Gilroy – Leonard Garcia is a dreamer. In 1967 he had a dream he couldn’t shake. He was riding in a military helicopter flying over a hill in Vietnam when the hill gave way to a green jungle that filled Garcia with a feeling he hadn’t felt before. t was a feeling that he had a destiny to fulfill. He had to serve the U.S. military in Vietnam.
So at 17, barely into his senior year at Samuel Ayer High School in Milpitas, he told his parents he wanted to sign up for the military. His father threw on his shoes and immediately drove Garcia to a recruitment center in Oakland.
After a stint in bootcamp at Fort Polk, La., he was given orders to go to Germany. He declined and said he wanted to head to Vietnam. Garcia wasn’t allowed to serve in Vietnam because he wasn’t of age. So he was sent home to Milpitas for a 30-day leave until he turned 18 and then was sent over to the country he had been dreaming about.
“I’ll be damned. When they put me in that helicopter and I went over that hill it was the same as the dream,” Garcia said.
Garcia served for two years. He said he never did figure out why he so strongly felt the need to serve.
But now, 39 years later, Garcia is paying the price for living out his dream. While he was serving, he was exposed to Agent Orange, an herbicide used to kill vegetation that Vietnamese fighters would hide behind. According to the Department of Veteran Affairs, Garcia is 100 percent disabled. He suffers from nerve inflammation on the right side of his body that he said, “feels like someone hitting me with nails all the time.”
He’s also dealing with diabetes and his bones are becoming more and more brittle. On top of this he also suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder.
But Garcia has stopped thinking about himself. It’s not about him anymore. The way he feels, the 56-year-old said, he’s not going to last much longer anyway.
“I lived my life,” Garcia said. “I had a damn good life.”
Lately Garcia has taken up a crusade to make sure that the community doesn’t forget about soldiers fighting in Iraq. He’s afraid they’ll come back home like he did – scared, paranoid and unable to function in regular society.
So Garcia has started spray painting a heart next to resident’s address numbers on the curb to symbolize the hardship (or “heartship”) soldiers are going through. The upper left part of the heart is made up of five blue stars while the rest of the shape is made up of red stripes.
Garcia estimates that he has painted “hundreds” of hearts up and down Welburn Avenue. Most people are open to it, but there are some that say they want nothing to do with it and close the door.
But he doesn’t get upset. On the contrary, he understands people have their own views, and even though he is doing what he feels is right, others don’t have to agree.
Although he chose to go to war he would like to see the soldiers come home.
His feelings, he said, don’t come from a lack of patriotism or support for the troops. What it comes from is a deep dread that these soldiers will end up like him. End up falling into drugs and alcohol just to keep the memories of war at bay.
Garcia has another dream. He closes his eyes when he thinks about it. It’s a dream that his “heartship” stencil will stretch all the way down Welburn and that a demonstration will happen where the residents will come out and hold hands and make a statement that the soldiers are not forgotten.
He doesn’t know if this will ever happen. But he has hope.
As he likes to say, “Dreams do come true sometimes.”
