Roy arrived in Saigon in December of 1965. “As the Military Air Transport Service plane banked for its final approach,” he remembered, “I glimpsed the city of Saigon through my window.… It ranked at the top of anybody’s list of the most confusing, frustrating, and dangerous places to be in the world.” Roy disembarked the plane and was greeted by an afternoon heat, hanging “heavy and dank,” as he stepped onto Vietnamese soil for a short and dangerous tour of duty that nearly cost him his life.1
Roy and the other American soldiers boarded a bus that drove them into the city. That first night, he joined some soldiers for drinks at a hotel bar before going to bed to get some sleep before orientation early the next morning. He spent much of the next two weeks in a classroom learning basic Vietnamese and gaining familiarity with the American mission, which was to aid the South Vietnamese Army’s defense against the North Vietnamese communists. These Americans were advisors, told to instruct and suggest but not to take any actions on their own.2
After a couple weeks in Saigon, Roy was flown to Da Nang just in time to attend the annual Bob Hope Vietnam Christmas Show that was performed on the base every year between 1964 and 1972. Roy remembered the audience of young men looking “more like a Boy Scout jamboree than a gathering of warriors.” Cameras surrounded the stage as rain fell upon an estimated crowd of ten thousand, mostly young GIs. The men loved Bob Hope. He was one of America’s most famous comedians and a man deeply committed to helping boost the morale of the troops. His own son was among the American soldiers stationed in Vietnam. And it didn’t hurt that Hope always brought along beautiful women. That year’s entourage included actresses Carroll Baker and Joey Heatherton. As the comedian took the stage, the men could hear gunshots in the distance, but the crowd focused on Hope. “The fatigue-clad throng howled its appreciation of his humor,” Roy wrote. “It was marvelous.”3
The United States had been heavily involved in Vietnam since 1949. American leaders and their allies had long forewarned of grave consequences if communism were to spread there. “If you lose Korea,” a French general told the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1951, “Asia is not lost; but if I lose Indochina, Asia is lost.” That same year, future president Dwight Eisenhower wrote in his diary, “If they [the French] quit and Indochina falls to Commies, it is easily possible that the entire Southeast Asia and Indonesia will go, soon to be followed by India.” In 1953, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles cautioned that Vietnam was “in some ways more important than Korea because the consequences of loss there could not be localized, but would spread throughout Asia, and Europe.” Determined to prevent that loss, the United States in the early 1950s backed France’s efforts to maintain its colony in Indochina, providing military supplies—planes, napalm, howitzers, and more—even while committing millions of its own troops against communist forces in Korea.4
But the French lost anyway, having been routed at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in the spring of 1954. France had fought a nine-year war that cost the lives of roughly 110,000 soldiers and as much as $1.2 billion a year. Meanwhile, approximately 325,000 Vietnamese fighters and civilians perished during the conflict. The subsequent peace negotiations in Switzerland resulted in the 1954 Geneva Accords, an agreement that ended the war and settled all French claims in Indochina. The settlement created the nations of Cambodia and Laos, and it divided Vietnam into two separate spheres—North and South—set to be reunified with a general election in 1956. Ho Chi Minh told his followers that the Geneva Conference was “a great victory for our diplomacy.” He thanked his countrymen for their support and encouraged them to “make every effort to consolidate peace and achieve reunification, independence and democracy throughout our country.” “Our country will certainly be unified,” he promised, “our entire people will surely be liberated.”5
Peace did not last long, as the intertwined fate of the two new nations was reshaped by a global struggle between communism and capitalism. Ho Chi Minh was a communist committed to reunifying his country under the banner of an independent Vietnam. And South Vietnam’s greatest ally, the United States, was desperate to halt communism in Vietnam to prevent its spread into Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, and perhaps even India and the Middle East. The Vietnamese people held their own diverse opinions, but their internal disagreements would not be allowed to be resolved on their own because the great global powers believed the Vietnamese conflict belonged to the world.
