The Man Who Would Not Die

As a sublieutenant under Pancho Villa in 1913, Pedro Gomez took slugs in his stomach and in one leg, was left to die after a skirmish in which government forces routed Villa. Before he could die however, he was jerked to his feet in front of a firing squad. The bullets which crashed into his chest merely knocked him down. A sergeant's coup de grace only nicked his ear. The sergeant's cursing captain seized the pistol and sent a .38 bullet into Gomez' head at the hairline--but late that night Gomez still lived.

Friends found him and carried him back to Villa's headquarters, where a carpenter made a blue cross to put on his grave when he died. Pancho Villa himself told the painter that the lettering on the cross should read, "Lieut. Colonel Pedro Gomez." Two weeks later, far from dead and hoping to see his sweetheart, Gomez was railroading in a gondola car with some of Villa's dynamiters. One of them accidentally touched off a fuse and the car blew up. The only survivor: Gomez.

Last week, grey and gnarled and living on the charity of friends, Gomez, now 61, appeared in Mexico City and demanded that the Defense Department give him a lieutenant colonel's pay of 1,000 pesos a month. The department refused, on the grounds that Gomez was a finger officer, i.e., an officer who got his rank when Villa pointed a finger and said, "You are a colonel." Replied Gomez with dignity: "I won my rank the hard way... A man such as I, who has died, at least has the right to eat daily." But at week's end, he was still eating by the charity of his friends.

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