E-mail a friendSgt. Juan Luis Alcivar
airdate April 23, 2009
Earlier this month, Sgt. Juan Luis Alcivar was sworn in as a citizen of the United States, four years after joining the U.S. Army. Born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New York, he was attending college and working four jobs when he had the urge to sign up to protect and defend his adopted country. A member of the 19 Delta Cavalry Scout unit, the 25-year-old was shot in the leg by sniper fire outside Baghdad and has since received the Purple Heart.
St. Alcivar talks about moving to America and the decision to join the U.S. Army. (1:26)
Full interview. (9:47)
Sgt. Juan Luis Alcivar
Tavis: Sergeant Juan Luis Alcivar joined the U.S. Army back in 2005 despite the fact that the Dominican-born New Yorker was not a U.S. citizen. In 2007 he was shot and wounded in Iraq and awarded the Purple Heart.
On April 10th, at a ceremony at the Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington, he was sworn in as a U.S. citizen by Homeland Secretary Janet Napolitano. Shortly after that ceremony I spoke with Sergeant Alcivar about his inspiring story.
Tavis: Sergeant Alcivar, glad to have you on the program, sir.
Sergeant Juan Luis Alcivar: Thank you very much, sir.
Tavis: So does it feel different on this side of being a U.S. citizen, or you pretty much feel the same? (Laughs)
Alcivar: I feel a little bit different, feel a little bit different. Everybody treats me a little bit more different. My comrades make a little bit more fun of me now, so it's good.
Tavis: Your nickname is AC. They call you AC. Why?
Alcivar: (Laughs) They call me AC - it's short for "air conditioner." At the time, my first Sergeant Lynch (sp), he couldn't pronounce my last name, which is Alcivar, and he went ahead and just called me into the office. He called me Air Conditioner, and from then on it's just stuck with me. (Laughter) Since 2005.
Tavis: So Air Conditioner gets shortened to AC.
Alcivar: I told everybody, "Just call me AC for short, please - no more Air Conditioner."
Tavis: See, that's one thing about the American way. Being a citizen, you've figured out now we like to short-circuit everything. (Laughter) So you end up being - you go from Alcivar to Air Conditioner to AC. Anyway, I'll call you Sergeant Alcivar for the rest of this conversation.
Tell me about your background and how you come to join the Army without being a U.S. citizen. How did that happen for you? Tell me your back story.
Alcivar: Basically I was born in the Dominican Republic, moved to the United States, to New York City, the Bronx, when I was five years old. From there, I was raised until I was 14, moved upstate New York, went to college up in Hudson Valley Community College.
After that, couldn't afford to go to school anymore. I worked six jobs and from there decided, you know what? I saw a lot of the guys doing - just joining the Army, doing their part, and I've been here for 20 years. I felt more American - I'm not trying to say I felt more American than Dominican, but I felt I was part of this country and I owed this country a lot, that I decided to join.
And when I joined, I decided to pick up the MOS of 19 Delta Cavalry Scout, which is a combat arms. And from there just started my military career. Joined in 2005, went to Iraq in 2006 and got hurt, and I'm here at Walter Reed and now I'm a U.S. citizen.
Tavis: I want to talk about your injury in just a second. First, though, I want to get a better understanding of what it is that you felt you owed the country. By your own admission, you felt like you were a part of this, you felt like you belonged to the nation and wanted to do your part. You felt like you owed the nation something.
I'm trying to understand what it was you felt like you owed, given that you were in a country where you couldn't afford to finish your own education, but you felt like you owed this country something. What do you mean by that?
Alcivar: I was here for 20 years. I've been through the school system and my family struggled and all that through the whole time we've been here. But for some reason, just being here and just with all the friends I've made, all the people that I've met, I cannot just stand aside and just let this go by, let this war just go by and be like, you know what? I'm not American, this is not my war, I shouldn't fight.
After college and everything I just said, "You know what? I think this is the right time for me to join," and I did.
Tavis: Was there a particular reason for the Army as opposed to the other armed services?
