Medal of Honor · Vietnam War
Roy Perez Benavidez
Master Sergeant, U.S. Army
- Date of Action
- May 2, 1968
- Location
- Near Lộc Ninh, South Vietnam
- Medal Presented
- February 24, 1981
Values Embodied
- Courage
- Sacrifice
- Commitment
Official Citation
This citation is paraphrased from public-domain histories and is pending verbatim verification against the Congressional Medal of Honor Society archive.
Master Sergeant (then Staff Sergeant) Roy P. Benavidez United States Army, who distinguished himself by a series of daring and extremely valorous actions on 2 May 1968 while assigned to Detachment B-56, 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne), 1st Special Forces, Republic of Vietnam. On the morning of 2 May 1968, a 12-man Special Forces Reconnaissance Team was inserted by helicopters in a dense jungle area west of Loc Ninh, Vietnam to gather intelligence information about confirmed large-scale enemy activity.
This area was controlled and routinely patrolled by the North Vietnamese Army. After a short period of time on the ground, the team met heavy enemy resistance, and requested emergency extraction. Three helicopters attempted extraction, but were unable to land due to intense enemy small arms and anti-aircraft fire.
Sergeant Benavidez was at the Forward Operating Base in Loc Ninh monitoring the operation by radio when these helicopters returned to off-load wounded crewmembers and to assess aircraft damage. Sergeant Benavidez voluntarily boarded a returning aircraft to assist in another extraction attempt. Realizing that all the team members were either dead or wounded and unable to move to the pickup zone, he directed the aircraft to a nearby clearing where he jumped from the hovering helicopter, and ran approximately 75 meters under withering small arms fire to the crippled team.
Biography
Before the War
Raul “Roy” Perez Benavidez was born August 5, 1935, in Lindenau, a hamlet in DeWitt County, Texas. His father, a Mexican American sharecropper, died of tuberculosis when Roy was two; his mother died of the same disease five years later. Roy and his younger brother were raised by an uncle in Cuero, Texas, alongside eight cousins. From age eight he was picking cotton and sugar beets in fields across South Texas to help feed the family.
He dropped out of school in the seventh grade to work full time, joined the Texas National Guard at nineteen, and transferred to active-duty Army in 1955. By 1965 he had deployed to Vietnam as an adviser to the Army of the Republic of Vietnam and was seriously wounded by a mine, suffering a back injury doctors said would permanently end his military career. He taught himself to walk again over the course of a year — dragging himself along the wall of his hospital room at night — and qualified for Airborne and then Special Forces training. He earned his Green Beret in 1967 and returned to Vietnam in 1968.
The Action
On the morning of May 2, 1968, a twelve-man Special Forces reconnaissance patrol was inserted by helicopter into dense triple- canopy jungle near Lộc Ninh, along the Cambodian border, to observe a suspected North Vietnamese Army battalion. Instead they found an entire NVA infantry division of roughly 1,000 men. Within minutes the team was overrun.
Three helicopters went in to extract them and were driven off by heavy fire. The wounded and dying could not reach the landing zone. Staff Sergeant Benavidez was at the base in Lộc Ninh monitoring the radio. Without waiting for orders, he boarded a returning helicopter with nothing but a knife and a medic’s bag, jumped into the jungle clearing, and ran through withering fire toward the remnants of his team.
What followed is known in Special Forces history as “Six Hours in Hell.” Benavidez moved between wounded men, carried them under fire toward successive extraction helicopters, was shot in the leg, the stomach, and the head; was bayoneted in the back during hand-to-hand fighting with an NVA soldier who attacked him as he was loading a wounded man onto a helicopter; retrieved classified documents from the body of his dead team leader; fought off an NVA gunner who had boarded the medevac helicopter; and directed air strikes by radio as the helicopters came in. When the last helicopter finally lifted him out, he was in a body bag. The medical officer, cutting the bag open, was about to pronounce him dead when Benavidez spat in his face.
He had taken 37 separate wounds. He saved eight lives.
After the War
The Army initially awarded Benavidez the Distinguished Service Cross. His commanders — the surviving members of the team — campaigned for years to have the award upgraded. The Medal of Honor was presented by President Ronald Reagan in 1981, thirteen years after the action. Reagan said at the ceremony, “If the story of his heroism were a movie script, you would not believe it.”
Benavidez spent the last decades of his life speaking to schoolchildren and veterans, asked always to repeat the same story. He died on November 29, 1998, and is buried at Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery in San Antonio, Texas.