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<img src="https://cdn.kahimyang.com/resources-13/jesse-balazar-and-barack-obama-sm.webp" alt="Jesse Baltazar meeting President Barack Obama at the White House on Veterans Day 2013" loading="lazy" />
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(Jesse Baltazar meeting President Barack Obama at the White House on Veterans Day 2013)
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Mr. Baltazar retired from the Air Force in 1966 at the rank of major.  He was a 21-year-old student at the American Far Eastern School of Aviation in Manila when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.
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The next day, the Japanese attacked the Philippines, then a U.S. protectorate, and Jesse swiftly joined the U.S. Armed Forces of the Far East (USAFFE), under the command of General Douglas MacArthur. More than 70 years later - a delay attributed to lost military records - he received the Purple Heart.
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Baltazar participated in the battle on the Bataan peninsula in the Philippines. "We had no uniforms, no weapons," he later recalled of his ROTC unit. 
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"The first casualty happened to be my schoolmate. He stepped on a hand grenade and died in my arms on the way to the hospital."
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Jesse Baltazar was wounded in the leg during a bombing in March 1942. He endured surgery in the jungle and had not fully recovered when he and his comrades surrendered to the Japanese on April 9, 1942.
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The Japanese forced 76,000 Americans and Filipinos, Jesse among them, on a 66-mile trek that became known as the Bataan Death March. Ten thousand or more prisoners died. The survivors lived on minimal food and water, sometimes drinking from rice paddies contaminated with disease. Jesse witnessed the beyoneting or beheading of his comrades.
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At one point, he fell to the ground, and a guard struck him with a rifle. "I'm going to die," he thought to himself, according to an account in State Magazine.
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But on the third night of the march,  he attempted an escape and made his way home, aided by fishermen who rowed him through swamps.
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He later participated in the Philippine resistance movement. After the war, he settled in the United States and joined the Air Force, serving principally in the Office of Special Investigations.
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A polyglot, he was stationed in Korea during the war there and questioned Korean and Chinese refugees. In West Germany, he used his knowledge of Russian to gather intelligence from Soviet emigres.
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April 12, 2016: Jesse Baltazar, first Filipino-born officer of the U.S. Air Force, died of cancer