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Montebello Vet Killed 40 Years Ago, Still Waits for Final Resting Spot
Group honors former journalist killed in Vietnam as they reflect on their own war experiences.

Elizabeth Hsing-Huei Chou
EGP Staff Writer

Reporter Raul Guerra went to Vietnam as a Navy journalist in 1967 to tell the story of the war and the people serving in it.

Before he was able to file his first report to his hometown paper, he was killed in a plane crash, his body recovered and returned 40 years later.

As part of Memorial Day remembrances, Guerra’s friends are comparing notes so that they can finally tell his story.

They hope that renewed attention to Guerra will replenish the journalism scholarship fund setup soon after his death. Also, friends want to hold a military burial for Guerra’s remains, but are being told his body is on a waiting list because of the Iraq war.

When he got to Vietnam, Guerra decided he would write a feature story on aerial combat for the Montebello News where he had been a sports editor and story contributor. On October 8, 1967, he was out collecting first-hand information when the reconnaissance plane he was taking with two other officers crashed into a mountain peak near Da Nang Province.

The mountainous terrain prevented the military from getting to the crash site to recover their bodies, but it was determined that they could not have survived. Guerra’s friends and family mourned his death without the benefit of seeing his body interred or a clear understanding of what happened.

“The fact that there was no body coming home… I think that added to our pain,” says Mary Barrow, who went by her maiden name Somelrott at the time. She had been engaged to Guerra before he was called to Vietnam.

She says Guerra was devoted to his chosen profession. “He was a promising journalist – he would have been a great journalist had he lived, had he come back from Vietnam,” she says.
The two had been rival editor-in-chiefs at their respective high school’s newspapers–Guerra was at Montebello High, and Barrow was at Garfield High. They both dominated journalism competitions throughout high school, but their paths did not cross until they both sought out the same scholarship at East Los Angeles College.

“Both of us could have used that $100… when it was all said and done, they couldn’t decide between the two of us,” she said. ELAC split the pot down the middle, giving each enough to continue their education.

In the years since his death, Guerra’s friends often kept him in mind when reading the newspapers.

Gena Valencia, the daughter of his childhood friend, grew up hearing stories about her father’s best man and considers Guerra the “uncle I never had.”

The stories were reminders of her own father’s experience serving as a Marine in the 3rd battalion 5th unit in the Vietnam War. They have inspired her to become her father’s advocate in getting veterans’ benefits and to help him come to terms with the war.

So when she came upon Guerra’s picture, accompanied by news about the recovery of his remains in the newspaper, she immediately called her father.

“I should have told him to sit down. There was dead silence,” she said.

The call from his daughter forced 65-year-old Ruben Valencia to face difficult memories he thought he had shelved away.

“Just knowing that they could not get him out of there to bring him back—it just killed me. It killed his mom,” he said, “Not only was it the experience of Vietnam, but it was losing my best friend over there.”

Guerra’s mother Margaret Pavloff died a few years back.

Guerra and Valencia had a lot in common when they met in the 5th grade at Eastmont Elementary. Guerra had just come to the United States from Ensenada. Valencia had just transferred from another school. Both were raised by single mothers.

“It sort of felt like we were brothers to each other,” he said. Valencia admired Guerra’s intelligence from the beginning. Even though Guerra had just immigrated, “he picked up English quickly like it was nothing,” he says.

The two continued playing sports together and backing one another up if someone picked a fight with one of them, but started going their separate ways as they got older.

In high school, Valencia spent his afternoons working, getting a fulltime job after graduation. Meanwhile, Guerra participated in numerous extra-curricular activities, including serving as the editor-in-chief of Montebello High School’s student newspaper the Derrick Diary. He went on to East Los Angeles College where he wrote and edited for the Campus News.

The draft turned the lives of young people, many fresh out of high school or college and just starting their lives, upside down.

“Our lives changed so drastically,” Valencia says. He had married his girlfriend Emily just six months before getting drafted. Guerra was his best man at the wedding.

Fighting in the Vietnam War forced Valencia to quickly toughen up. Within the span of two months, he was promoted twice – first to lance corporal, then to corporal. Guerra was writing and editing at the Montebello News at the time and would document Valencia’s many advancements.

“He would write to me and say he wished he could trade places with me,” Valencia says. Guerra was technically exempt from the draft because he was in college, he says.

He remembers telling Guerra, “You stay where you are. You don’t have to get nosy about stuff.”

But Guerra always wanted to go where things were happening. “If we heard a siren, he always wanted to go see what was going on,” Valencia said, “I was always the more cautious one.”

After Guerra’s remains were brought back, Valencia was shaken by the revelation that Guerra’s plane had gone down near Chu Lai where his Marine unit had been stationed.

“I think he was following the path that I took,” he says.

For forty years he did not want to relive the Vietnam war. “I know now that I needed to relive it,” he says. He now volunteers at veterans’ hospitals where he hopes to give younger veterans comfort through telling about his experiences. It was not a benefit he had when he first got out of combat, Valencia says.

The needs of Vietnam veterans should not be ignored, even though the country is preoccupied with the Iraq war, he says. He would like to see Guerra buried in Arlington cemetery by next year.

“He was a human being. He needs to be treated as a human being,” says Valencia