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Bushmasters

Two generations of Arizona fighters on the front lines. Modern Bushmasters are linked to a battalion's storied past.

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In his office at the Arizona National Guard headquarters in Phoenix, Col. Alberto C. Gonzalez pulls a worn document from his desk drawer. The years-old discharge papers show the history of his late grandfather’s service from 1920 to 1923 as a member of the Arizona National Guard unit most commonly known as the Bushmasters.

Other bits of Bushmasters history fill the room. On the wall hangs a World War II Bushmasters shoulder patch with its insignia of the namesake deadly jungle snake coiled around a machete. A large Bushmasters sign from a 1988 dedication ceremony greets visitors when they enter.   

For Gonzalez, the memorabilia are more than just pieces of military history. Gonzalez turned to the storied past of the Bushmasters for inspiration as he helped ‘stand up’ the unit when it was once again called into active duty in 2006.

Gonzalez, 42, served as commander of this latest incarnation of the Bushmasters during a 12-month tour of duty in Afghanistan. The unit returned in late March.

With over 600 Arizona soldiers represented in the 1^st Battalion, 158^th Infantry Regiment, this was the largest single-unit deployment of the Arizona National Guard since World War II. When the Bushmasters were last deployed in 1941, they were one of the most ethnically diverse regiments of the war with many Arizona Latinos and Native American members and earned fame as a hard-scrabble group whose training in jungle warfare proved formidable against Japanese tactics.

Other than military history buffs, civilians rarely know much about the history of the Bushmasters, says Major Paul Aguirre, a spokesman for the Arizona National Guard. And few know what an important role the Bushmasters played in the history of Latinos in the military.

Pete Dimas, who included interviews with former Bushmasters from Phoenix in his 2007 DVD Los Veteranos, argues that Latinos who served during World War II and earned many awards and decorations for their heroism demanded social change and fought against discrimination when they returned home.

“They had confidence. They had already faced death so why would they be afraid? They came back and put that confidence to use,” Dimas explains.

How they earned their fame 

The history of the Bushmasters begins before statehood when the volunteer military group was organized and mustered into federal service in 1865 as the 1^st Arizona Volunteer Infantry. Since then, the Bushmasters have gone through several different names and reconfigurations. In the late 1800s, the Arizona National Guard, 1st Infantry Regiment were part of the National Guard troops to respond after Pancho Villa’s raid of Columbus, New Mexico in 1916. In World War I, it was reorganized as 158^th Infantry, 40^th Infantry Division.

It was during World War II that the 158^th Infantry Regiment earned recognition and respect as one of the most diverse regiments to serve. About 30 percent of the soldiers who fought with the 158^th during World War II were of Mexican heritage and 22 Native American tribes were represented in the group.

Anthony Arthur delves into the World War II history of the group in his 1987 book, Bushmasters – America’s Jungle Warriors of World War II. He writes that the “Indians and Mexican-Americans who had survived the Depression for the last ten years on their reservations and in their barrios hadn’t known an iguana from a mango six months earlier. But they knew about staying alive, and they transferred their skills to the jungle easily – or at least without apparent strain.”

In Dimas’ DVD, the late Phoenix resident and World War II veteran David Perez, who enlisted in the Guard in 1939, recalled how the 158^th got its nickname when it was deployed to Panama for training in jungle warfare.  Perez remembers the poisonous bushmaster snake from which the group took its name as being “very aggressive. It doesn’t give you too much time to pray before you’re gone,” he recounts in the film.

 A year of intense training in the jungles of Panama led to three years of combat until the return home at the end of the war in January 1946.

During that service, the Bushmasters are well-known for earning praise from General Douglas MacArthur, who said of the group, “No greater fighting combat team has ever deployed for battle.”