Our Fathers in Bayamón

By Cristóbal S. Berry-Cabán

On October 29, 2026, my brother Carlos and I gathered with our lifelong friends, Buenaventura Ruiz and John Vargas, at the Puerto Rico National Cemetery in Bayamón. We had traveled from across the country to reach these grounds: Carlos from the Tampa area, Buenaventura from upstate New York, John from Los Angeles, and I from Southern Pines, North Carolina. What began as a solemn visit to a sacred site quickly deepened into an experience far more profound than an ordinary pilgrimage. Standing beneath the quiet morning sky, looking down the disciplined rows of white headstones rising against the green hills, we found ourselves walking through the living history of our own families. We had come not only to honor the dead, but to trace the lineage of ordinary men summoned to extraordinary duty, and to reflect on the enduring cost of liberty.

Our first stop brought us to a modest marker nestled in the quiet grass, bearing the names of our parents: Charles W. Berry and his beloved wife, our mother, Maria de Lourdes Cabán. My father lived a life defined by patriotism, discipline, and quiet fortitude. His military journey began aboard naval stations in Brazil during World War II. Following the war, he transitioned into the Army Air Forces, the historic predecessor of today’s United States Air Force. His assignments eventually carried him to Puerto Rico during the Korean War, and later throughout the continental United States and Spain during the Vietnam conflict. In all, he served across three distinct wars and two military branches, embodying a lifetime of devotion to country and family. He passed away on May 19, 2010, and now rests alongside Lourdes, whose steadfast support anchored our family through the uncertainties of military life. Their shared resting place remains a quiet monument to a marriage rooted in love and sustained by service.

Nearby lie two of our uncles, Robert “Bob” Furster and Tío René (Santiago René Cabán), both of whom answered their country’s call during critical junctures of the twentieth century. Walking farther through the morning dew, we stood before the grave of Buenaventura’s father, a distinguished colonel in the United States Army Reserve who served during both the Korean and Vietnam wars before passing away on May 20, 2005.

For John, the cemetery held a particularly heavy, hallowed meaning. His father, Technical Sergeant Juan A. Maldonado, was the very first among our circle of families to be laid to rest on these grounds. On January 17, 1969, while deployed during the Vietnam War, Sergeant Maldonado was killed in action in Laos. His absence cast a long, lingering shadow over John’s childhood, a stark, painful testament to the ultimate price paid not only by those who perish in combat, but by the widows, children, and communities left behind to carry their memories forward.

Standing side by side, Carlos, Buenaventura, John, and I recognized that these stones did not merely mark the burial sites of our fathers, uncles, and mentors. They represented individual chapters of an overarching American saga. Each marker recorded a life lived, a family loved, and a duty discharged.

The tradition of national military cemeteries is deeply woven into the American fabric, tracing its roots to the bloodstained battlefields of the Civil War. Prior to the establishment of a formal national cemetery system, soldiers who fell in battle were often buried in hasty, unmarked trenches, shallow churchyard plots, or near overflowing field hospitals. Bereaved families rarely had the means to recover or identify their loved ones. Confronting the unimaginable loss of hundreds of thousands of soldiers, President Abraham Lincoln and the United States Congress recognized the republic’s sacred moral obligation to provide permanent, dignified resting places for those who perished in uniform.

On July 17, 1862, Congress passed landmark legislation authorizing the creation of national cemeteries. By the conclusion of the war, roughly thirty had been established. Over time, these grounds expanded from Civil War burial sites into national sanctuaries of remembrance, honoring veterans of every conflict that followed.

The Puerto Rico National Cemetery in Bayamón holds a distinctive place within this heritage. Following the close of World War II, a 108-acre parcel of land formerly managed by the United States Navy was transferred to the Army to establish the island’s first national cemetery. Officially dedicated on Veterans Day in 1949, the site was born out of an urgent need to honor the tens of thousands of Puerto Rican service members who answered the call to arms during World War II, fighting across Europe, the Pacific, and North Africa. In the decades since, Bayamón has served as the final sanctuary for generations of Boricua veterans, standing as a permanent testament to the island’s proud, outsized legacy of military contribution.

