A Mystery Hidden in Plain Sight (Part Three)

The Third Part of a Four Part Essay

“A Mystery Hidden in Plain Sight (Part Three)”

1. Roy Benavidez

Roy at fifteen in South Texas.

Sergeant Roy Benavidez was born in south Texas during the Depression.  His father was a Mexican farmer and his mother was an indigenous Yaqui, and both died of tuberculosis before Roy was eight. Roy and his siblings were adopted by an uncle and grew up working hard. By his late teens he joined the U.S. Army and proved to be such a promising soldier he progressed rapidly to the 82nd Airborne and then the Special Forces.  Like my own father, uncle, and many of our family friends, Roy volunteered to serve in Vietnam.  It was a different time.

One day in 1965 on operations in Vietnam, Roy was severely injured after stepping on a landmine.  Army doctors told him he'd never walk again. Roy refused to accept the verdict of the doctors.  On his hospital ward at night, he rolled himself out of bed and, unable to generate any power in his legs, painfully pulled himself across the floor by his chin and arms, struggling to teach his legs to assist the rest of his body.  This was decades before research demonstrated the transformative effects of neuroplasticity.  At that time the medical model for the body was a machine; in the view of his doctors, Roy’s machine had been blown up and was broken beyond repair.

Initially, nurses tied him into his bed to try and prevent him from continuing his self-invented recovery regimen. But Roy struggled out his bonds, assisted by other wounded soldiers who were witnesses to his first faint signs of progress. He subjected himself to agonizing pain for hours every night.  Once he was able to crawl across the floor to the wall, he struggled to raise his body until he was propped against a wall.  He started by wiggling his toes, and when he had regained sensation in his toes, he began the first slight movements of his feet.  These efforts were so agonizing that this tough, battle-hardened paratrooper often had tears in his eyes from the pain. Still Roy persevered, and his brain and body kept reconfiguring and evolving new ways to work together until Roy was able to push himself up the wall with his own legs.

Once he could stand, Roy began the long process of re-learning how to walk.  After many more months, he was not only able to walk again.  He ran again, and then he passed the demanding medical physical and physical fitness test required to remain in the Army.  He didn’t go to a desk job, either.  Roy returned to the Special Forces where he served in the famed MAC-V SOG, the most elite American Army unit during the Vietnam War.

Source: U.S. Army

Mission into the rainforest outside Loc Ninh, Vietnam

Roy’s perseverance hadn’t just rebuilt his body.  We have uncontestable proof of the personal transformation he achieved on that Army recovery ward, and the way his brain, neurological system, and body acquired a level of capability that seems almost superhuman.  Because on the 2nd of May, 1968 Roy performed an awe-inspiring demonstration of what he was now able to accomplish.

Three days before, Roy was with his Special Forces team on a helicopter leaving a landing zone swept by enemy fire. As the helicopter banked after lift-off, Roy began to topple out the open door. His team mate Leroy Wright grabbed him and yanked him to safety, saving Roy’s life. Three days later on the morning of May 2nd, a 12-man Special Forces Reconnaissance Team commanded by Roy’s friend Leroy was inserted by helicopters into the rain forest near Loc Ninh, Vietnam.  Shortly after disembarking at the landing zone, they were attacked by a battalion of a thousand North Vietnamese (“NVA”) soldiers.  Completely out-matched, Leroy ordered his radioman Brian O’Connor to request emergency extraction.  Unfortunately, enemy small-arms and anti-aircraft fire were already so intense that three helicopters were unable to land and were badly shot up in the attempt, wounding many of the helicopter crewmen.

While the helicopters limped back to the Forward Operating Base, Roy was listening to a sermon. As the badly damaged helicopters arrived Roy ran over to help unload the wounded crews.  A mortally wounded door gunner, 19 year old Specialist 4 Craig Michaels, fell into Roy’s arms, murmured “Oh my god, my mother and father,” and died.

