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Eduardo Berdugo
I was born in San Salvador, El Salvador in the fall of 1952; graduated from high school in 1969, and attended the Catholic University (UCA) where I studied the first two years in an economic degree...view moreI was born in San Salvador, El Salvador in the fall of 1952; graduated from high school in 1969, and attended the Catholic University (UCA) where I studied the first two years in an economic degree. At that time, the Salvadorian civil war was beginning to fuel up, and my family thought it would be safer to [legally] immigrate to America were we arrived in November of 1972. My first job was as the doorman of the building where I used to live in Hollywood, California; I worked the evening shift while attending an English school at Figueroa Street in downtown Los Angeles. At that time America was ending the war in Vietnam, but the “cold war” was at full-fledged.
When I enlisted in the US Army in September of 1973, and did my basic training at Fort Ord,outside Monterey Bay, California. After that, I went to Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama for my military occupational service and trained as a Radar Repairman in the Vulcan and Chaparral missile systems. My permanent duty station was at Bitburg Air Force in the Federal Republic of Germany; I had a short temporary change of duty station to Crete, a Greek island in the Mediterranean for NATO maneuvers. On my second year in the Army, I became a United States Citizen. My honorable discharge came about in September of 1977. It was this type of training and experience that I used to seek employment during the return to my civilian life.
In Los Angeles, California where the mother lode of the aerospace industry was flourishing, I worked for the next thirty-years in various companies at the beginning as an electronic technician and later, as I was promoted through the ranks, as a Quality Engineer. It was during this time that I married with two children, my son Gabriel, who just completed two tours of duty in Iraq and my daughter Christina, who is now rearing her first son. As my employment duties increased, I felt the necessity for more formal training.
Thus, I attended first Moorpark College where I obtained my AA degree in General Liberal Arts and Science and later my BA in Geography from the California State University at Northridge. Presently, I am working on my MS in Engineering Management. It was during these years that I discovered my fondness for writing and found the Gutenberg Project in the Internet where I discovered in the public domain the Michael Zévaco’s novels of The Pardaillan, which were never translated to English.
The compelling story of Pardaillan, which takes place in the middle of the fifteenth century is about the religious wars in France between the Huguenots (French Protestants) and the Catholics, and could easily relate to what happened in the world since then, until now. I am not too sure if the massacre of Saint Bartholomew reached the peak of grotesqueness where millions of people died fighting to officiate the Catholic mass in French rather than Latin. Or, when the Hitler killed millions of Jews because of how they choose to worship God in the ancient way. Let’s not forget the disputes in the six counties in Ulster, or can you tell the difference between the Hutus and Tutsis in the Rwandan Genocide?
And I could go on and on, including citing those terrible slaughters among men, which easily will occur in our near future. For now, however, I hope you will enjoy reading The Pardaillan as much as I do in translating and editing it.view less