Yet as we four stood together that afternoon, our conversations inevitably turned toward how that legacy of service had shaped our own lives. We were not merely sons looking backward; we, too, were men whose paths had been charted by the military environment in which we were raised.

My brother Carlos followed directly in the footsteps of the fallen, dedicating twenty-two years of his life to active duty in the United States Army. He completed seven combat deployments across the globe, retiring as a full colonel.

Buenaventura also served, earning his Navigator-Bombardier wings as a second lieutenant and completing Air Force assignments in Texas, New York, and at Clark Air Base in the Philippines. He later joined a United States Army Reserve medical unit, providing essential care to underserved communities on humanitarian missions across Latin America before deploying to Camp Bucca, Iraq. He retired as a captain.

John’s career as an accomplished actor and filmmaker explored American servicemen’s hardships, sacrifices, and resilience. In the acclaimed The Hanoi Hilton (1987), he played Oliviera, a composite of Everett Alvarez Jr. and other American POWs held in Hanoi. Alvarez, my friend from the Washington, D.C., area, was the first American aviator shot down over North Vietnam and spent more than eight years in captivity. John also starred in Last Stand at Lang Mei (1989), depicting fierce Vietnam War combat, and played Nando alongside John Ritter and Alfre Woodard in Unnatural Causes (1986), highlighting Agent Orange’s devastating, lasting effects on veterans and their families. Though he never wore the nation’s uniform, his work honored those who served and preserved their brotherhood, sacrifices, and struggles for wider audiences.

My own contribution unfolded across two decades as an epidemiologist and Department of Defense civilian employee at Womack Army Medical Center. Throughout the height of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, I witnessed Womack evolve from a modest regional military hospital into a world-class trauma and medical system. Working alongside clinical teams, I saw firsthand the staggering human costs of modern warfare: young men and women returning with catastrophic wounds, the tireless efforts of military medicine to restore broken bodies, and the quiet dignity of families who kept vigil beside hospital beds.

In that cemetery in Bayamón, all of these divergent paths converged. The wars our fathers fought, the battlefields my brother navigated, the stories John illuminated on screen, and the wounded warriors I cared for in clinical corridors formed a single, unbroken continuum. We realized that military service is rarely an isolated act; it is a shared inheritance that shapes families, influences worldviews, and establishes bonds of friendship capable of enduring across decades.

Every November 11, our nation pauses to commemorate Veterans Day. Originally celebrated as Armistice Day to mark the cessation of hostilities along the Western Front at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918, it remains distinct from Memorial Day. While Memorial Day honors those who made the supreme sacrifice in military service, Veterans Day celebrates every man and woman who has honorably worn the uniform of the United States Armed Forces, in peacetime and in war.

True remembrance, however, cannot be confined to an annual holiday. It must be an everyday civic posture. It demands that we remember the military families: the spouses who ran households alone, the parents who held their breath through months of silence, and the children who spent birthdays waiting for a deployment to end. It asks us to look after the veterans who returned bearing invisible wounds of mind and spirit, and to safeguard the memories of those who never returned at all.

As Carlos, Buenaventura, John, and I turned to leave the quiet cemetery of Bayamón, the sun began casting long shadows across the rows of gravestones. We departed with heavy hearts, but with an abiding sense of gratitude and purpose. Some of the men and women resting beneath the soil of Puerto Rico gave their tomorrows so that we might have our today. Their names, etched in stone, are permanently woven into the history of our nation. May we live in such a way that honors their service, cherishes their sacrifice, and ensures their legacy is never forgotten.

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Cristóbal S. Berry-Cabán, PhD, is the son of Charles W. Berry and brings more than 30 years of experience in military health research. He retired as an epidemiologist at Womack Army Medical Center, Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where his research focused on health outcomes, military readiness, behavioral health, and preventive medicine. He currently resides in Southern Pines, North Carolina.

As the Voice of the Veteran Community, The Havok Journal seeks to publish a variety of perspectives on a number of sensitive subjects. Unless specifically noted otherwise, nothing we publish is an official point of view of The Havok Journal or any part of the U.S. government.