Photo 28910891 © Tan Kian Yong | Dreamstime.com

As Roy stood with the body of SP4 Michaels in his arms, the distressed helicopter pilot told Roy it was his friend Sergeant First Class Leroy Wright leading the team trapped in the jungle. Roy immediately decided to save them if he could. A brave helicopter pilot volunteered to try again to extract the team from another clearing in the rainforest about seventy five yards from where the surrounded Special Forces team was fighting for their lives, and Roy jumped on board. As the helicopter hurtled towards the battle, radio traffic made it clear all the team members were already either dead, or so badly wounded they would be unable to move to the pick-up zone.  It seemed already over.

One Man Rescue Team

Roy decided to try and reach Leroy and his team, no matter what, despite facing almost certain, painful death.  He jumped off the helicopter as it hovered for a few seconds in a cloud of bullets from NVA soldiers alerted by the sound of its approaching rotors.  This is where the changes in Roy’s neurological system revealed themselves:  he was shot several times as he ran through the rain forest full of the enemy to what was left of the perimeter of survivors. According to the Medal of Honor citation, “Despite these painful injuries, he took charge, repositioning the team members and directing their fire.”

Roy’s courage was exceptional, and it was possible for him to function despite the pain of his multiple wounds because of the harsh regimen he had imposed on himself in the hospital ward three years before.  His neurological system and body had evolved to a rare level of resilience, and his pain threshold was now off the charts.

The instinctive human response to heavy gunfire is to lie motionless, except for uncontrollable shivering.  Soldiers are trained to continue fighting in this terrifying environment, and the reason so many young officers and NCOs are wounded and killed in combat is because they actively move around battlefields leading their men.  According to the citation for the Medal of Honor awarded decades after this battle, Roy acted with fierce, self-sacrificial courage in the highest traditions of the United States Army:

“He then threw smoke canisters to direct the aircraft to the team's position. Despite his severe wounds and under intense enemy fire, he carried and dragged half of the wounded team members to the awaiting aircraft. He then provided protective fire by running alongside the aircraft as it moved to pick up the remaining team members. As the enemy's fire intensified, he hurried to recover Leroy Wright’s body and the classified documents he was carrying. When he reached Wright's body, Roy was severely wounded by small-arms fire in the abdomen and grenade fragments in his back.”

Most people are quickly de-motivated by pain, and if they can’t flee their attackers they become passive, fearful victims hoping against hope the suffering will end.  Blood loss brings feelings of weakness, light-headedness, and nausea.  Roy’s agonizing recovery regimen three years before made it possible to persevere with incredible courage despite the pain of his wounds and life-threatening blood loss.

Roy Refuses to Quit

For six hours, Roy fought to save his men despite being wounded again and again.  He had just managed to load several more wounded onto the helicopter hovering in the landing zone when its brave pilot, Warrant Officer Larry McKibbens, was shot and killed and the helicopter crash-landed upside down.  With an overwhelming force of the enemy closing in from all sides, and Roy himself the last US soldier still fighting back, all seemed lost.

But Roy didn’t give up: he helped wounded soldiers out of the smoking wreckage of the overturned helicopter, and gathered the survivors into a defensive perimeter. Every soldier was wounded and most were in shock.  The enemy rushed forward, aiming automatic gun fire at close range into the easily-seen perimeter around the overturned helicopter. The roar of battle was deafening.  Grenades started landing while Roy, “moved around the perimeter distributing water and ammunition to his weary men, re-instilling in them a will to live and fight.”  For a wounded soldier losing blood, water is as vital as ammunition.

What is so impressive was Roy’s ability to continue to think so clearly in the chaos of battle, despite the effects of his wounds and blood loss.  The only communication with the outside world was the team radio, and radio operator Brian O’Connor was badly wounded and could no longer operate the radio.  Roy, despite his wounds and blood loss, was able to think clearly enough to communicate over the radio in the hail of gunfire and even up the odds by bringing in air support.  He personally directed tactical airstrikes and rocket and machine gun fire from jets and gunships almost directly onto the tiny perimeter of survivors, forcing the enemy to pull back from the zone of death Roy created around them with napalm, rockets and .50 caliber machine gun fire.  He also devoted precious seconds to tending his team’s wounds, despite being shot again and again and hit by shrapnel.  Years ago in those wards at night, Roy had taught himself to never give up.

