U.S. Army Pacific on Thursday presented three community members with its Mana o ke Koa awards, one of them posthumously.

It was the first in-person ceremony for the annual award since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, with the 2020 and 2021 recipients recognized alongside this year’s honoree.

Since 2007 the Army has given the award to community members who have bridged the gap between local communities and Army troops and families serving in the Pacific region. Retired Gens. David Bramlett and Robert Lee received the 2022 and 2021 awards, respectively, while the 2020 award went to the late Domingo Los Banos, a prominent Hawaii educator and World War II veteran who died in 2019 at the age of 93.

With tears in his eyes, Roberto Los Banos accepted the award on his father’s behalf from U.S. Army Pacific commander Gen. Charles Flynn during the ceremony at Fort Shafter.

“We are just proud of Dad. He left a huge legacy for us, and I was there when he took his last breath. And to that day he loves his community, he loved this nation,” Los Banos said.

Domingo Los Banos was born in Wahiawa, one of five brothers who served in the Army. After attending the University of Hawaii for a year, he dropped out and enlisted in the Army. He was sent to the Philippines at age 19 alongside 300 other recruits from Hawaii as part of the 1st and 2nd Filipino Infantry Regiments.

“His exploits during the war are legendary, facing Japanese soldiers in harsh jungle combat,” Flynn told attendees at Thursday’s ceremony. “He made himself a promise and a promise to God that if he survived he would become a teacher.”

After returning home from the war, Los Banos continued his education and became a teacher. He would serve more than three decades in Hawaii’s public education system, eventually becoming the state’s first Filipino principal and the Department of Education superintendent for Leeward Oahu.

He was also a tireless advocate for Filipino veterans.

“He was relentless in making their stories known. His heart’s desire was to educate others on their sacrifice and the love these men had for the United States and to make it right, what was promised to them for their service,” said Roberto Los Banos. “(At) the very end of our dad’s life, he campaigned for the Philippine infantry, and those other Filipinos that served under MacArthur, too.”

When World War II broke out, the Philippines was a U.S. colony. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Gen. Douglas MacArthur called on Filipinos to fight the Japanese under the promise they would be recognized as U.S. Army veterans. But in 1946, Congress passed the Rescission Act, which stripped veteran status and citizenship from Filipino troops who fought under American command.

Lee, former commander of the Hawaii National Guard and onetime superintendent of nuclear regional maintenance at the Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard, recalled working with Los Banos on Filipino veterans issues. Lee also has been involved in efforts to give nisei and Chinese American veterans from Hawaii their proper due.

“We have a bit of unfinished business,” he said, telling attendees at the ceremony that he is continuing efforts to get Congress to repeal the Rescission Act similarly to the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act.

Bramlett, who serves as board president of the USO, turned attention toward the post-Sept. 11, 2001, conflicts and the toll they have taken on the most recent generations of veterans.

“Our country has never faced what our soldiers, their families and their community faces,” he said. “The last 20 years they have faced continuous war, protracted conflict. We’ve had general war, limited war, Cold War, (but) we have never had continuous war.”

Despite the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan in 2021, troops continue to deploy to war zones in Iraq and Syria, and in May, President Joe Biden deployed U.S. troops back to Somalia.

In January the Hawaii National Guard announced it was expecting to send troops on a deployment somewhere in the Middle East in 2023.