08/24/2026
He spent his last leave in Hawaii with his wife. Two days after she got home to Indiana, Marines knocked on her door.
Emilio Albert De La Garza Jr. was 20 years old.
He grew up in East Chicago, Indiana, in the shadow of the steel mills. His father, Emilio Sr., was a Mexican-American who served in the U.S. Army during World War II. Emilio Jr. graduated from E.C. Washington High School in 1968, married his high school sweetheart Rosemary Rejon, and went to work at Inland Steel in Indiana Harbor — the same road generations of Mexican-American families in the Calumet region had walked before him.
They married right out of high school. They had no money and no honeymoon.
On February 4, 1969, he enlisted in the Marine Corps in Chicago.
He trained at San Diego and Camp Pendleton and landed in Vietnam on July 25, 1969. By February 1, 1970 he had been promoted to Lance Corporal and joined Company E, 2nd Battalion, 1st Marines — a machine gunner, working about four miles south of Da Nang.
In April 1970 he got a short leave. He and Rosemary spent it in Hawaii. It was the honeymoon they never had. Their baby daughter, Renee, had been sick, so she stayed behind in East Chicago with her grandparents.
Then he went back.
On the morning of April 11, 1970, his squad was returning from a night ambush operation when two enemy soldiers were spotted running for cover toward a small pond. Emilio went with his platoon commander and one other Marine to find them.
He found one of them hiding in the reeds.
The three Marines waded in and tried to pull the man out of the water. He resisted. And in that moment, Emilio saw him pull the pin on a gr***de.
He shouted a warning and put his own body between that gr***de and the two Marines standing beside him.
They lived. He did not.
Two days after Rosemary landed back in Indiana, the Marines came to the door.
On September 9, 1971, his family stood in the White House as Vice President Spiro Agnew presented the Medal of Honor in his name. Renee was not yet two years old. She grew up on stories instead — stories of a father whose last act, in a muddy pond outside Da Nang, was making sure two other men got to go home to their families.
But the story didn't end there.
Decades later, a Navy corpsman named Sammy Lyles came across a message online asking whether anyone had served with Emilio De La Garza. Lyles had been the corpsman on that patrol. He answered it. In 2011 he traveled up from Alabama to stand with Emilio's family at a memorial ceremony in Indiana and tell them, at last, exactly what happened that morning. Renee said it helped mend her heart.
And in November 2025 — fifty-five years after he died — East Chicago finally dedicated the Emilio De La Garza Jr. Veterans Wall Memorial. His widow stood there and said it was unfortunate it took that long, and beautiful to finally see.
He is buried in Hammond, Indiana. An American Legion post and a college campus in East Chicago carry his name.
Emilio A. De La Garza Jr. — East Chicago's son. 1949–1970.
He stepped in front of the blast so his brothers wouldn't have to. 🇲🇽🇺🇸
