Garcia survived land mine, POW camp and worked until he was 80
By Edmund Tijerina - Express-News
Lying in the snow in France, Rudolph Garcia watched as a German soldier approached with a bayonet. He prayed his life would be spared, promising that if he lived, he would spend the rest of his life working.
Garcia survived that encounter and, later, a prisoner of war camp. He worked until he was 80.
Garcia, a one-time mechanic at the San Antonio Express-News, died Friday morning of cancer. He was 83.
He joined the Army in the later years of World War II, and went from his hometown of Corpus Christi to the vast European continent.
While on patrol one day, he set off a land mine and the shrapnel tore into his body. Bleeding in the snow in France, he watched the bayonet-wielding German soldier approach.
"He played possum," remembered a daughter, Sylvia Garcia Croley. "He told me, 'I promised God that I would work until the day I died.' That's what he did. He worked."
Although he avoided death that day, he didn't avoid capture. He was taken to a prisoner of war camp in western Germany, where he was held in a horse barn with French and American soldiers.
His leg became infested with maggots. A French soldier told him not to remove them because they would help save his leg. The soldier was right.
When the prisoners were liberated, Garcia was taken to a hospital in Germany and then transferred to one in France. He recovered from his wounds and soon returned home to Corpus Christi.
In 1959, he was hired as an aircraft mechanic at Kelly AFB. The family bought a house on the South Side, where they have lived ever since.
He worked for some 30 years at Kelly, and after retiring joined the Express-News. While there, he struck up a friendship with the sports columnist Dan Cook, who asked him to fix a car that he had wrecked after hitting a deer.
Garcia fixed the car and Cook gave it to him. The Garcia family still has that Chevrolet Caprice.
After the newspaper, Garcia went to work for Kerrville Coach Co., and stayed there until he could no longer do the physical work, about three years ago.
After being diagnosed with cancer, he went to the hospital for treatment and then to a rehabilitation facility. When he would wear his POW/MIA cap, people would stop in the hallways and salute him.
"When he had that cap on, he was a person from another era," Croley said, "an era that people still respect."
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