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US honors those who fought in Spanish Civil War

SAN FRANCISCO—As Spain shrugs off the last cobwebs of Gen. Francisco Franco's fascist regime 70 years after it hatched amid civil war, Americans are also looking back, honoring their own who fought there and the ideals for which they stood.

The faces of some of the approximately 3,000 men and women who broke American isolationism to volunteer in the 1936-1939 Spanish war look out from the translucent onyx squares of a monument recently inaugurated on this city's touristed Embarcadero.

"I wasn't about to watch another country go to hell," said veteran David Smith, 92, recalling that Italy and Germany were already controlled by Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler when he left the U.S. to join the Jarama front in 1937.
Read entire article at Mercury News