PBS VS BSC WAR: PBS VS BSC - 29/06/2025 20:30

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Vietnam Green Beret Had 37 Separate Bullet, Bayonet, & Shrapnel Wounds & Still He Carried On Fighting

Master Sergeant Raul “Roy” Perez Benavidez was shot several times, suffered two grenade blasts, and got bayonetted while saving the lives of eight men. Despite this, it took him over a decade to get a Medal of Honor – and all because of bureaucratic red tape.

Born to a Mexican-American and a Yaqui Indian, orphaned at a young age, and having to drop out of school at 15 so he could work to eat, Benavidez didn’t exactly have a charmed life. So in 1952, he enlisted with the Texas National Guard at the age of 17. By 1965, Benavidez was an advisor to an infantry regiment of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), which was how he stepped on a landmine.

They sent him back to the US, but the diagnosis wasn’t correct. Doctors at Fort Sam Houston swore he’d never walk again, so they prepared to discharge him from the military. But how was a crippled minority, who was also a high-school dropout, going to support himself and his wife?

 

So Benavidez did the only thing he could. At night, when the doctors and nurses left, he tried to wiggle his toes till he felt them again. Then he would use his elbows and chin to crawl toward the wall next to his bed. Then he’d try to get off the bed by himself.

In July 1966, the man whom the medical experts said couldn’t possibly walk again did just that. Though his wounds still hurt, he was back in South Vietnam by January 1968… only to nearly die again some four months later.

It happened on 2 May 1968. Benavidez was at Loc Ninh in a Green Beret outpost near the Cambodian border, attending a prayer service. At 1:30 PM, a panicked voice shrieked out of their communications radio, demanding to be rescued.

 

It came from a 12-man team that was on patrol. There was Sergeant First Class Leroy Wright, Staff Sergeant Lloyd “Frenchie” Mousseau, Specialist Four Brian O’Connor, and nine Montagnard tribesmen. They had stumbled upon an entire infantry battalion of the Vietnam People’s Army (NVA) of perhaps 1,000 men.

Armed with only a knife and his medical bag, Benavidez rushed to a helicopter, leaving his gun behind. From the air, they spotted the team in a tight circle. Some 25 yards away was the enemy surrounding them on all sides.

The chopper tried to land, but enemy fire prevented that, so they had to move some 75 yards away. Benavidez jumped out and made his way toward the men, but got hit in his right leg by an AK-slug.

He stumbled and fell, but thought he’d only snagged himself on a thorn bush. So he kept running till a grenade blast slammed him to the ground, peppering his face with shrapnel. Incredibly, he got up again and staggered his way toward the circle of men that had split up into two groups.

Four were dead, so he got an AK off of one and redistributed their ammo among the rest. Ignoring enemy fire, he bound what wounds he could and injected morphine into those who were screaming the loudest.

Vietnam War
Picking up his radio, he directed air strikes into the enemy, then directed another chopper toward his group. He was still asking for more air support when a second bullet got him in the right thigh.

The chopper landed, allowing Benavidez to drag the dead and wounded into it. But the enemy kept up their barrage, so he waved the chopper toward the second group as he tried to provide cover fire from the ground.

Benavidez spotted Wright near the second group. The man was dead, so he bent down to get the pouch containing their radio codes and call signs. He was stuffing them into his shirt when the third bullet hit him in the stomach. Then a grenade blasted him from behind. Then the pilot got shot and died, so naturally, the chopper crashed.

Staggering forward, Benavidez dragged the wounded out, and the group fought off the NVA as best they could when the extra air support finally reached them. Jets and helicopter gunships pounded the enemy, but they were so many of them to keep them at bay.

Benavidez was hit several more times, yet he still managed to direct the airstrikes, using his sense of hearing since he was blinded from all the blood streaming into his eyes. Then silence. The pilots thought he died, but a minute later, he was back on, directing even more strikes. He kept passing out from shock and blood loss, apparently, but never for long.

A chopper finally landed for his group, but as he was shoving Mousseau aboard, an NVA rose up and clubbed him on the head with a rifle. Benavidez fell, rolled and tried to get up, just in time to see a bayonet heading his way.

 

Benavidez receiving the Medal of Honor from President Ronald Reagan and US Secretary of Defense, Caspar Weinberger
He grabbed it, cutting his right hand open, but he pulled anyway. The Vietnamese fell forward, bayonetting the Mexican-Yaqui all the way through his left arm… just as Benavidez’s knife dug deep into enemy flesh.

Getting up, he dragged Mousseau in but saw two more NVA coming toward them. Grabbing an AK-47, he dealt with those two, then dove back into the circle to rescue a Montagnard. Only then did he get onboard to be whisked away.

En route to base, Benavidez tried to hold his intestines in, but that proved too much. He passed out. He woke up in the Medevac Hospital in an open body bag while a doctor pronounced him dead. Too exhausted to talk, but not wanting to be chucked into a freezer, Benavidez did the only thing he was able to do, he spat in the man’s face.

They wanted to give him a Medal of Honor, but weren’t sure he’d survive that long, so they settled on a Distinguished Service Cross, instead. That way, they could give it to living person.

Benavidez, however, was clearly not an easy man to kill. Realizing this, they put in the paperwork for the Medal of Honor. He finally got it on 24 February 1981.

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