In South Vietnam, America backed a prime minister named Ngo Dinh Diem who hated the Geneva Accords and never intended to honor the reunification plans. Supported by the Eisenhower administration, he won a fraudulent election in 1955 that established him as president of a new Republic of Vietnam. He then refused to coordinate with North Vietnamese leaders to plan for the reunification elections scheduled for July of 1956. The month came and went, “without incident in Vietnam and without much international comment,” writes historian Fredrik Logevall. The two countries remained divided, with the North eager to reunify and the South and its American allies committed to separation.6
Beginning in 1956, the United States began spending roughly $300 million per year to bolster the Diem government and its military. The legal basis for this aid was provided by the creation of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) in September of 1954, just two months after the Geneva Accords were signed. SEATO empowered its members—namely the United States and Australia—to use military force to prevent the spread of communism in Southeast Asia. Under this cover, the United States sent military advisors and supplies to South Vietnam and even paid the salaries of officers in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN).7
The following year, Diem visited the United States, where President Eisenhower congratulated him on his “miracle of Vietnam,” referring to Diem’s ability to maintain South Vietnamese independence. The pair issued a joint statement in which Eisenhower pledged American assistance against possible “aggression or subversion threatening the political independence of the Republic of Vietnam.” Diem addressed a joint session of Congress, thanking the American people for their support in fighting against communism. That May, 250,000 people lined the streets of New York City to cheer on the visiting South Vietnamese president. The mayor presented him with a medal, and the New York Times called him “An Asian Liberator.” Later, Diem attended a banquet held in his honor where he sat alongside luminaries such as Eleanor Roosevelt, John D. Rockefeller Jr., and future president John F. Kennedy.8
Meanwhile, the North Vietnamese communists prepared for war. Global politics had failed them, so they decided to pursue reunification through military action. North Vietnamese leaders began to rebuild their military and prepare the nation’s industries to make war once again. They also established a new command post in an isolated section of the South Vietnamese Central Highlands, where they began chopping a pathway out of the jungle that would become part of the notorious Ho Chi Minh Trail. In 1960, leaders in Hanoi established the National Liberation Front (NLF) to organize resistance to Diem from within the South.9
Diem was far less popular among his own people than he was with American politicians. In South Vietnam, his administration failed to capture the support of rural citizens who formed the bulk of the nation’s population. The regime further alienated South Vietnamese farmers through unpopular land policies, religious intolerance, and by operating what one American observer called, “a quasi-police state characterized by arbitrary arrests and imprisonment, [and] strict censorship of the press.” Diem expanded the range of prosecutable political crimes and even brought back the French guillotine for executions. In response, insurgents operating in South Vietnam began conducting acts of terrorism and sabotage to threaten and harass the Diem government. By 1960, there were serious concerns about a coup that would overthrow Diem.10
Back in the United States, Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kennedy attacked the foreign policy record of his opponent, Eisenhower’s vice president Richard Nixon, as one of “weakness, retreat and defeat.” Kennedy, of course, won the election and doubled down on his promises to fight communism in his famous inauguration speech: “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”11
Once in office, the Kennedy administration escalated American support of Diem. By the end of 1962, more than eleven thousand American “military advisers” operated in Vietnam, helping train recruits for the growing South Vietnamese Army. American troops and supplies poured into Vietnam to help Diem’s government stave off invasion from North Vietnam and an insurgency from pro-communist forces operating within South Vietnam itself.12
