The Green Beret who went on a one-man rampage, Roy Benavidez, the Vietnam War.:O
Roy Benavidez's life had been rough as a child, both his parents had died.:(
He was bullied by his classmates because of his mixed Yaqui Indian and Mexican heritage:(
And had to leave school in eighth grade to help his family.>:O
At the age of 19, Benavidez joined the army serving in the Korean War in the Texas Army National Guard.
He married Hilaria Coy Benavidez in 1959.
He completed Airborne training becoming assigned to the 82nd Airborne Division.
In 1966, Sgt. Roy Benavidez was in hospital after stepping on a landmine,
Doctors said he would never walk again.
He had been sent to Vietnam in 1965 as an advisor for the ARVN troops there.
Benavidez was carrying out a classified operation alone to gather evidence that the North Vietnamese troops were posing as VietCong.
While he was on patrol along a narrow trail disguised as a Vietcong guerrilla, he stepped on a landmine.
Sometime later, a squad of Marines came across Benavidez,
They initially thought it was a booby trap, but were surprised when they flipped him over and discovered.
The man in Vietcong pajamas was Hispanic and wearing US Army dog tags, He was soon evacuated to the hospital.
In hospital in the US, 2 months later,
Benavides had recovered and awoke, his memories came back to him, the doctor told him he would never walk again.
His spine had been damaged and his brain had rattled in his skull.
Nevertheless, Benavidez sitting in his wheelchair begged to the doctors not to discharge him from the Army, The Army was his life.
Determined, Benavides got up from his bed night after night dragging himself to the wall and putting weight on his legs.
For weeks, he pushed through the pain going further in distance than before, which surprised the doctors.
6 months later, with his wife Walla's support, Roy Benavidez walked out of the hospital.
He was promised only a desk job at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, but determined and exercising every day,
He trained vigorously and qualified for the Special Forces also known as the Green Berets, he would be assigned to detachment 'B56', 5th Special Forces Group Airborne, 1st Special Forces.
SIX HOURS IN HELL
Now it was 1968.
Staff Sergeant Roy Benavidez now with a codename "Tango-Mike-Mike" was back in Vietnam,
And was off-duty attending church.
His mind was fixed on the panicking radio chatter from the frontlines, in Nihn Binh, Vietnam near the Cambodian border.
A 12 man Special Forces reconnaissance team, which included his close friends.
SFC. Leroy Right, SSgt. Lloyd Frenchy Musso,
Specialist (4) Brian O'Connor, and 9 Montana Yard
Tribesmen who are part of the civilian irregular defense group program or CIDG were surrounded by a battalion numbering
1,000 battle-hardened North Vietnamese soldiers.
Everyone in the unit had been wounded or killed in earlier fighting, the three of the helicopters sent to rescue them had been unable to extract them due to heavy enemy fire.
When the helicopters returned, they were riddled with bullets, one of them, the door gunner "Michael Craig," aged 19, had been hit several times and died in Benavidezs's arms.
There was no way Benavidez was going to leave his friends out of the jungle.
Benavidez jumped onto a returning helicopter that was going back in, volunteering so quickly that he didn't have time to get his M16,
So was only armed with a bowie knife and medical supplies.
Benavidez described it as "Going into autopilot."
As he was approaching the extraction zone,
Benavidez realized his fellow team members were too severely wounded to run the distance to the helicopter.
There was so much enemy gunfire that the pilot "Larry McKibben" had to zigzag in an attempt to dodge it who was nevertheless able to provide covering fire.
Benavidez jumped out with a medical bag, ran through the jungle to the wounded men under heavy enemy fire,
Taking a shot to the leg which he initially thought was a thorn bush.
He found himself first against a tree whose eyeball had been shot out was hanging down his cheek, (:O)
But was determined to keep shooting back. The CIDG were in a pool of blood and patched up as best they could.
Benavidez has dragged everyone into a defensive position to direct their fire at the enemy, and provided morphine to the wounded.
