve my country,” Alex said to his parents on the night of his sixteenth birthday.
“No. No. You are going to college,” Felicia replied sternly. “You will be able to enter the University of Florida at age seventeen. Few others get to do that. You will have your master’s degree by the time you are twenty–three. Your future is set. We have agreed. Please don’t start with us. It’s too much. It’s too much. We have to know that you are going to do as we agreed. Your future will go according to our plan. You will not stumble through. You will face your future in a logical way.”
“I want to go into the Army, but not for the reasons you might believe. I want to go into the Army, then on to college, and, yes, earn my master’s degree. My country has been good to me, and I want to give back, but also, I want to go into federal law enforcement after I get out of college. My résumé will look good with two years of army duty on it.
“Don’t worry, Mama, I will go to college. I will earn my degree. I will be a law enforcement officer. You will be proud of me. You and Papa will get out of this abuse and far away from that devil Rodgers and other demons like him. But it will take time. It will work. I know it will. I’ll prove it to you.”
Alejandro interjected. “We will compromise. Because you will graduate from high school at such a young age, you will attend UF for one year, see how it goes, then join the Army, if you still feel that it is important to you to do so.”
In June 2000, at the age of sixteen, Alex graduated from high school with top honors. The following August, on his seventeenth birthday, he began his first term at UF.
The college world was light years away from the world Alex was used to. UF was a great school, well–respected for its law enforcement programs, but like most major U.S. universities, it was a party school. Alex was not a party person. He had not attended a party in his entire life. He was lonely in school, younger than most other students, and socially behind as well. He was more serious about his future and had more faith in the future of the U.S. than his fellow students. He attended for two semesters, making top grades in all of his subjects.
On 6 July 2001, Alex went to the U.S. Army recruitment office in Boise, Idaho, and enlisted. His parents supported him. He had kept his end of the bargain by attending UF for a year, so they would keep theirs. He was off to boot camp. His experience at boot camp made him feel somewhat the way he felt while at UF. He was different than the other soldiers, more serious and determined, but socially behind his peers.
The terror attacks against the U.S. on 11 September 2001 forever changed Alex. By noon that day, he had solidified his future plans. No longer would his plans to become a federal law enforcement officer be just dreams, and no longer would those plans represent only the distant future. From that moment on, Alex’s every decision would be directed to the end that he would one day serve his country as a federal agent working to protect Americans from terrorism.
Alex went to the library on base daily to read books about service in the CIA, FBI and other national security agencies. He longed to be a major player in the protection of the United States. And maybe, just maybe, his mother’s prophecies were to come true. For now, though, he could not dream. He had to work. He had to be productive, just has he had been all those years in the fields for Dean Rodgers.
Completely unexpectedly, but as a direct result of the terror attacks of 11 September 2001, Alex was dispatched to Afghanistan. Afghanistan sounded more like a disease to him than a country. It was a place about which he knew nothing. He called his mother to tell her the news.
“Hi Mama. Hi. I’m going to go out of the U.S. for awhile, Mama.”
“What! Where are they taking you, Nino? To Mexico? To Latin America? There’s much work for the U.S. to do in Latin America.”
“No, Mama. I’m going to Afghanistan.”
There was silence on the other end of the phone, a long period of silence.
“Mama? Are you still there?”
“Yes, I’m here,” Felicia said, as she fought back tears.
“Nino, Nino, do you understand that there is a war over there? America will punish that country for training the terrorists who attacked us. I don’t want you to be killed, and I don’t want you to kill others. This was not supposed to happen.”
“I know, Mama, but everything has changed now. The terrorists must pay. They must pay for their murder. We will get them. We will get them. I have to go now. I am going for training, then off to Afghanistan. I love you.”
“I love you too, my Nino.”
“Goodbye, Mama. I’ll call you in a day or so.”
“Goodbye, Nino.”
The officer responsible to train Alex and the other soldiers who were to be sent off from that division to Afghanistan stood to the left of a map of the region to be invaded. The officer’s presentation was thorough, but the map spoke more clearly than he could have hoped to. Though young and inexperienced, the soldiers could tell from the map that Afghanistan contained hundreds of mountains, several small cities, and hundreds of smaller villages.
They would also learn that Afghanistan contained millions of flowers from which heroin was produced, and a huge number of terrorists, near–terrorists, and terrorist sympathizers. “This looks like a God–forsaken place; how could these primitive people have done to us what they did on 9/11?” Alex thought to himself as he studied the map.
Alex and the other soldiers who arrived with him in Afghanistan were stunned by what they saw—work wagons pulled by oxen, travel by camel or on foot, water carried for miles in buckets. Afghanistan made Crimpton look modern, and that was no easy task.
Immediately upon arrival at the town outside their army camp, the soldiers were greeted with a hail of gunfire from the Taliban fighters. These people may have carried their water in old buckets and used oxen, camels and their own feet for transportation, but they had sophisticated and powerful guns, and they were well trained in how to use them.
The Taliban fighters attacked Alex and the other soldiers, and the fight lasted ten hours. When the dust settled, hundreds of Taliban fighters lay dead in the street. Hundreds were hiding in the surrounding homes. America lost forty–two soldiers in the fight as well. U.S. soldiers then went door to door searching for Taliban fighters. Each resident questioned hadn’t seen any of the fighters and knew nothing about what the U.S. soldiers were asking. Such were the ways of the Afghan people.
Days turned into weeks, then months, and Afghanistan proved to be the unforgiving hell hole most believed that it was. Progress was slow, and U.S. military leaders were frustrated. Alex was awakened again and again each night by the sound of gunfire, U.S. air raids in the distance, the explosion of a suicide bomb, a combination of the three, or something else loud and annoying.