Despite significant aid from the Americans, Diem’s control increasingly waned throughout the early 1960s. There were several major problems embedded in his leadership. He was a French-trained bureaucrat and a landed Catholic citizen whose familial wealth dated back to the colonial era, thus making him an easy mark as a puppet of the West. Diem surrounded himself with tyrannical family members who did not believe in true representative government. His brother oversaw corrupt secret intelligence and police forces that ruled through torture, rape, and executions. And his army was beset with problems, including commanders who seemingly didn’t want to lead and troops who didn’t appear eager to fight, leading to disappointing results in the early stages of a defensive war against highly motivated North Vietnamese regulars.13
Diem’s regime also persecuted Buddhists in a majority-Buddhist country. In 1963, government forces killed nine people during a pro-Buddhist demonstration, sparking an internal “Buddhist Crisis” that involved peaceful protests and a wave of monks who committed public suicides through self-immolation. By September of 1963, David Halberstam of the New York Times reported, “The protests were clearly out of control, and there were reliable reports that at least two groups were moving toward a coup. A general fear of disintegration gripped the country.” Diem was ultimately killed in a coup on November 2, 1963, throwing the nation further into chaos. By the time of Kennedy’s own murder just three weeks later, nearly sixteen thousand American military advisers were serving in Vietnam.14
Within a week of Kennedy’s assassination, his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, promised Congress, “This nation will keep its commitments from South Vietnam to West Berlin.” Johnson followed the course established by previous presidents, insisting that South Vietnam was crucial to American interests. But conditions were nevertheless deteriorating for the South Vietnamese military, whose soldiers were struggling against communist forces.15
The following summer, in August of 1964, the United States reported two attacks—at least one of which was falsified—on American ships in the Gulf of Tonkin waters just off North Vietnam. In response, Congress passed a resolution giving President Johnson the authority to indefinitely escalate America’s military presence in Vietnam. This Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was passed by a vote of 88–2 in the Senate and a unanimous vote of 416–0 in the House of Representatives. The United States military responded by launching attacks against North Vietnamese naval bases and other installations used to support military action. Three months later, Johnson’s landslide victory in that November’s presidential election further paved the way to ramp up American involvement.16
America’s war strategy in Vietnam was based on the idea that North Vietnam would eventually have to halt its invasion in the face of predominant American firepower. This idea was rooted in the experiences of World War II–era bombing campaigns when America’s long-range bombers pounded the factories and infrastructure of Germany and Japan, severely limiting the Axis Powers’ ability to make war. If American bombers could defeat the Nazis and Japanese, so went the thinking, then surely they could stop the North Vietnamese. The brain trust at the Department of Defense believed that the communists at some point would simply lose the materials, the men, or the will to keep fighting.17
In March of 1965, the United States military launched Operation Rolling Thunder, a historic bombing campaign designed to neutralize the North Vietnamese by destroying their military capabilities and crushing civilian morale. A month later, Johnson issued his famous “Peace Without Conquest” speech, declaring that the United States was in Vietnam “because we have a promise to keep.” “Since 1954 every American president has offered support to the people of South Vietnam. We have helped to build, and we have helped to defend,” he insisted. “Thus, over many years, we have made a national pledge to help South Vietnam defend its independence. And I intend to keep that promise.” That spring, the president approved an increase of eighteen to twenty thousand American troops. One hundred thousand more were ordered in July. By the end of 1965, America was fully at war, with approximately 180,000 soldiers on the ground in Vietnam. Roy Benavidez was among them.18
Roy’s arrival into South Vietnam came just weeks after the Battle of Ia Drang Valley. Made famous by the book and film We Were Soldiers Once… and Young, the Battle of Ia Drang was the first major direct confrontation between the United States military and the North Vietnamese Army (NVA). “The valley has no strategic importance,” noted an Associated Press report. “The idea was to kill as many Communist troops as possible.”19
