AUSTIN Texas Land Commissioner and Veterans Land Board (VLB) Chairwoman Dr. Dawn Buckingham introduced the next installment of the series highlighting the VLB’s Voices of Veterans oral history program. This week, they highlight the service of JO1 Cindy Alvarez who served in U.S. Navy.
Alvarez was born in El Paso and when asked about her parents, took a moment to talk about her father, Daniel Alvarez, who served during WWII.
“He’s a WWII hero, he fought at the Bloody Rapido, which he survived,” she said, adding she was doing a dissertation on his Company at the University of North Texas, at the time of this interview.
Alvarez said she joined the United States Navy in 1981 at 26 years old and did so with a college degree in journalism in hand from the University of Texas at El Paso. Alvarez said when she joined the Navy, she had no intention of going in as an officer even though that’s what the recruiters wanted.
“The recruiters tried to make me be an officer, they told me you can make money, you can do this, and I told them that’s fine, that’s dandy but can I write, will they allow me to write? Will I get to a journalist? They told me no and I told them I don’t want to be an officer,” Alvarez explained.
Alvarez said she was sent to the Recruit Transfer Center in Orlando, Florida for boot camp. She said the bus they sent picked her up at 4:30 in the morning. She will never forget that morning, when her dad blessed her with the cross before she left.
“The last thing I remember was my father blessing me, and I just cried the all the way to Orlando,” Alvarez recalled about that day. “I cried and I cried, and as I cried I just kept asking myself what have I done, why am I leaving everything and every one I love?”
Alvarez said while boot camp wasn’t long, the real adjustment came with how she was yelled at, something she didn’t have experience with growing up. Following boot camp, Alvarez said she was selected to go to Defense Information School at Fort Benjamin Harrison in Indiana.
“It was a very hard and competitive school to get into and so, when I went through journalism there, then I went through radio broadcasting, then TV broadcasting,” Alvarez said about her first stop after boot camp. “I remember asking how long I was going to be there because my entire Navy career up to that point was two years in school.”
Alvarez said her first duty station was in Puerto Rico as a radio broadcaster, hosting her own radio show. When Alvarez was in Newport, Rhode Island, she worked as a reporter for the Newport Navalog, where she would take pictures and write about sporting events, local events and whatever else the editor told her to cover. From there, she said her orders were to go to Roda, Spain where she would be an assistant editor for the base newspaper.
“I loved Roda, Spain, that was my favorite, favorite duty station,” she said emphatically, as her voiced trailed off remembering her time there. “I would have loved to have stayed there.”
Alvarez said she did a lot of different jobs while there, from writing to filling in on the radio from time to time.
“It was so much fun, so much fun,” she said. “When I was in Spain, I would also work a lot with Community Relations, so I was a liaison, I was an education training officer for the Naval Broadcasting Detachment. I was also the postal clerk and I would pick up the mail, I had a blast, I had a blast.”
Alvarez, for as much fun as she was having, left the Navy in 1986 because bigger things were on the horizon for her with the Naval Investigative Service (NIS), which she began a year later, in 1987.
“It was November of 1986 and I got a call from NIS telling me they wanted to bring me on and so I got to choose where I wanted to go,” Alvarez explained. “I chose Great Lakes, Illinois and I started with them February 2, 1987 as a Federal Agent.”
Alvarez said she worked all sorts of cases as an agent with NIS, now known as NCIS, from undercover work to general crimes, the position ran the gamut.
“As an agent you conduct criminal investigations, so I worked foreign counter intelligence, I did undercover, I worked Foreign Object Debris (FOD), they sent me as a liaison to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network Department of Treasury in Virginia,” Alvarez explained.
“In general crimes, I did everything in general crimes, I worked narcotics, suicides, death scenes but my expertise in general crimes was sex abuse, child abuse and domestic violence.”
Alvarez shared she was also at The Pentagon the day 9/11 happened, shocking the heartbeat of America and the world.
“There were 11 NIS Agents that responded immediately after The Pentagon was hit and I was one of them,” she said. “We stayed for about a month and a half and helped clear rubble, obtained everything we had to obtain, made sure it was clean before we returned the building back to the Department of Defense.”
Click here to listen to JO1 Cindy Alvarez tell her story.
