A Marine Comes Home : For 26 years, Joe Trujillo’s friends, family wondered if he’d return from Vietnam. The agony of waiting is over, but questions linger about the sergeant’s complex life.

When Margaret Wilmott heard last week that remains repatriated by the Vietnamese had been identified as those of Marine Sgt. Joseph F. Trujillo, she wasn’t sure how to react.

Long after Trujillo was reported missing in action 26 years ago, Wilmott had clung to the fragile hope that the young man she regarded almost as an older brother had somehow survived.

“I have a lot of mixed feelings about it,” Wilmott, 44, says. “I feel happy, I feel sad. You have to go through the whole grieving process again.”

Wilmott, who met Trujillo when they attended high school in the southwestern New Mexico town of Deming, last saw him in December, 1965, when he took a three-week leave after boot camp. He has seldom been far from her thoughts.

“He left a lot of memories,” she says. “He was a special guy.”

Trujillo is one of 319 Americans listed as missing in Southeast Asia who have been accounted for since the war’s end. The agony of uncertainty continues for the relatives and friends of 2,264 others still missing.

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Only 20 when he died, Joe Trujillo had seen his share of pain and disappointment.

He’d been adopted by a couple in northern New Mexico when he was 3, sent to a reform school at 13 and placed with a variety of guardians as a teen-ager. When he lived in Deming, he never discussed his childhood, says Wilmott.

“I asked him one time, and he said, ‘When you suffer, it’s best to leave it behind and give it a chance,’ ” she says.

It was in the Marine Corps that Trujillo found a sense of identity that might have been lacking elsewhere in his life.

“He was proud,” Wilmott says. “He belonged to something. He loved to belong.”

After he shipped out for Vietnam in January, 1966, Trujillo wrote often and sent pictures, but his letters didn’t dwell on the horror of war. “He was the type who didn’t like you to worry about things,” Wilmott says.

Trujillo had been in country nearly nine months. Then on Sept. 3, 1966, he was undergoing forward observer training with soldiers from the 1st Battalion of the 1st Marine Division in Quang Nam Province when the enemy detonated a land mine by remote control.

The injured were evacuated; Trujillo was initially thought to be among them, but it turned out he’d been left behind. A search found no trace of him, leading the military to list him as missing in action. In 1978, the Marine Corps declared him dead.

U.S. officials now believe that Vietnamese villagers buried Trujillo.

His remains were turned over to the United States on June 1 as part of a joint U.S.-Vietnamese search program and sent to the Army Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii, where they were identified. A casket carrying the remains was flown to Travis Air Force Base, near Sacramento, last week; interment is pending.

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The recent news about Trujillo came as a shock to Elfego Lopez, a 23-year-old resident of Tome, N.M., who has worn a silver MIA bracelet engraved with Trujillo’s name for five years. He has never removed the bracelet, even during his own stint in the Marine Corps, from boot camp to Operation Desert Storm.

“I can’t tell you the feeling I went through,” says Lopez. “Wearing the bracelet is like wearing the cross. Every time you glance at it, you remember this guy who did something for you, who gave his life for his country.”

Now that questions about Trujillo’s death have been resolved, it is ironic that aspects of his life remain unclear.

When Lopez sought out Trujillo’s next of kin so he could send them his bracelet (as is customary when MIAs are identified), he learned that Trujillo had both an adoptive mother and a foster father.

Lopez, an unemployment insurance processor for the New Mexico Department of Labor, wants to do the right thing.

“I’m just trying to return it to the proper person,” he says. “I’m trying not to hurt anybody in the process.”

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According to military records, Trujillo was born July 29, 1946. He was adopted through an agency at age 3 by Luis and Juanita Trujillo, says Marina Montes, a second cousin and Juanita’s goddaughter.

The middle-aged couple had Joe Trujillo baptized a Catholic and took him home to the small village of La Puebla, about eight miles east of Espanola, where they lived in an adobe house near the Santa Cruz River, Montes says.

“He was a happy-go-lucky kind of kid,” Montes recalls. “Juanita loved him very, very much.”

Luis Trujillo died 14 years ago. Juanita Trujillo, 93 and in frail condition, lives in an Espanola nursing home, where she receives Joe Trujillo’s military survivor’s benefits. She keeps his picture in her room, says Montes, who spoke on Juanita Trujillo’s behalf.