On November 14, roughly one thousand American Army troops were dropped by helicopter into the Ia Drang Valley to engage North Vietnamese soldiers who had been attacking special forces camps in the area. The North Vietnamese responded by sending three battalions to meet the Americans. Most of the fighting occurred in the first few days and would prove to be some of the most intense combat of the entire war. Outnumbered by more than three to one, American soldiers fought bravely and used their immense firepower advantages to win a decisive military victory in terms of casualties. During those four days in what one commander called “the Valley of Death,” 234 American soldiers lost their lives, and the enemy lost at least 1,200 more. With Ia Drang, observed a journalist in the Chicago Tribune, “The United States has entered another new phase of the war in Viet Nam by directly engaging massed forces of the regular North Vietnamese army in the battle of Ia Drang Valley.”20
In Vietnam, Roy was assigned as a light weapons advisor to South Vietnamese troops. In preparation for his mission, he learned some basic information about Vietnamese culture—common words, customs, holidays, and so forth—and about what he called “nation building,” which focused on distributing resources, building infrastructure, and providing political and military education. His unit was there to help teach the South Vietnamese to stand on their own against the North Vietnamese forces.21
Roy was stationed near Tam Ky, a small coastal city located about 450 miles northeast of Saigon. The South China Sea lies just a few miles to the east and the Annamite Mountain Range about twenty miles to the west. Tam Ky was part of I Corps Tactical Zone, the northernmost of four tactical zones established by the United States military in its organization of South Vietnam. The defense of I Corps was led by the ARVN and supported by members of the United States Marines and Army. I Corps bordered the Vietnamese Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) that separated North and South Vietnam, thus making it a hotbed of action. North Vietnamese forces could enter I Corps by crossing the highly fortified DMZ or through trails leading into South Vietnam from Laos.22
At Tam Ky, Roy and his ARVN allies were primarily facing the military arm of the NLF. Commonly known as the Viet Cong, NLF members included military insurgents operating in South Vietnam to aid the North Vietnamese. Some were holdovers from the Viet Minh who had fought the French. Others were drawn into the struggle by the repressive policies of the American-backed Diem administration and/or the growing involvement of the United States military. Plenty more were conscripted through any number of methods.23
The NLF were stealthy practitioners of guerilla warfare who typically did not follow a traditional Western order of combat. Their membership was mostly male but included people of all ages and genders who were involved in a wide array of activities, ranging from direct fighting to logistical support to grassroots political organizing. Their missions included everything from executing brutal assassinations to feeding farmers’ animals. They were a formidable military foe, fighting on their home turf with tactics such as booby traps, ambushes, and sabotage. They had an uncanny ability to blend into the civilian population. Their members hopped back-and-forth across borders, moving undetected, and operating within close proximity to American and South Vietnamese soldiers. They built extensive underground tunnel systems—including one near Tam Ky—that allowed them to maneuver daringly close to major cities and even American military installations. Still, their force could also be unstable. Their members might work for the North Vietnamese cause one day and then help Americans the next, as everyday civilians tried to negotiate a daily existence amid a dangerous war. Loyalties wavered as all sides—North Vietnamese, South Vietnamese, and the United States alike—undertook economic incentives and violence to affect NLF membership. While the NLF did use an explicitly political message to recruit, they also at times employed brutal, murderous tactics to coerce civilian assistance. Menacing the United States and its South Vietnamese allies throughout the war, the NLF were a terrifying, maddening enemy because they were so hard to identify and could seemingly appear anywhere at any time.24
Roy was a good soldier who wanted to fulfill his mission as part of broader American foreign policy objectives. But the nature of the American approach to the war—rooted in the sometimes abstract goal of “containment” rather than a definitive victory over the enemy—made life difficult and frustrating for the average American GI. “Democracy, communism, ‘domino theory,’” he later wrote, “all those things made sense someplace. Maybe they made sense in conference rooms ten thousand miles from Vietnam, but they meant nothing there.” “The history and politics of the war didn’t mean much to me at the time,” he wrote more than twenty years later. “They still don’t.”25
