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Lenny Kravitz’s Hero Uncle and Other Lesser Known American Heroes

Khalid Elhassan August 18, 2020 35 min

American Revolutionary War - United States — The British surrender at Yorktown. Library of Congress

31. The Forgotten Hero

WWI hero Marcelino Serna was Texas’ most decorated soldier – and America’s most overlooked hero – of that conflict. He was also an illegal immigrant, born into a dirt-poor family in Chihuahua, Mexico, in 1896. He only enlisted in the US Army to avoid getting deported back to Mexico.

When he was twenty, Serna had decided to seek a brighter future north of the border. He crossed the Rio Grande in 1916, and made it to El Paso, Texas. Speaking no English, all he could manage were a series of low-paying jobs. So he left the Lone Star Republic, and headed to Colorado, where he found a better paying gig picking sugar beets near Denver. It was backbreaking work, but the pay was better than anything he had encountered before, so he kept at it.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.