OPINION: Always remember: New Mexico's greatest heroes deserve it

We scroll past wars now on social media while standing in line for coffee. The men of the New Mexico 200th Coast Artillery did not have that luxury.

Most Americans know Dec. 7, 1941, as the day that launched the United States into World War II. Fewer know that on Dec. 8, just hours after the Pearl Harbor attack, Japanese bombers appeared over Clark Field in the Philippines. Meeting them was the 200th Coast Artillery Regiment of the New Mexico National Guard. It the first American unit to engage the enemy in the Pacific. First to fire. First to fight. New Mexicans, from our streets, our valleys, our small towns.

My father, Agapito E. Silva, of San Marcial, was one of them. He survived Bataan, Corregidor and more than three years in Japanese prisoner-of-war camps — coal mines ringed by electric fences, hell ships, starvation, malaria. He carried shrapnel in his thigh until the day he died. He never gave up hope, he said, because the men who gave up hope never made it home.

For four months, the soldiers of the 200th and its sister unit, the 515th, held the Bataan Peninsula against a relentless enemy, desperately undersupplied. No reinforcements. They shot down 86 confirmed enemy aircraft and bought precious time with their lives.

April 9, 1942, is also a date we should never forget. That is the day Bataan fell. The day our boys, having held the line against impossible odds, were ordered to lay down their arms. What followed was the Death March: 65 miles under a killing sun. Of the roughly 1,800 New Mexico men who deployed, fewer than 900 made it home. Within a year, a third of those survivors were gone too, their bodies broken.

They are all gone now. But not forgotten — not while the New Mexico Bataan-Corregidor Memorial Foundation draws breath.

This Saturday, April 4 — days before the 84th anniversary of that terrible April 9 — we will gather at Bataan Memorial Park in Albuquerque for our annual ceremony. The ceremony begins at noon. It is free, and the event matters more this year than I can easily express.

Look around us. Wars are burning on multiple continents. American troops are in harm's way. Our nation is fractured along lines so sharp they seem designed to wound. It is tempting to look away.

But that is exactly what we cannot afford. Not when we have these men as our example.

The soldiers of the 200th came from every walk of New Mexico life — Hispanic families with deep roots, anglo ranchers, Pueblo men who answered a call to defend a country that had not always treated them justly. They did not agree on everything. They did not have to. Unity was not a slogan for them. It was survival.

Heroes are hard to come by today. The word has been stretched thin. The men of the 200th were the real deal — no camera crews, no highlight reels, just youth from Gallup, Clovis, Las Cruces, holding a line at the edge of the world because someone had to.

Their legacy lives on in their descendants. Many will be at the park on Saturday. Come, stand beside us, so our elders know they are not forgotten.

Our foundation's motto is simple: “Always Remember, Never Forget.” In times like these, it is not just a memorial pledge — but a civic obligation. The greatest generation did not look away. They showed up.

We can, at the very least, show up for them.

Agapito J. Silva is the president of the New Mexico Bataan-Corregidor Memorial Foundation