In wars, territory is usually the most important objective. But in Vietnam, the United States’ policy placed more value on killing people than taking land. American servicemen could fight and kill on a hill only to concede the same hill when the killing was done. Even territory controlled by allies could be incredibly dangerous when the enemy could so readily hide among the landscape and the population. Vietnam was different than Roy expected. “Nothing that I had been trained for,” he recalled, “had anything to do with what was really going down.” “I don’t really believe that even our training personnel had any real idea about what we were walking into,” he later concluded. Amid such confusion and chaos, Roy’s primary concern was staying alive and protecting the lives of those with whom he served.26
Roy’s base near Tam Ky was a shoddy headquarters, “no more than a tin-roofed shack,” he described, “which served as living quarters for the Vietnamese officers and their American advisors.” Roy remembered “low-wattage light bulbs,” “Army cots… in the corners,” and “a rickety table covered with maps.” At the small base, Roy and his fellow servicemen at least had cots and an opportunity “to relax and be ourselves.” Otherwise, he and his comrades were out in the fields and jungles of South Vietnam, advising allied soldiers in a war zone where the enemy could appear from seemingly anywhere. Time spent in the jungle meant time that one could die.27
Roy was primarily involved in patrolling. He was one of about fifteen men who would walk into the countryside looking for enemy soldiers. The weather was almost always either excessively rainy or hot, and the men spent their days trudging through the jungles and rice paddies, looking for the “little soldiers in the black pajamas,” as Roy sometimes called members of the NLF. It was frightening duty, marching through dangerous territory in a place where “it was often impossible to tell who the enemy was,” wrote Roy. To avoid detection, he made it a point to walk quietly in a straight line, especially along the small ridges separating the rice paddies. Booby traps and ambushes happened all around them, and other men brought back harrowing stories from the fields.28
At times, the patrols had to camp overnight in the jungle. “There were no enemy lines and no safe havens,” Roy explained, “not even in our own quarters.” The enemy was all around. Nighttime ambushes may have been unlikely, but the soldiers took care to avoid drawing extra attention. Men slept on their stomachs to avoid snoring, and they hid shiny objects that might draw the interest of a sniper. “Staying alive in Vietnam meant blending in,” Roy wrote, because the NLF were eager to kill American advisors. He learned not to slap at mosquitos, as it was a surefire signal of being an outsider. He stayed quiet and small, aided by his short stature and darker skin. “All my life I had been fighting against the bigotry created by these differences,” Roy joked. “Now they were helping to keep me alive.”29
There were numerous close calls. One of Roy’s first and most vivid memories of the war was of a day out on patrol. He and an Australian soldier named Dickie were walking with South Vietnamese soldiers on a “bright sunny day” when they paused to eat lunch underneath a large tree. As they ate, Roy remembered Dickie suddenly but softly telling him to continue eating as normal, but warning him, “We’re not alone.” Suddenly, Dickie jerked his rifle toward the sky and opened fire into the upper branches of the tree as a stunned Roy froze with a mouth full of food. A moment later, a dead NLF soldier dropped from the tree.30
One night, Roy and his comrades were patrolling deep in the mountains, searching for the enemy. They were dressed like Vietnamese peasants to blend in, as they traveled far from their compound. After a few quiet days, the unit unexpectedly spotted a massive encampment of between “eight hundred and a thousand men” in a valley a few hundred yards away. Roy spent a night “sweating while the insects chewed on me.” He and his men made it out without being seen and reported the information to their superiors.31
Another day, Roy was planning to attend mass with a group of Vietnamese Catholics from Saigon. Sometime before, these Vietnamese allies had learned that Roy was Roman Catholic and invited him to join them at church. Roy obliged and continued attending these services for a few weeks until another American soldier warned him against regular church attendance. Establishing any sort of predictable pattern was dangerous because it left one susceptible to ambush by enemies who learned your routine. According to Roy, on the day he stayed back, the transport jeep crossed a bridge with a bomb planted underneath, and all the men were killed.32
