Record Business
The Crossroads looks forward to the Fourth of July with a long weekend, fireworks, barbecue, and family on the porch. But we also gather to honor a decision made in 1776 by a few dozen farmers, lawyers, and merchants who put their names to a Declaration and dared a king to do something about it.
That story is true, but incomplete. The independence we celebrate was declared by Americans, but it was won shoulder- to-shoulder with foreigners in search of a better life.
When George Washington's army was freezing and coming apart at Valley Forge, the man who created a disciplined fighting force was a Prussian, Baron von Steuben, who wrote the training manual the Army relied on for decades. The teenager from France who served without pay, being wounded at Brandywine, was the Marquis de Lafayette. The cavalry that screened American movements was built by a Pole, Casimir Pulaski, who died of wounds suffered at Savannah. The fortifications at Saratoga and West Point were engineered by another, Thaddeus Kościuszko. A German baron, Johann de Kalb, fell at Camden. And the pamphlet that put the case for independence into language any farmer could read, 'Common Sense,' was written by Thomas Paine, who stepped off a boat from England a little over a year before.
These men were not bystanders to our founding. They helped author it and win it, under arms, before there was a country to be a citizen of.
The pattern never broke. Immigrants and the sons of immigrants made up more than 40 percent of the Union Army that held the nation together. Since the Medal of Honor was created in 1861, more than 700 recipients, roughly one in five, were born in other countries. The newest Americans have always carried a disproportionate share of the load, and of the cost.
One of them was a Texan. Macario García was born in Coahuila, Mexico, in 1920. His family crossed into Texas as farm workers and settled near Sugar Land, where he picked cotton instead of finishing school. He was working at a local ranch when the draft found him in 1942. He was not an American citizen. He went anyway.
García landed at Utah Beach on D-Day, was wounded, spent four months recovering, and rejoined his unit pushing into Germany. On November 27, 1944, in the Hürtgen Forest, his company was pinned down by machine-gun fire and pounded by artillery. García, wounded in the shoulder and foot, refused to be evacuated. He crawled forward alone, wiped out two enemy machine- gun nests, killed six German soldiers, took four prisoners, and kept fighting until his company seized its objective. President Truman placed the Medal of Honor around his neck at the White House in August 1945.
Macario García became an American citizen on June 25, 1947. He had earned the nation's highest decoration for valor almost two years before his country formally counted him as one of its own. Soon after coming home a hero, he was refused service at a Texas restaurant because he was Mexican. He then spent 25 years as a counselor at the Veterans Administration in Houston, helping other veterans carry what they brought back. A Houston street, an Army Reserve center, and area schools bear his name today. His Medal of Honor is kept at the Capitol in Austin.
I wore the uniform for 10 years, deploying twice. On my first combat deployment, going 'outside the wire' to investigate roadside bombs before and after detonation, I was always with an Iraqi interpreter. He had immigrated to the United States after the Persian Gulf War. He did not have to go to war; he chose to go. His name is Allen, and he spent years helping American soldiers communicate with local Iraqis. There was no glory in it for him, and he never sought any. He wanted to help his adopted country win the war.
When the fireworks go up over Texas, remember the freedom we celebrate was secured, from the very beginning, alongside foreign-born patriots. Some were not yet citizens, some crossed an ocean to become one, and some never asked to be thanked for any of it. Macario García defended this nation before it called him a citizen. That is not a footnote to the Fourth of July. That is the Fourth of July.
Joe Olive, CFP, MPS, is a 10-year Air Force veteran who works as a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER with Sather Financial Group, a fee-only strategic planning and investment management firm. He holds a master's degree from Columbia University.
