All posts tagged: Filipino-Americans

The Battlefield of Dreams – Part 2

Published by

This is the continuation of a story I did in 2008 while I was a Yuchengo media fellow at the University of San Francisco-Center for the Pacific Rim. Some information may have already been superseded by more recent data. But hey, read on. After the two-month boot camp, enlistees with a college diploma are elevated to a rank three steps higher than the lowest. But sweeter than the rank is the bonus. Dancel and Edmilao, now both stationed at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, received a $12,000 bonus when they got out of training. Edmilao is also using his tuition assistance privilege to study environmental management at the University of Maryland. He already has an economics degree from the De La Salle University in Manila, but the educational benefit available to military personnel was too good to pass up. “I plan to be an officer,” says Edmilao, 28, who wants to maximize all the military benefits here but retire in the Philippines. George Barreto, a retired Marine, has also recently obtained a master’s degree …

The Battlefield of Dreams – Part 1

Published by

I did this story in 2008 while I was a Yuchengo media fellow at the University of San Francisco-Center for the Pacific Rim. Some information may have already been superseded by more recent happenings. But it’s still a good read, methinks. San Francisco – They were told, sometime during their entry into the U.S. Navy, that a corpsman’s life in the battlefield lasted only about 10 seconds during World Wars I and II, and the Vietnam War. Navy corpsmen, the equivalent of the Army’s medic, were often the first targets of the enemy because in their hands lay the fate of wounded troops. “During a gunfight, there would always be two men standing guard with the corpsman. We are not allowed to fire our weapons unless in defense,” says Joshua Dancel, a Filipino-American who has completed a seven-month tour of duty in Fallujah, Iraq, one of the most chaotic cities when the U.S. troops first advanced into Saddam Hussein’s turf. “Our work is to stabilize patients until their medical evacuation to the shock-trauma platoon. The …