A crazy-brave pilot landed another helicopter next to the wreckage of the downed helicopter and Roy exposed himself again by repeatedly carrying the wounded who could no longer move to the helicopter bay.  On one of his trips, an enemy soldier jumped up and bayoneted Roy, who killed him with a knife and then carried his team member to the helicopter. He tried one more time to carry out his friend Leroy’s body but was no longer able to lift him. 

Last Man Out 

Roy’s sense of purpose and mental clarity after hours of this ordeal is hard to believe.  With most of his wounded team members now loaded onto the helicopter, Roy, as the long-delayed Medal of Honor citation documents, “spotted and killed two enemy soldiers who were rushing the helicopter from an angle that prevented the aircraft door-gunner from firing upon them. With little strength remaining, Roy made one last trip to the nearly-abandoned perimeter to ensure all classified material had been collected or destroyed, and to bring in the remaining wounded. Only then, near death himself from numerous wounds and loss of blood, did he allow himself to be pulled into the extraction aircraft.”

Roy saved one of the three American soldiers and six of the nine Montagnard soldiers on his team.  He was wounded thirty-seven times in six hours and lost most of the blood in his body.  When the extraction helicopter landed at the Forward Operating Base, Roy was so badly wounded he was thought to be dead.  The soldiers who carried him off the helicopter with the men he had saved placed Roy himself in a body bag.  The MASH (“Mobile Army Surgical Hospital”) doctor conducting triage was about to zip the bag shut over his face when Roy, unable at this point to move in any other way, spit in his face.

Medal of Honor

There’s an Australian aspect I like to how Roy was finally awarded the Medal of Honor.  Immediately after the battle, Roy and Brian O’Connor, the team radio operator and only other surviving American soldier on the team, were separately medevaced back to the States for long recoveries.  Neither was aware the other had survived. Brian retired from the Army and moved to Fiji.  Decades later, he happened to be vacationing in Australia, where he read about Roy in the newspaper.  Brian immediately reached out to Roy, and it was Brian who wrote the report with the crucial eye-witness facts that made it possible for Roy to be awarded the Medal of Honor.

2. Lyrics from “The Sound of Music”

“You are sixteen going on seventeen
Fellows will fall in line,
Eager young lads and roués and cads
Will offer you food and wine,

Totally unprepared are you
To face a world of men.
Timid and shy and scared are you
Of things beyond your ken,

You need someone older and wiser
Telling you what to do:
I am seventeen going on eighteen
I’ll take care of you!”

“I am sixteen going on seventeen
I know that I’m naive,
Fellows I meet may tell me I’m sweet
And willingly I believe.

I am sixteen going on seventeen
Innocent as a rose
Bachelor dandies, drinkers of brandies
What do I know of those?”

Of course, part of the joke in the movie is that Liesl is far from the innocent, naive girl she pretends to be. She’s totally in control of her country bumpkin admirer. Nevertheless, in our Internet-saturated world, this scene is probably the farthest from our contemporary social environment of any other aspect of this film.

3. “Hedges”

Source: Coffman family archives

The original part of our home, visible on the left as a white outline, was a one story, 10’ x 10’ hut with two-feet thick stone walls built in 1790. It’s now our kitchen. A few years later a story was added above, and that section can be seen in blue. The rest of the house was built in 1820. The original owners were a German family named Huber. The Philadelphia tax officials were English, so their name was entered in the tax roles as “Hoover”.

Eighty years later in nearby Easton, Hugh Moore, CEO of Dixie Cups, was doing well by doing good: creating a sanitary way to drink water in the days before air conditioning and refrigeration. The company prospered as a result of growing public awareness produced by an “influential study carried out in Easton’s public schools documenting the contamination present in school drinking cups . . . “Death in School Drinking Cups” in Technical World Magazine in August 1908:

Illustration from The Cup-Campaigner, August, 1910

“In a further development in 1909, Kansas passed the first state law to abolish the common drinking cup—the “tin dipper”—in public places, and the common glasses beside coolers in railroads.”

Hugh Moore’s second son, also named Hugh, didn’t go into the family business. Instead, he trained as architect, and lived here in the 1950s and 1960s with his young family, making many upgrades and improvements to the old house.

Mother’s Day, 1960 (with three of the five children) Source: Moore family archives

Link: https://sites.lafayette.edu/dixiecollection/company-history/