When the Boys Came Home to Santa Fe . . . : World War II: The Hispanos of northern New Mexico drew on a centuries-old heritage to serve in the Philippines.

If atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons to the arsenals of a warring world . . . then the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and Hiroshima.

-- J. Robert Oppenheimer, November, 1945

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Many journalists have passed through northern New Mexico these past few weeks to write about the epochal events that unfolded here 50 years ago. About the brilliant scientists and strong-willed soldiers who gathered at a former boys’ school on an isolated mesa to create a weapon of awesome destructive power. How that weapon helped end a terrible war, but in the process changed the world forever, and not necessarily for the better.

My aim was less ambitious. I just wanted to understand how those historic events changed this unique and lovely part of America--a land of deep blue skies and startling vistas where the oldest European settlements in what is now the United States were first built around the old Spanish colonial city of Santa Fe.

Many descendants of those first Spanish settlers still live in the rural valleys and small towns of northern New Mexico. They call themselves Hispanos, and in many ways they are as different from their urban Mexican American cousins as they are from the many Anglos who have flocked to cities like Santa Fe and Albuquerque in recent years.

Santa Fe is now New Mexico’s state capital and sits about one hour south of here by a modern multilane highway. It is well-nigh impossible for a baby-boomer to imagine just how isolated this place must have been in the early 1940s, when those roads were little more than dirt paths. It was J. Robert Oppenheimer, who had visited the area on vacations from his job teaching physics at UC Berkeley, who proposed Los Alamos as a possible site for the Manhattan Project, the top-secret effort to build the first atomic bomb before Nazi Germany did.

I’ll confess I came here with the preconceptions of a city boy educated in the 1960s, with their idealistic anti-war fervor and budding enthusiasm for protecting the environment. I assumed that most Hispanos did not look back very kindly on the work that Oppenheimer and his scientific colleagues did here--or on the similar work that goes on there to this day, in the massive and modern National Laboratory that sprawls over two neighboring mesas, looking like a college campus with more barbed wire than students.

And, indeed, you’ll find Hispano activists who are critical of the weapons work being done at Los Alamos and the impact the Manhattan Project had on their once-pristine state. But not that many. When most Hispanos discuss World War II and the impact it had in New Mexico, they do not start in 1943 with the Manhattan Project. They start in 1942, a few months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, when the Philippines fell to the forces of Imperial Japan.

When Americans remember those dark days, they recall tragic events like the Bataan death march, a 10-day ordeal in which 76,000 American and Filipino prisoners of war were marched from the Bataan Peninsula, where they had surrendered, to prison camp trains 55 miles away. Already weak and malnourished after four months of fighting with no hope of relief, 10,000 of those prisoners died.

Bataan had a special impact in northern New Mexico because this is where many of those American soldiers came from. Local historians, like Orlando Romero, research librarian at the Museum of New Mexico in Santa Fe, estimate that 2,000 New Mexicans were in the Philippines when the war broke out. Most were members of the 200th and 515th Coast Artillery Regiments, sister units formed from the New Mexico National Guard and stationed in the Philippines largely because so many of their men spoke Spanish, an important second language in that former Spanish colony.

Only about 1,000 of those New Mexico soldiers returned home after the war, according to Romero, most of them having spent two or three years as prisoners of war. The names of their fallen comrades are carved on a monument near the state capitol.

“Before you write about how Hispanos feel about the war, you have to look at that monument,” Romero told me. So I did, and found that it lists more Garcias than Smiths and fewer Joneses than Martinezes.

Romero was right. More than anything else I saw or heard here, that monument helped this urban Chicano understand why our Hispano brothers bear little if any anger toward the scientists and soldiers who came here so long ago and made Los Alamos forever synonymous with the atomic bomb and all the terrible things it represents.