Victor Berrios went to school one day. Into the army the next.
It wasn’t his choice.
The El Salvador army picked up Berrios on his way to school, forcing the 16-year-old into battle.
“The army wait for students, they have a truck, they just put you in the truck,” Berrios said. “Next day, nobody hear from you, nothing.”
Berrios was forced to fight in El Salvador’s civil war that lasted 12 years, killing 75,000 civilians and ripping apart the Central America country.
“They started to control the business, destroy the electricity, make holes in the street,” Berrios said. “The government sent the army, that’s how it started. The guerilla people live in the jungle, the army go look for them. It was very bad.”
Berrios remembers 200 kids in his platoon, if you could call it that. Ten survived. Berrios was lucky, if you can call it that.
He was in charge of radio transmission, he was in the middle, rather than in the front line of the government’s attacks. The ones in the front waded into the jungle to fight the guerillas that had reorganized in the jungle, setting traps, ambushing untrained kids like tin cans in a shooting gallery.
“I heard him crying,” Berrios said of one such kid. “I put him in my arms, try to take him out to the helicopter. I walk maybe six minutes from the jungle. In one second, I know he’s nothing, I feel his arms go to nothing. He die in my arms. Two bullets in his stomach. I put him down. I feel weak. I feel weak.”
Berrios managed to escape the army and escape El Salvador, a country ravaged by the war and its aftermath of forlorn children, fatherless, motherless, falling into gangs and falling into more violence.
“When the war finished, there were a lot of kids without a father, without a mother, they started gangs,” Berrios said. “Just kids. It was a bad life. Very bad in El Salvador. Very bad, very bad.”
Berrios’ dad booked his son on a plane to California, he had a friend there. It was 1984.
As the El Salvadoran refugees gathered before leaving their long-lost country, Berrios met Nora Martinez. She was escaping, too, to New York, where she had a sister. She gave him her number. He didn’t have a pen, didn’t write it down. Landing in San Francisco, without a job, without a plan, Berrios was lost, couldn’t find work. He thought of the girl, the number.
“I remember it,” Berrios said. “Well, some of it.”
Berrios started dialing what he remembered, adlibbing for the numbers he couldn’t remember. He figures it took him 50 calls. Fifty calls to get through to Martinez’s sister in New York. She answered, put Nora on the phone.
“No estoy hacienda nada en San Francisco,” Berrios said.
“Hablare con mi Hermana,” Martinez said.
“I’m not doing nothing in San Francisco.”
“I’ll talk to my sister.”
Berrios booked a ticket from California to New York, arriving in the snow. Martinez’s sister was babysitting for a man who worked at Belmont Park.
“You want to work?” he asked Berrios.
Berrios slogged through the snow and through the Belmont stable gate the next morning. Salvation. He landed a job walking horses for Mary Cotter, a week later he was grooming for Frank Martin.
“I was very happy to see the horses,” Berrios said. “I worked with horses in El Salvador. Not racing horses, just farm horses. I liked the horses. I like it. I love it.”
Berrios learned to rub horses for Martin before moving to P.G. Johnson’s barn. The Hall of Fame trainer sent Berrios to his lawyer, helped him to become legal in America. After Johnson’s stable wound down, Berrios worked for Del Carroll and Martinez babysat Carroll’s children. Eventually, Berrios and Martinez teamed up with Johnson’s longtime assistant, John Hertler.
Married along the way, Berrios and Martinez have two sons and a daughter and two grandsons. The couple still works at the track, you can find them at Hertler’s barn every day. Upbeat and smiling. Always upbeat and smiling. He works as Hertler’s assistant, she walks horses for Hertler. Down on horses these days, Hertler made sure Berrios had security, encouraging his longtime employee, his longtime friend, to work for NYTHA.
Berrios works from 5-7 every morning for Hertler, carrying a clipboard, smiling and making sure everything goes smoothly. He works for NYTHA the rest of the day, dealing with rooms and stalls and making trips to the racing office and rec hall.
“Whatever they need,” Berrios said.
Berrios has most of his family with him in America. One brother works as assistant for Tom Bush, another one works for John Kimmel. Two nephews work with horses. His daughter works for NYTHA at Aqueduct. His mother lives here.
“I go back to my country 25 years later to visit, it was better, but I don’t like it,” Berrios said. “This is the American dream. The American dream.”
