A posthumous salute to a great American

By Darrell Laurant

Published: August 23, 2008

Throughout his life, Eduardo Peniche did his best to give immigration a good name. And it was a wonderful life, indeed.

In fact, one could almost plug Peniche into the framework of that classic Christmas film, in which a disgraced banker pondering suicide is shown what life in his town would have been like had he never been born.

Or, in Peniche’s case, if he had never crossed the Rio Grande and adopted America.

Among those who would have been the poorer for his absence are his fellow infantrymen in World War II Europe, his Spanish students at Central Virginia Community College and Kingwood (Texas) College, and essentially anyone who ever basked in the warmth of his sunny personality.

The entries in the online guest book that was opened up after his death in Houston earlier this month came from all over the world: the U.S., Mexico, France, Belgium. But it was this one that really caught my eye:

“The employees of Greenbriar express our sadness for your loss. We will surely miss seeing him coming around the corner, into the parking lot, to mail something special to someone he thought was special. What a smile! And those wonderful stories!”

You have to be pretty special yourself to get a posthumous tribute like that from the window clerks at your local post office.

Ed was a friend of mine, although I hadn’t seen him in years. He was also a frequent source of copy for me, most recently back in January, when I wrote about him finally getting a second Purple Heart from the Battle of the Bulge. He wanted it, not for himself, but for his son Carlos. Son John, who still lives in Lynchburg, has the other one.

At the risk of being repetitive, I’d like to tell you one more time the two things that, to me, made Ed Peniche one of the most remarkable human beings I’ve ever encountered.

He was a Mexican citizen living in Paducah, Ky., when he was drafted for World War II. I don’t remember how or why that happened, but I got the sense that Peniche could have avoided that burden if he’d really wanted to, simply by slipping back over the border to his native Yucatan.

But he loved the U.S., and he loved Deane, his future wife,whom he’d met in Paducah as an exchange student. So he not only accepted his draft call, but he volunteered for one of the most dangerous, difficult jobs in the wartime Army.

When he went for his draft physical, he was measured at 5-5.

“You have to be 5-6 to be in the Army Airborne,” the sergeant told him. “Sorry.”

Peniche replied, “That’s too bad, because I wanted to volunteer with a bazooka unit.”

According to a story Ed always told with great gusto and a broad grin, a nearby officer overheard the conversation and hurried over.

“This man wants to be a bazookaman? Sergeant, measure him again.”

“So they did,” Peniche recalled, “and by a miracle, I gained another inch.”

He wound up in the middle of the climatic battle of the European campaign, in Belgium, in December — about as far removed from his hot, placid native land as it’s possible to get. And he jumped out of airplanes and carted his bazooka well enough to earn two Bronze Stars, as well as the Purple Heart.

Later, Peniche served in Vietnam. Despite his warrior credentials, he was a man of peace, driven by a philosophy that nations needed to rip down their fences of misunderstanding. An avid reader and observer through the years, he evolved into someone both compassionate and tough-minded.

In the process, he carved out his own niche in Lynchburg, and he was comfortable here. But then his granddaughter, Amada, was born in Houston with a brain that wasn’t fully formed.

“She was in a semi-vegetative state,” Ed recalled later. “It was so hard on her parents, and so Deane and I went down to help them out.”

And stayed, until Amada died at the age of 18. As long as she was alive, Peniche visited her almost daily and showered her with affection, even though she gave few outward signs of acknowledgement.
It would have been easy, and even natural, to have said, “I’ll just make the occasional visit, because she won’t know who I am, anyway.”

Which leads me to his own last days.

“He had suffered a massive stroke,” said son John, “and the family was scattered all over — some in Honduras, some in South Florida, some in Virginia. That meant we all arrived at different times, and each of us asked Dad — even though we weren’t sure he could hear us — to hang on until the next family member came. ‘It’s a paratrooper’s mission,’ is how we phrased it.

“Sure enough, he didn’t draw his last breath until the whole family had arrived and was gathered around him.”

What a guy.