Remember The Alamo Read Free

tables were piled high with food and kegs of
beer. Although the official start of spring was more than a
month off, here in South Texas winter was already dead and
gone. The sunshine that washed over the landscape this Saturday was warm, as were the breezes from the south.
    Given the circumstances good food, good fellowship,
good weather-the atmosphere should have been happier. Instead, a pall hung over the gathering. Maybe they should have
canceled the picnic, Dieter Schmidt thought, after the bloodbath on the border.
    That was what people had started calling the brutal slaying
of the eight Border Patrolmen a few days earlier. They had
been out on a routine patrol, looking for illegals crossing the
border, when someone had come along and massacred them.
Nobody knew exactly what had happened. A piece of a garbled radio transmission from one of the patrolmen had gotten
through, but it didn't provide any answers.

    Just gunshots, screams-and a voice shouting, "Reconquistar!"
    "To reconquer" was the word's literal meaning, but what the
hell did that mean? Dieter didn't know. All he knew was that
the talk around the picnic tables was quieter than it should
have been, and there wasn't as much laughter, and even though
the kids ran and played, their folks kept a closer eye on them
than usual.
    They weren't that far from the border here. Less than thirty
miles, in fact.
    Mike Belkowicz came over and sat down next to Dieter.
With his campaign cap, medal-decorated vest, and beer gut,
Belkowicz looked like a walking cliche of a VFW member. He
had been in Vietnam, and his father had fought in the Italian
campaign and then left a leg on Utah Beach on June 6, 1944.
    Belko-"Not Bilko, damn it, I hated that show" had taken
a while to warm up to Dieter. At first he had wondered if it might
have been Dieter's grandfather manning the machine gun that
ripped away the elder Belkowicz's leg on D-day. He didn't like
the idea of a Kraut being in the VFW, even though Dieter had
done a tour of duty in Baghdad and Fallujah.
    Dieter had explained to him, though, that his grandfather
Alfred Schmidt had been a house painter in Chicago during
World War II and hadn't been anywhere near Utah Beach. He
had moved his family to Texas after the war, and Dieter had
been born in Waxahachie, where he had grown up, played high
school football, climbed the local water tower, and gotten a
shy, studious girl named Beth knocked up just as if his name
had been John Smith or Jimmy Williams.
    Once Belko had understood all that, he had accepted Dieter
as an American, although he had warned him, "I'm a Polack,
and I ain't ever gonna be too fond o' Krauts ""
    Now Belko popped the top on a can of beer he'd gotten from one of the coolers and said, "That wouldn't'a happened
if they'd built the damn fence like they were supposed to ""

    "You mean what happened to those Border Patrolmen?"
Dieter asked.
    Belko took a swig of beer. "What the hell could I be talkin'
about? They should've built the damn fence"
    A law had been passed several years earlier authorizing
the construction of a fence along sections of the border between the United States and Mexico. Quite a bit of it would
have been here in Texas.
    But although a few short sections of fence had been erected,
the rest of the project was stalled out at the moment because
of economic and political considerations. In other words, there
wasn't enough money to pay for it, and not as many politicians
in Washington thought it was a good idea anymore.
    "Even with the fence, illegals would still cross the border,"
Dieter said. "The Border Patrol would still be out there"
    "You don't know that. They put up a big enough, long
enough fence, and line it with cameras, that'll keep the illegals
out" Belko took another drink. "A few land mines wouldn't
hurt anything, either."
    "You don't mean that. You're just upset because those men
were killed."
    "Yeah, well, this country could use a few more