Later in Roy’s tour, he was once again saved by the Australian advisor Dickie. Their group was out on patrol when they came across a roadside fence just outside a hamlet. The men heard some type of whimpering coming from near the barrier. When Roy approached, he saw a small puppy dog sitting in a sack looped onto the fence. When he reached to lift the puppy from its sack, a burst of gunfire landed near his feet, halting him in his tracks. Dickie had fired his gun as a warning for Roy to stop. The Australian then walked over and “slit the little fellow’s throat,” Roy remembered of the poor dog. “I stood there, watching in shock.” When the dog stopped twitching, Dickie cut open the sack to remove the body. When the bag was opened, Roy saw a wire connecting the dog’s leg to a grenade. It was a booby trap designed to attract a sympathetic American.33
Roy was deeply critical of the ARVN soldiers he was there to advise. “Their army was a joke,” he recalled. According to Roy, ARVN was comprised of “traitors, cowards, crazies, and only a few good fighters.” The force was much maligned during the early parts of the war. One early observer of ARVN wrote that they were “an army that suffered from an institutionalized unwillingness to fight.” This wasn’t the whole picture—many members of ARVN were dedicated and talented soldiers who fought bravely to defend their government. More than 200,000 of them died defending South Vietnam, and their abilities would improve later in the war. But most American observers of ARVN in the early 1960s characterized them as poorly trained, undisciplined, even cowardly. One problem was that many of these soldiers lacked the political resolve of either their advisors or their enemies. The Americans in Roy’s unit were career military men conducting a mission for a nation they considered to be the greatest purveyor of freedom on the planet. And North Vietnamese soldiers believed they were fighting the final salvo in a long war for national independence. ARVN soldiers, on the other hand, had borne witness to countless examples of coups and corruption and carried no such faith in their government. Roy later wrote, “I never could see one lick of difference between the people we were fighting for and the people we were fighting against.”34
Roy wrote of a dangerous ARVN officer named Wag. Trained in the United States, Wag was a first lieutenant with a reputation for “cruelty toward civilians and Viet Cong prisoners,” Roy recalled. One day, Roy and Wag were out patrolling an area where sniper fire had been reported. According to Roy, they entered a small village, and Wag began signaling for the locals to approach. When the residents ignored Wag’s command, he fired his handgun toward “30–35 villagers,” Roy described, who scurried to obey the order.35
Through an interpreter, Roy learned that Wag was asking the villagers to identify the sniper who had fired upon his allies a few days prior. He was yelling, “berating” the locals, Roy testified, when he suddenly grabbed one young woman by her hair and dragged her out in front of the rest. She was pregnant, visibly showing, and Wag screamed at her, accusing her of carrying the baby of an NLF guerilla. He threw her to the ground and then “began viciously kicking her in the stomach with the toe of his boot,” Roy remembered. Wag then turned and grabbed a young man and began stabbing him in the arms and upper torso with a bayonet. When the beating ceased, Wag pulled out his handgun, pressed it to the man’s temple, and blew out the side of the man’s skull, scattering the victim’s brains across the dirt. Some of the villagers glanced at Roy and another American who stood watching. Roy walked away, convinced there was nothing he could have done. “I will never forget the look in those villagers’ eyes,” he wrote nearly thirty years later.36
Roy bore witness to another horrifying example of civilian murder at a refugee site near his home base. Tam Ky, like many South Vietnamese cities during the war, drew displaced rural refugees whose homes had been destroyed by the violence in the countryside or whose movements were constricted by American war strategies. Roy tended to blame either the NLF or ARVN for such displacement, but the actions of American aircraft, gunships, and soldiers certainly also played a major role in displacing millions of rural peasants. Roy called this particular refugee site “a pitiful excuse for a camp.” It made him think better about the difficult living conditions in the migrant labor camps of his youth. “We had lived well compared to the way those people were living,” he lamented. And so, the American soldiers took some initiative to improve the camp. They scavenged some extra building materials and helped construct better housing and sanitary facilities for the refugees. After finishing their work, Roy and his colleagues were “feeling pretty proud of ourselves.”37