He then saw O'Connor and an interpreter CIDG who he motioned them to move over to him, but the gunfire started again,
And they took cover.
Another round then hit Benavidez in his thigh, on adrenaline
He popped the green smoke for McKibben in the rescue helicopter to pick them up, while everyone who could move got into the chopper,
He suppressed the treeline with an AK-47 he had picked up, to cover O'Connor and the interpreter who crawled towards the helicopter.
Now Benavides was looking for the team leader, SFC. Leroy Wright, who had been killed, and who also had intel on him that could NOT get into enemy hands.
Benavides found his body, and proceeded to drag him to the chopper,
When he was shot again, this time in the stomach, and hit in the back by shrapnel from a nearby grenade, knocking him out.
When he awoke, Benavides was forced to leave his dead friend's body.(aww)
Disaster had also struck. The chopper had crashed to the ground from enemy fire. The pilot, McKibben was dead.
Five of the men on board including Musso survived the crash, as did O'Connor and the interpreter, who didn't get into the helicopter.
Benavidez pulled them out of the wreckage, dispensed morphine, set up a perimeter around the crash site,
Called in heavy air support from the F-100's above, the truck napalm on the enemy position.
When the Jets ran out of fuel and had to leave, the enemy machine-gun fire started again.
Benavides gave O'Connor a third shot of morphine, and took another bullet to the leg.
Their position was surrounded by North Vietnamese soldiers. It looked hopeless.
But a helicopter finally came to their rescue.
Benavidez and the rescue team carried and dragged the wounded men onto the chopper,
But the landing zone was still being fired upon by NVA troops.
To the extent that two men were shot on the back as they crawled to it.
Shrapnel wounds to his face from earlier caused
Benavidez's vision to be blurred from the blood in his eyes.
When he went to get Musso, an NVA soldier bunted his rifle into Benavidez's head, and jaw, had slashed his arm with his bayonet.
He shouted to O'Connor to shoot, but he was too drugged from morphine to react.
Benavides pulled out his bowie knife and stabbed the NVA soldier 'till he was dead.
He then dragged Musso to the helicopter,
And killed two more NVA with an AK-47 who were out of the helicopters side gunner's arc of fire.
And then he made one more trip to get the interpreter, and destroy any classified material, with blood still obscuring his vision.
Only then did he allow the others to pull him on to the helicopter, the last man to leave the battlefield.
At this point, the round that had hit his stomach, exposed his intestines, which was trying to hold in with his hands.
The helicopter badly shut up and with no instruments left, managed to take off.
When they landed, the wounded were unloaded and examined one by one. It had turned out that
Benavidez had even loaded three dead enemy soldiers into the helicopter, in case they had classified materials
They were left to the side as was Benavidez.
He couldn't move, or speak because of the broken jaw from the rifle.
But, the blood over his eyes had glued them shut in the thirty-seven bayonet bullet and shrapnel wounds all over his body, he looked dead.
Medics started placing him in a body bag and started zipping him up when a friend noticed him and said, "That's Roy, that's Roy Benavidez!"
The doctor said there was nothing that could be done.
But Benavidez mustered his last bit of energy and spat in the doctors face, causing the doctor to say, I think he'll make it.
He was flown to Japan for intensive surgery. Then Brooke Army Medical Center, Fort Sam Houston where he stayed for almost a year.
Roy Benavidez had survived six hours in hell and saved eight lives.
Benavidez's his commander had put him in for the Distinguished Service Cross, because the process for awarding a Medal of Honor would take much longer.
And he was unsure if Benavidez would live or die before he could have received it.
Finally on February 24th, 1981, President Ronald Reagan would present Roy Benavidez the Medal of Honor.
Reagan said if the story of his heroism were a movie script you would not believe it.
Benavidez said of his actions the real heroes are the ones who gave their lives for their country.
"I don't like to be called a hero,
"I just did what I was trained to do." Master Sergeant Roy Benavidez died on November 29
1998 at the age of 63.
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