Alcivar: Actually, I did want to - at first I wanted to join the Air Force, and after talking with them and everything it was fine and all. The Air Force is a great branch, but I don't know, just - I really wanted to be in combat arms. I wanted to actually be in there and be helping out.
To me, I think combat arms was the way for me to go. I couldn't just do any support, I couldn't do - and God bless them, we do need support and everything. But to me, I wanted to be out there searching for IDs, kicking in doors, doing the full nine.
Tavis: So that combat arms, as you might put it, doing the full nine, puts you in harm's way and you end up, in fact, being harmed. Tell me about your injury and how that happened.
Alcivar: Basically I was six months into my deployment. We had a little patrol base over in southern Baghdad, a town called al-Jabor, and it was a Friday afternoon. We had to go do mosque monitoring. Mosque is what they would call their church. So usually they would have a speaker and they would yell out what they needed to put out for the church, and at times they would put out negative slander towards the military, like, "Kill military," anything like that.
So we're going down there and we're going to go check it. Once we get done, we're coming back towards the town, and in the middle of the town, and usually it's about 3:00 in the afternoon, the sun is bright out, and there's actually a school right next to it, and there's no little kids out there.
Usually we know we're safe when we have little kids come towards us and have little kids outside, and for some reason there was no kids. It was a Friday afternoon, bright as day, and nobody was outside. So we knew something was going to happen.
We're marching down, we get down to about 600 meters away from our patrol base, and there's a bridge and we were searching the bridge for IEDs because we found three there before.
So we go ahead and start searching for it. I'm in the rear, pulling security. I'm kneeling down. About, like, two minutes pass while they're still searching, and I hear this pop. And as soon as I hear this shot I feel this burning in my leg, and then I just - like it just was instantly, I was down on the ground, looking up. And I'm like, "What just happened?"
And from there I realized that my leg was shattered, my femur was shattered, and I was in the line of fire. And my platoon sergeant at the time, he came over and he actually grabbed me and dragged me out of the line of fire, and they called up the humvees, they put me in the humvees, took me back to the patrol base, called the choppers, and put me in a chopper and sent me on my way.
Tavis: What actually happened to your leg and what condition is it in now at Walter Reed?
Alcivar: Basically what happened, the shot went through the back of my thigh, came in, shattered my femur, and ricocheted up my thigh. And actually, the bullet is still stuck in there at this point. I have a rod replacing my whole femur because my femur was just shattered into about, like, what was it - four pieces. So they couldn't put it back together.
So they went ahead and took it out, replaced it with a rod, and I've got a screw in my hip. All that was done in Germany and at Walter Reed, and right now I'm actually pretty good. I can walk on my own a little bit. I still walk with a limp, but it's getting better where hopefully in the next couple months I'll be able to lightly - lightly job.
Tavis: So two quick questions and I'll let you go - number one, you won't be on the front line of duty anymore in terms of combat, the thing that made you want to get in in the first place -
Alcivar: We don't know that.
Tavis: All right. (Laughs)
Alcivar: We don't know that yet.
Tavis: I stand checked and corrected. So is that your hope? Would you like to get back out there again, even after this incident?
Alcivar: Seriously, (laughs) I don't see myself doing anything else. I don't mind being out there. It was just one incident, it just happened one time. It could happen again, it might not. To me, I enjoyed being out there. It's a great experience. To me, it was a great experience for me and I would do it again in a heartbeat.
Even if you tell me that I would have gotten shot in the leg, I would do it in a heartbeat.
Tavis: Well, to heck with my last question. (Laughs) You're not going to play me again on national television. (Laughter) I'm not going to set myself up for another one.
His name is Sergeant Juan Luis Alcivar. I know when to get out. Sergeant, an honor to have you on. All the best to you for a full and speedy recovery. And whatever you want to do in the Army, I hope you find a way to do it. I'm honored to have you on the program.
Alcivar: Thank you very much, sir, and I'm honored for you to have me on your program.
Tavis: Thank you very much.
You might be surprised to learn that there are nearly 20,000 foreign-born non-U.S. citizens currently serving in the U.S. military. Many hope to follow in Sergeant Alcivar's footsteps and eventually become U.S. citizens.
Back to April 23, 2009