Three nights later, the refugee camp came under attack from the NLF. Roy and his fellow soldiers awoke to gunfire near one o’clock in the morning. NLF soldiers rolled through the village attacking or kidnapping civilians and leaving fliers denouncing the war. That night, a reported thirty-three refugees were killed and fifty-four more wounded. Roy believed the attack was meant to warn other Vietnamese peasants against cooperating with the Americans or South Vietnamese government. “We were all stunned…,” Roy recalled. “We all knew that the people in that camp had no way to defend themselves.”38
The next morning, Roy and his colleagues walked over to the camp. “We could see the place was in bad shape,” he remembered. “The gates had been shot to splinters.” The Americans heard loud cries coming from near one of the buildings. As they rounded a corner, they were stunned by what they saw. “There, on the wall of the barracks facing us,” Roy wrote, “three children were nailed, crucified, the spikes in their hands and feet suspending them three feet above the blood-soaked ground.”39
After about three months in Vietnam, Roy’s first tour ended in March of 1966 when he was almost killed. His men were out in the countryside on patrol, and Roy was walking point, something American advisers were not supposed to do. As Roy recalled, there had been some type of joke in the unit about Roy’s indigenous background. The South Vietnamese soldiers, familiar with American Western films, joked that Roy’s Yaqui ethnicity made him a natural tracker and suggested that he should be the one leading the patrol. It was a good-natured joke among fighting men. Roy played along, agreeing to walk point on patrol, the most dangerous and exposed spot in the unit.40
Roy was humping along on one of those days when he stepped on some type of a makeshift land mine. NLF booby traps could be quite primitive. Some were merely sharpened sticks posted into the ground; there’s no telling exactly what Roy stepped on. The device detonated like a land mine, but it thankfully did not carry such an explosive charge that would have killed him on the spot.
The charge sent several hundred pounds of force into Roy’s body, ejecting him from the ground and sending him flying through the air. He landed violently into the earth, knocked unconscious by the collision. Roy had no memory of the following moments, and no one could ever provide him with a definitive explanation of what happened next.41
Roy woke up in the hospital. He was coming out of a long fog that had clouded his journey from that spot in the jungle onto a hospital ship, to an Air Force base in the Philippines, and finally to the Beach Pavilion at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio. Roy was back home in Texas. He had lost some hearing in his right ear, his sense of taste had been dulled, and his mind was still groggy. Worst of all, he could not feel any part of his body below the waist. He had no external wounds, but the force of the booby trap had twisted Roy’s spine “like a corkscrew,” he wrote.42
Roy stayed in the hospital for a substantial amount of time. Lala came from El Campo every weekend to be with him. She was pregnant at the time, about four months in, having conceived the baby not long before Roy left for Vietnam. On some of her first visits, Roy was barely conscious. He didn’t even remember all the times she came, and he later admitted that he took her visits for granted. As Roy’s mind slowly returned, he and Lala would sit in the hospital and talk. There wasn’t much else they could do. Roy could use a wheelchair, but they couldn’t get far outside the walls of the hospital.43
Some of the men around Roy were much worse off. By March of 1966, the United States had lost roughly 2,200 men killed and another 10,500 wounded in the war. As Roy later wrote, “The human debris of Vietnam was beginning to wash up on the shores of America.… I saw human beings with wounds so severe it was unbelievable they were still alive.” Next to Roy in the hospital were men who were badly burned and others who had lost arms and legs. As injured as Roy was, at least he was alive and his limbs were intact.44
But Roy was also deeply afraid. He was unable to move his legs, and the prognosis was unpromising. His doctors told him that he might never regain the ability to walk. If that were true, then Roy’s time in the military was over. Grateful as he was to have survived the explosion, he was terrified at the prospect of going back to El Campo in a wheelchair. He had first joined the armed forces nearly fourteen years earlier, desperately seeking a pathway toward a brighter future. The Army had provided an escape from the poverty and prejudice of his youth. With his injury, he faced the possibility of losing his livelihood.45
