Editor’s note: This is the third installment in a series throughout the month of November highlighting veterans’ experiences. “Freedom is not free,” said Jess Villegas, a Korean War veteran, referring to a motto he and his fellow soldiers repeated during the war. Villegas, 79, grew up in a citrus-growing, Mexican-American community outside of Riverside where he worked in the orange fields after finishing ninth grade. “Most of us — about 70 percent of us — went into the service,” he said. “We didn’t say, ‘Hell no, we won’t go.’ We went to serve our country because our country needed it.” In April 1950, he joined the California Army National Guard. By September, when Villegas was just 18 years old, the entire division from San Diego to Santa Maria was activated for duty. He recalled the harsh, wintry conditions of Korea when he was stationed there in 1951. He and his fellow soldiers, he said, got each other through the difficult elements. “Because you live with death every day, you never know when your time was up being an infantryman,” he said. “We all were a band of brothers. Anybody would give you the last scoop of his C-ration if you asked for it.” As a California-bred soldier, Villegas was shocked by the biting cold, which still affects some of the nerves in his fingers and legs today. “If you’re from New York, you understand what snow is, but some of the guys from back East used to laugh at me because a lot of the guys came from New England, the Midwest and the Pacific Northwest, so they were used to it,” he said, adding that at about 130 pounds, he was quite thin — but still had to wear 40 pounds of clothing in addition to carrying his rifle and ammunition around his waist. Then there was the enemy to contend with. “Anyone who tells you he wasn’t scared is not telling you the truth,” he said. “I was frightened.” Villegas said the nature of the conflicts gave American troops the impression that the Chinese soldiers they fought lived lives that “didn’t mean anything to them” — not unlike the kamikaze pilots in WWII and suicide bombers in the Middle East. “It was not unusual for them to attack an outpost of ours with a company, and no matter how many died, it didn’t matter to them,” he said. “We Americans fight to live and they fight to die. That’s the difference between our systems of government. In our country, life means a lot.” Villegas recalls the moment he returned to American soil after being away for 17 months. “Nothing feels better or more wonderful than when you come into San Francisco Bay and you see the Golden Gate,” he said. “We got into San Francisco at about 9 o’clock in the morning and we didn’t get off the ship until 9 o’clock at night. There were several hundred of us on the ship and there were no bands for us, no cheering, no nothing. We just got off the buses and they took us to the separating centers.” He took the Greyhound bus back home to Riverside, “a beautiful sight” he said, and into the welcoming arms of his family. “My mother came running out and she hugged me,” he said. “After I got rested up after all the hugs and kisses and everything, my mother took me to church, and I had to [walk] on my knees from the street to the altar with her, because she promised we would do that.” Consistent with the motto recited by Villegas and others in his outfit, many of his friends did not come back. “That’s the price of freedom,” he said. Villegas continued to work for the U.S. military as a civilian airplane mechanic and technician for 14 years. He and his wife raised three children, all the while emphasizing the importance of education — a value that his father instilled in him at a young age. “My dad used to tell me, ‘Everything you want to know comes out of books,’” he said. “I always put a lot of emphasis on education. That’s the only way you’re going to get anywhere.” He said he is grateful his country gave him so much, particularly the opportunity to expand his knowledge base through an education. “When I see these young people enjoying life in this country, at one time I was a little bitter when I came back because I could not get a job because I didn’t have the necessary marketable skills,” he said. “But where do you get those skills from? You go to school. My country was good enough to send me to school and pay me to go to school, so I went half the time to school and managed to get a vocational high school diploma.” He furthered his education at National University to become an industrial engineering tech before retiring. Since Villegas’ wife passed away in 1998 and his children have grown up, he travels around California and volunteers 12 hours per week at the San Diego VA Medical Center. “I wanted to give my country back what it gave me. I think I owed it to my country to do that. It’s fun. This is our second family here,” he said. “I’m glad that I served my country. I can hold my head high and know that I belong to an elite group that not everybody can belong to. I am so glad to be an American, and I’ll never forget that.”