This article focuses on an aspect easily forgotten but absolutely inspirational. Courage. Presented are a few with one extraordinary physical tale of the Green Beret wounded 37 times in one encounter!
Witold Pilecki (1901-1948) – During WW2 Pilecki joined the underground Polish resistance. In 1943, he volunteered to smuggle himself into Auschwitz concentration camp so he could report on the holocaust to the allies. He then escaped Auschwitz and took part in the Warsaw uprising of 1944. In 1948, he was executed by the Stalinist secret police for retaining loyalty to the non-Communist Polish government.
Helen Keller (1880-1968) – Overcame the dual disability of deaf blindness to champion the deaf and help improve societies’ treatment of deaf people.
Rosa Parks (1913-2005) – Refused to give up seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama and started a mass protest which led to the end of segregation on public transport.
Muhammad Ali Refused to fight in Vietnam despite having the threat of public opprobrium and jail.
Maximilian Kolbe (1894-1941) – A Polish Franciscan priest. During the Polish occupation, he was arrested twice by the Nazis but continued to offer shelter to Jews and Polish refugees. In 1941, he was sent to Auschwitz concentration camp, where he volunteered to take the place of a man condemned to death, showing great courage, faith and dignity.
Amelia Earhart (1897 – 1937) – First female to fly solo across the Atlantic in 1928. Disappeared whilst attempting to be the first female to circumnavigate the world.
Harriet Tubman (1822 – 1913) – Tubman escaped from slavery but returned on many dangerous missions to Maryland where she helped lead slaves to freedom. She also served as an agent and leader during the Civil War.
Emmeline Pankhurst – Leading suffragette in the UK. Emmeline Pankhurst went to jail several times for her protests to gain women the vote.
Edith Cavell – Nurse in Belgium during World War One. Arrested and executed for helping Allied servicemen escape back to England. Shortly before her execution, said ‘Patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone.’
Martin Niemöller (1892 – 1984)– Lutheran pastor and anti-nazi theologian. A founder of the Confessional church which sought to reject the Nazification of churches. He opposed the idea of Aryan supremacy. For his opposition to Nazi ideology, he was imprisoned in concentration camps until the end of the war.
William Wilberforce (1759 – 1833) – A leader of the campaign against slavery in Britain. He lived to see the passage of the Slavery Abolition Act 1933, which was passed after overcoming opposition from interested parties.
Olaudah Equiano (1745 – 1797) – The first black African slave to write about his experience as a slave. His book ‘The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano’ played a pivotal role in turning public opinion in Britain against slavery.
Chiune Sugihara (1900 – 1986)– Japanese diplomat who served as Vice-Consul to Lithuania during the Second World War. He helped several thousand Jews to escape from Lithuania by personally writing exit visas – despite the fact he was disobeying orders from Tokyo not to do so. It is estimated, because of Sugihara’s actions, 6,000 Jews were able to escape from Lithuania and avoid the holocaust.
Vietnam’s Green Beret had 37 wounds and still carried on fighting – he was awarded The Medal of Honour
Sergeant Raul “Roy” Perez Benavidez was shot several times, suffered two grenade blasts, and got bayonetted while saving the lives of eight men. Born to a Mexican-American and a Yaqui Indian, orphaned at a young age, and having to dropout 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 May 2, 1968. Benavidez was at LocNinh 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 Congressional 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 Honour. He finally got it on February 24, 1981.
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