Still only thirty years old, Roy began to imagine life back home as a permanently disabled Hispanic man. His mind raced to other peoples’ perceptions and concerns about what they might say: “Bet he shot himself in the foot just so he could get that check,” he imagined his white neighbors griping. “Heck, they’re all the same, even too lazy to steal. Except from the gov’ment.” What could he possibly become, he wondered, especially if he were no longer able to walk? “Without the Army,” he wrote, “I felt that I had no future.”46
Roy turned to God. He had been raised in a religious family, with his aunt Alexandria forming the backbone of their family’s Catholicism. That time in the hospital deepened his commitment. While recovering, Roy spent a great deal of time in the chapel. He was so inwardly focused on his own predicament that he had trouble connecting with others. Roy was fixated on “what my life had become,” he remembered. Sitting in the chapel, he found in God a good listener at a time when “the doctors didn’t listen, and the therapists didn’t listen, and when Lala just couldn’t listen anymore.” He later wrote that he began to understand his survival as a gift—or at least a sign—of some type of divine intervention to save him for some greater cause. “I began to believe that my life had been spared for some purpose,” he remembered.47
As April turned into May, Roy worked through his physical therapy. His recovery started with hydrotherapy in the pool. He began to learn how to live in his wheelchair. Roy endured these lessons, but he adamantly refused to believe that he wouldn’t be able to walk again, and he could not bring himself to concede that his time in the Army was finished, even as he knew that the physicians in the hospital doubted his ability to reenter the service. It seemed to him like only a matter of time until he was medically discharged and placed on permanent retirement due to disability. He imagined being “back in El Campo sitting in a wheelchair on the front porch,” he wrote. He begged the doctors for their patience in making their final judgments about his future in the Army.48
Meanwhile, Roy began to take therapy into his own hands, supplementing his guided physical therapy with some training of his own. Every night when the lights went out, Roy waited for the nurses and doctors to leave so he could try to stand and walk. The first night, he rolled out of bed and hit the ground “with a crunch,” he remembered. The head nurse “chewed me out,” he wrote, and orderlies lifted him back into bed. On the second night, Roy once again hit the floor, but he then managed to use his arms to drag his body to the opposite wall, where the hospital staff found him leaning the next day. “I got my butt chewed out again,” he remembered.49
On the third night, Roy tumbled out of bed again. He made it back to the wall and reached his hands up to grab onto adjacent nightstands, using the tables to pull his body upright into a standing position. He recalled himself “just sort of hanging there” until he tried to put weight on his feet. When he did, “a burning pain shot through my back…,” he remembered, “like I’d been stabbed with a red-hot knife.” He again collapsed to the floor, where the hospital staff found him the following morning.50
This struggle continued night after night. Some of the other men in the hospital were so amused by the night crawling that they joked about placing bets on how far Roy would make it. “Every night, I got knocked down,” Roy explained. “Every night I got back up again.… The pain was like nothing I could have ever dreamed about.” But Roy continued to push forward, showing slow but steady progress. One night, he was finally able to stand. On another night, he was able to move his toes. Eventually, he managed to perform a little shuffle with his back against the wall.51
As Roy remembers it, the doctors came close to recommending he be discharged from the service. Even after he was able to convince them that he might walk again, they still held doubts about his ability to remain in the Army. But Roy convinced them to hold off on the formal recommendation of separation, aided by testimonies of the other hospitalized soldiers who had witnessed the progress of his night moves. At one desperate point, Roy was speaking with a doctor about his health when he managed to turn his body and stand up beside his bed to convince the physician of his progress.52
That May, Roy formally began therapy to help him regain the ability to walk. He later credited his painful nighttime physical therapy for his recovery. It was a remedy that teetered on the impossible, but from that point on, it became part of a mythology about Roy’s grit and determination. However it happened, Roy did indeed start to improve dramatically. And that May, he walked out of the hospital with Lala on his arm.53