Who is the most badass person in history that no one knows about?
He spat at doctor’s face with his only remaining strength to let him know he was still alive.
In 1965 Roy Benavidez stepped on a land mine during a patrol in Vietnam and was evacuated to the United States. Doctors at the time said he would never walk again and began preparing his medical discharge papers. He began a nightly training ritual (doctors did not tell him to train) in an attempt to regain his ability to walk. And guess what. He did it!
I wanted to go back to Vietnam because of what the news media was saying about us: that our presence was not needed there; they’re burning the flag….
On 2 May 1968 during the Vietnam War, there was an operation to save his wounded comrades. Because they were wounded, they couldn’t move to the helicopter – pickup zone.
Roy Benavidez jumped from the hovering helicopter (30-50 feet/9-15 meters in the air) and ran 75 meters under heavy small arms fire to the team. I should mention, his only weapon was a KNIFE when he jumped from the helicopter. While he was running to his comrades, he was wounded on his right leg, face and head.
When he reached the team, Benavidez was severely wounded by small arms fire in the abdomen and grenade fragments in his back. Later, the aircraft pilot was fatally wounded and his helicopter crashed.
Although he was critically wounded, Benavidez secured the classified documents and made his way back to the ruins of the helicopter, where he aided the wounded out of the aircraft and gathered shocked survivors into a defensive formation. Under heavy fire, he moved around the squad and distributed water and ammunition to the men.
Then he called for airstrikes and another rescue attempt. He was shot in the thigh a couple more times. While he was going towards the second rescue helicopter, he was stabbed by an enemy. He killed the enemy in hand-to-hand combat (despite his wounds).
When they finally made it back to the base, he was pronounced dead and put into a body bag. As they were zipping up the body bag, he spat in the doctor’s face with his only remaining strength to let him know he was still alive. He survived these wounds and received the Medal of Honor.
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6 Hours in Hell
On May 2, 1968, a 12-man Special Forces patrol, which included nine Montagnard tribesmen, was surrounded by an NVA infantry battalion of about 1,000 men. Benavidez heard the radio appeal for help and boarded a helicopter to respond. Armed only with a knife, he jumped from the helicopter carrying his medical bag and ran to help the trapped patrol. Benavidez “distinguished himself by a series of daring and extremely valorous actions… and because of his gallant choice to join voluntarily his comrades who were in critical straits, to expose himself constantly to withering enemy fire, and his refusal to be stopped despite numerous severe wounds, saved the lives of at least eight men.”
At one point in the battle an NVA soldier accosted him and stabbed him with his bayonet. Benavidez pulled it out, yanked out his own knife, killed him and kept going, leaving his knife in the NVA soldier’s body. After the battle, he was evacuated to the base camp, examined, and thought to be dead. As he was placed in a body bag among the other dead in body bags, he was suddenly recognized by a friend who called for help. A doctor came and examined him but believed Benavidez was dead. The doctor was about to zip up the body bag when Benavidez managed to spit in his face, alerting the doctor that he was alive. Benavidez had a total of 37 separate bullet, bayonet, and shrapnel wounds from the six-hour fight with the enemy battalion.
Benavidez was evacuated once again to Fort Sam Houston’s Brooke Army Medical Center, where he eventually recovered. He received the Distinguished Service Cross for extraordinary heroism and four Purple Hearts. In 1969, he was assigned to Fort Riley, Kansas. In 1972, he was assigned to Fort Sam Houston, Texas where he remained until retirement.
Medal of Honor
Army Master Sgt. Roy P. Benavidez (center) is flanked by United States Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger (left) and President Ronald Reagan at his Medal of Honor presentation ceremony in 1981.
In 1973, after more detailed accounts became available, Special Forces Lieutenant Colonel Ralph R. Drake insisted that Benavidez receive the Medal of Honor. By then, however, the time limit on the medal had expired. An appeal to Congress resulted in an exemption for Benavidez, but the Army Decorations Board denied him an upgrade of his Distinguished Service Cross to the Medal of Honor.
The Army board required an eyewitness account from someone present during the action. Benavidez believed that there were no living witnesses of the “Six Hours in Hell.”
Unbeknownst to Benavidez, there was a living witness, who would later provide the eyewitness account necessary: Brian O’Connor, the former radioman of Benavidez’s Special Forces team in Vietnam. O’Connor had been severely wounded (Benavidez had believed him dead), and he was evacuated to the United States before his superiors could fully debrief him.
O’Connor had been living in the Fiji Islands when, in 1980, he was on holiday in Australia. During his holiday O’Connor read a newspaper account of Benavidez from an El Campo newspaper, which had been picked up by the international press and reprinted in Australia. O’Connor immediately contacted Benavidez and submitted a ten-page report of the encounter, confirming the accounts provided by others, and serving as the necessary eyewitness. Benavidez’s Distinguished Service Cross accordingly was upgraded to the Medal of Honor.
On February 24, 1981, President Ronald Reagan presented Roy P. Benavidez with the Medal of Honor in the Pentagon. Reagan turned to the press and said, “If the story of his heroism were a movie script, you would not believe it”. He then read the official award citation:
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