On eve of Veterans Day, Bataan survivor Valdemar DeHerrera, 105, remembers the close calls and guardian angels of World War II

QUESTA — There are some things a man never forgets, even if — like Valdemar DeHerrera — he lives to be a 105.

Things such as surviving on grasshoppers and monkey meat, working hard and being beaten if you resisted.

Things such as collapsing from weakness and believing you would be shot or bayonetted before you could get up.

Things such as wondering if you would ever be free again, ever see the people you loved most again.

DeHerrera, of tiny Costilla in Taos County, is among the last American survivors of the fighting in Bataan and Corregidor in the Philippines at the outset of World War II. He was a prisoner of the Japanese for three years and seven months.

Valarie Rael, DeHerrera’s daughter, said her father told her he spent a lot of time as a prisoner of war thinking about his mother.

“He knew that she would be very worried and concerned about him,” Rael said. “He wished he could tell her he was alive and OK.”

More than 80 years later, as we celebrate Veterans Day, Valdemar DeHerrera is still alive and OK.

Winds of war

He was born on Oct. 8, 1919, to Meliton and Lupita DeHerrera, the third of 14 children. His father owned a bar and raised sheep, chickens, cattle, pigs, horses and crops, mostly beans.

DeHerrera helped his family with its farming until dropping out of school in the 10th grade to join the Civilian Conservation Corps, a government work relief program in which young, single men did manual labor for conservation and natural resources projects on rural lands owned by federal, state and local governments.

“My dad said he worked in the northern New Mexico area and did a lot work with a shovel,” Rael said.

DeHerrera has difficulty hearing and doesn’t talk as much as he did in his younger years. This past Saturday, he mostly answered a reporter’s questions through his daughter.

He still has his own home in Costilla, a place of 400 people near the Colorado border. But on this day he was at the home of Rael and her husband, Don, in Questa, 20 miles south of Costilla.

DeHerrera is slim, dressed neatly and has a remarkably wrinkle-free face that lights up when he smiles. He gets around with a walker, but rested in a recliner at his daughter’s house.

“He likes that chair because it’s in front of the TV, and he likes watching wild animal shows on National Geographic,” Rael said.

She said that her father enjoyed seeing new places when he was a young man, so after his time with the CCC, he went to Wyoming.

“His brother was in Wyoming, so he decided to go and see what work was there for him,” Rael said. “In Wyoming, he did mostly sheep herding.”

But the winds of war were stirring around the globe.

“When the draft happened, his boss in Wyoming convinced my dad to return to his home state and register there,” Rael said.

DeHerrera was drafted into the Army, sent for training to Fort Bliss in Texas, and attached to the 515 Coast Artillery in the Philippines.

That’s where he was when the Japanese invaded the Philippines in January 1942, initiating the Battle of Bataan, which would continue until the surrender of American and Filipino forces in April of that year.

Guardian angel

The Japanese marched 75,000 American and Filipino military personnel 65 miles to a prison camp, a brutal operation known as the Bataan Death March because anywhere from 5,500 to more than 18,000 prisoners are estimated to have died during it.

DeHerrera avoided that hellish episode because he was among those who escaped to Corregidor Island and eluded capture for a short while longer.

“Dad said they were in more of a survival mode at that point,” Rael said. “They would barter with locals for food and shelter.”

But eventually DeHerrera and his comrades were run to ground by the Japanese.

“He and a small group of men were found hiding in a bunker,” Rael said. She said one of the Japanese soldiers took everything out of her father’s pockets, threw it on the ground and dared him to pick it up.

“But he knew that if he did, they would kill him.”

Although DeHerrera was not subjected to the infamous Bataan Death March, he and other prisoners endured other forced marches. During one of these, DeHerrera, weakened by malnutrition, collapsed. The fall would have been a death sentence if a Japanese soldier had found him on the ground.

“A man by the name of Angelo Sakelares (Rael is not sure of the spelling of the last name) quickly picked him up and carried him until he was able to regain his strength enough to carry on,” Rael said. “My father calls this man his guardian angel and credits him for saving his life.”

Nightmares and healing

Rael said her father and other prisoners were allotted one cup of rice and two cups of water per day at the Japanese prison camps.

They supplemented that by eating grasshoppers and monkeys. Rael said her father became something of a hero when he discovered the wild spinach he knew from New Mexico growing near the camps and started picking that to add to the meager menu.

DeHerrera has some good memories from his years as a prisoner of war, Rael said. “One, of course, is Sakelares, the man who saved his life. But another is a higher-ranked Japanese soldier who befriended him.

“He doesn’t know why this Japanese soldier, who spoke English, liked him, but they would sit and talk about American movie actors,” Rael said. “This friendship allowed him some freedom to get food and cigarettes for himself and his comrades.”

But the bad memories outweigh the good. He saw a lot of men killed.

During part of his captivity, DeHerrera was forced to work at a textile plant in Manchuria, present-day northeast China. Rael said her father talked about the miserable manner in which the Japanese transported their prisoners from camps to plants or mines.

“The Japanese would stuff as many men as possible into train cars, and they would be in there in filth for days,” she said.

Rael said her dad still has nightmares and actually had a nervous breakdown at one point in his life.

“Even after he got married and had children, we never knew many of his stories,” Rael said. “It wasn’t until his grandchildren were in middle school and high school that he began to talk about his experiences.

“He found that once he began to open up and talk about his time there, his mind and heart would begin to heal a little bit.”

No place like home

He was in Manchuria when World War II ended. Their Japanese captors just turned their prisoners loose and told them to go. Go where?

On Saturday, DeHerrera told this part of the story in his own voice.

“We went from one city to another. I don’t know how many cities,” he said. “There were hundreds of us. We were hungry. We would have eaten anything. But each city we went to, they said, ‘No food. No food.’ Finally, we came to a city and they said, ‘Planes coming tomorrow, bringing food.’”

DeHerrera weighed just 80 pounds when he returned to New Mexico after the war. He spent months in Santa Fe recuperating.

At the Taos fiestas, he ran into 15-year-old Consuelo DeVargas, who was a family member of one of Valdemar’s best friends. He had last seen her before the war, when he was 18 and she was 4.

He married her, and they were together until her death in August 2019.

DeHerrera has eight children, 19 grandchildren, 29 great-grandchildren and three great-great grandchildren with one on they way.

After the war, he worked for the state highway department and the Molycorp Mine and kept his hand in farming, raising a variety of animals, a huge garden and fields of beans and alfalfa.

But he got over his urge to see new places.

“He loved his home in Costilla after the war and never had a desire to leave,” Rael said.

For many years, DeHerrera has attended the Bataan Memorial Death March memorial ceremony each March at the White Sands Missile Range.

Rael said that for the last two years, her dad has been the only Bataan survivor at the memorial march.

But DeHerrera goes. Because there are some things a man never forgets, some things that never should be forgotten.

As noted in the article, DeHerrera's family was uncertain how to spell the last name of the man DeHerrera credits with saving his life. The Journal has since learned the correct spelling and corrected it here.