Kids knew Joe Trujillo by his middle name, Florencio, says Eduardo Vigil, 42, a distant relative.

Vigil remembers an idyllic time in the late 1950s when he and the older boys swam in the river and played in the orchards of the mostly Latino farming community, nestled in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

But when Trujillo was 13, he got into trouble. Several kids broke into a house and stole food, recalls Montes. Trujillo took the blame for the others and was sent to the New Mexico Boys School in Springer.

After his release in September, 1962, he went to live with Arvil (Bert) Hunter; his wife, Mary Ann, and their children on their ranch in Miami, N.M., 12 miles east of Springer.

Hunter, who worked at the boys school, says Trujillo asked if he could stay with the family. The arrangement was worked out with the approval of a probation officer in Santa Fe, he recalls.

“He didn’t have any place to go, and he was eligible for release,” Hunter says. “He never did mention anything about wanting to go back to Espanola or any relatives or anything. He never had any mail from anyone.”

Trujillo attended Springer High School, where he earned a B average and made the track team. During his junior year, Hunter says, Trujillo stayed for a few months with another ranching couple, Arnold and Mildred Sturdy, both of whom have since died.

In the fall of 1964, as his final year in high school approached, Trujillo moved to Deming to live with William Drummond, a former supervisor at the boys school who had found a job teaching junior high school math.

Drummond, who runs a small upholstery business out of his Austin, Tex., home, says he took in the youth after a judge in Santa Fe made him Trujillo’s guardian. Trujillo had been badly treated at home and had run away, he says.

Montes takes issue with Drummond’s account. She doubts that Trujillo was abused as a child, although she concedes that his adoptive parents were probably old-fashioned disciplinarians. She points out that Juanita Trujillo visited him at the boys school and says that he corresponded with Juanita and visited after his release. He continued to write to Juanita after he was sent to Vietnam, Montes says.

But Drummond says Trujillo did not talk about his family. By this time, Joe, as he was known in Deming, had made some changes in his life. Drummond says Trujillo became a Protestant and changed his middle name to Felix.

“He was the type of son most parents dream about,” says Drummond.

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Trujillo is remembered by Deming contemporaries as a popular teen-ager who made the wrestling and track teams and who was popular with the girls.

“At one time he had nine girlfriends,” Margaret Wilmott says with a laugh. She recalls meeting Trujillo during the first week of her sophomore year, when she flung open her locker, hitting him.

He started kidding her, and when he learned that she had no older siblings, he appointed himself her big brother. Trujillo was a stickler for good grades and always encouraged her to do her best in school, she recalls.

“He touched a lot of people’s lives around here,” she says. “He was very, very proud of his foster father (Drummond), and he thought he was the greatest father in the world.”

Trujillo took the big brother role seriously, screening Wilmott’s potential dates--none of whom met his standards, she says. He even introduced her to her husband-to-be, Robert Wilmott, a Marine buddy he met during post-boot camp training at Camp Pendleton.

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For those who knew and cared about Joe Trujillo, the decades since he was reported missing have been filled with uncertainty tempered by hope. Now there can be healing.

“He’s been in our minds a lot,” says Wilmott, whose son Jeffrey also wears Trujillo’s MIA bracelet and has Joseph for a middle name. “My husband always felt like if he hadn’t been separated from him (while in Vietnam), he wouldn’t have allowed it to happen.”

Meanwhile, in northern New Mexico, Juanita Trujillo is “happy to know they found his remains,” says Montes, who brought the news to Juanita at the nursing home. “She wanted to know when he was going to be buried.”

Vigil, Trujillo’s cousin, says: “Florencio has been on my mind every time I see an MIA flag flying. . . . Now it’s finally, finally closed.”

In Austin, Drummond says he has known for several months that the remains might be Trujillo’s because a team of military experts visited him to discuss the dental and anthropological data they had used to make the identification.

He has asked that Joe Trujillo be buried Dec. 11 in Arlington National Cemetery, in Virginia.

When Trujillo was reported missing, “I was devastated,” Drummond says. He had little hope Trujillo was alive because military officials “felt in the beginning there was no way he could have survived.”

Now that the waiting is over, Drummond ponders what to do with the letters and mementos he has kept packed away.

“To be honest,” he says, “I haven’t had the courage to go look.”