NEW MEXICO (KRQE) – The New Mexico Department of Veterans’ Services honored a World War II veteran for his service and his 100th birthday on Memorial Day.
Sylvestre Sisneros was born in New Mexico in 1925 and joined the Navy in 1943, where he navigated a ship with more than 1,000 soldiers on board during a mission in the South Pacific.
“We were in the liberation of the Philippines. We were bombed,” Sisneros explained. “Suicide planes. They put two bombs in our ship, and a lot of people got killed.”
The flight deck was on fire, as well as the hangar below, which carried their arsenal of torpedoes and bombs. Specialists removed the fuses, then a group of soldiers, including Sisneros, tossed them in the sea so they wouldn’t explode on board.
Around 100 people were badly injured, and fifteen were killed, including two men Sisneros knew from home.
“He came back and actually recognized two New Mexicans who didn’t come home, and he made sure that they were honored sixty years later for their families to understand what happened to them,” said Cabinet Secretary Jamison Herrera with the New Mexico Department of Veterans’ Services.
The department gave Sisneros a plaque commemorating all of his hard work to make sure his fellow sailors killed in the line of duty were not forgotten.
Sisneros also had to deal with a monster typhoon in the South Pacific with winds reaching up to 80 miles per hour. His ship almost capsized several times, the gun mounts were torn off, and all of the planes were blown off the carrier. But he didn’t lose any sailors.
