CHAPTER 6

SOJOURN

In the spring of 1966, Roy and Lala returned to Fort Bragg. During the months Roy was fighting in Vietnam and hospitalized in San Antonio, Lala had lived in the couple’s trailer in El Campo. That trailer had moved with them all over the country, logging “more miles going from post to post than most people travel in a lifetime,” Roy wrote. It was an important place of solace for their family, the one spot in a chaotic world where they could spend private time together in peace. “No matter where we were,” Roy remembered of their travels, “when I opened that door I was home.” They settled in a small neighborhood of mobile homes located just south of Fort Bragg and began to prepare to welcome a new baby into their family. Just over four months after Roy nearly died, he and Lala were blessed with a new life. The couple’s first child, Denise, was born in Fayetteville, North Carolina, on July 31, 1966, at the Womack Army Medical Center.1

In the summer of 1966, Fort Bragg was abuzz with men preparing for war. By the time Roy returned, Fort Bragg was churning out ten thousand combat-ready soldiers per month. That summer, a visiting reporter described Bragg as “a maze of dirt roads” occupied by “barrel chested, broad shouldered, neat and clean officers” who conducted their duties beneath “thunderous anti-tank guns blasting at splintered targets.”2

America’s war in Vietnam was expanding. When Roy first went there in December of 1965, 181,000 American soldiers were stationed in the country. Within a year, that number would swell to roughly 385,000. Operation Rolling Thunder wasn’t nearly as effective as military officials had hoped, and it was becoming increasingly clear that a quick victory was out of reach. After the US military dropped 128,000 tons of bombs in 1966, a confidential December report concluded, “There is no evidence at present that economically and politically Hanoi should not be able to withstand the long, hard war it professes to have in mind.”3

Meanwhile, the country Roy was fighting for was undergoing immense changes. The mid-1960s saw a revolution of race in America. Black communities across the American South launched a massive civil rights movement, drawing together a multiracial coalition whose greatest gains were realized in the passages of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. These monumental pieces of legislation made racial segregation in public spaces illegal, thus eliminating the most visible components of the Southern Jim Crow system of racial apartheid. Hispanic kids like Roy no longer had to sit in the back of movie theaters or wait outside of restaurants that refused to serve non-white customers. Roy didn’t say much about his thoughts on the matter, but these profound changes meant that his and Lala’s children would not have to grow up facing the same humiliations that so deeply shaped Roy’s own childhood.

The Black Southern Civil Rights Movement helped inspire similar movements among Hispanic Americans. LULAC and the American GI Forum operated at the center of a growing Latino civil rights movement that fought for school desegregation, higher agricultural wages, and immigrant rights. By the late 1960s, a new generation of Hispanic activists, many calling themselves Chicanos, had launched a more militant movement than the previous generation, demanding not only basic civil rights but also land reform, anti-poverty policies, and political representation. Roy was not directly involved with the civil rights protests of that era, but he and his family were certainly affected by improving racial conditions in the United States. For his part, Roy and a few other Hispanic non-commissioned officers were involved with a group called “Club Latino” that organized Hispanic heritage events at American military bases.4

According to the Army, roughly eighty thousand Hispanic soldiers served in the Vietnam War. The precise numbers are difficult to track because the Army usually counted them as white, and Hispanic Americans themselves derived from very diverse backgrounds. They also had divergent views on the war that changed over time. Early in the Vietnam War, some of the major figures in both the American GI Forum and LULAC expressed support for American involvement. In a 1967 letter to Lyndon B. Johnson, American GI Forum founder Dr. Héctor Garcia wrote, “As far as I know the majority if not the total Mexican-American people approve of your present course of action in Vietnam.” Other members of the American GI Forum publicly demonstrated in Los Angeles and Austin in support of the war. In 1968, the GI Forum helped sponsor Spanish-speaking musicians who flew to Vietnam to perform for Hispanic troops. “Our men are 100 percent with our government,” reported one of the entertainers. The GI Forum supported Latino soldiers by maintaining a list of Hispanic casualties, greeting Gold Star families, and attending the funerals of servicemen killed in action. As in World War II, Hispanic supporters of American involvement in Vietnam argued that military service should translate to more inclusion at home.5

But there were also plenty of dissidents, especially as the war grew more unpopular in later years. The Chicano Movement that emerged in the 1960s was deeply connected to the anti-war movement and included Hispanic veterans. They, too, launched demonstrations, marching against the war and picketing Army induction centers. Anti-war Chicano activists held teach-ins, sponsored lectures, and produced pamphlets arguing for Hispanic males to resist military service. It was a significant movement, especially in California, where the most militant activists sported brown berets and depicted themselves as soldiers against the war. In 1970, the California branch of the American GI Forum broke with the national organization by passing a resolution opposing the war. Much like among the rest of the country, there was no single Hispanic American opinion on the war, with reactions ranging from full support to outright anti-government revolt.6

Those Latinos who fought in the armed forces reported experiences fairly typical of American soldiers. Most of them enlisted voluntarily. They had limited political consciousness going into the military but were nevertheless patriotic and deeply committed to helping their country defeat the perceived evils of communism. Like generations before them, they were patriots who thought military service would help improve their conditions at home. As a whole, they reported fewer racial conflicts in the military than they had experienced back at home, as racial conflict was mitigated by the pressing need for teamwork in the face of warfare. Non-white soldiers in noncombat jobs reported more racial discrimination than those on the front lines. Similar to other veterans, the experience of the war often soured their view of American foreign policy and made them more politically conscious. As one scholar has observed, “The great majority went to Vietnam believing they were doing the right thing and were disillusioned when they saw the reality of the war.” Those who arrived later tended to be more skeptical. All Hispanic American soldiers and veterans were deeply affected by the war itself and the political context of anti-war protests.7

At Fort Bragg, Roy was assigned to a special detail that essentially made him an administrative assistant. He was still recovering from his injuries, so the Army tasked him with clerical office duties. He was among the many thousands of active soldiers charged with piloting documents through the immense bureaucracy of an army at war. “I was handling benefits and problems for the families of my buddies who were off fighting in Vietnam,” he remembered. “It was an important job, and I was doing it.”8

But Roy did not like the work. He was a combat veteran, a grizzled, hardworking blue-collar fighter who felt remorse that his brothers-in-arms were fighting half a world away while he was nestled safely behind a desk in the United States. The ease of his job offered him little internal peace, as he was gravely concerned about his friends at war. “I was a warrior, not a clerk,” he remembered. “Sitting at that desk was like sitting in a prison for me.”9

Physically speaking, Roy’s back remained a major problem. Excruciating pain was a “constant companion,” he remembered. And his mind was clouded by side effects brought on by the painkillers he took to manage his agony. Roy was on Darvon, an opioid released in 1955 to help patients manage moderate pain. Darvon is a once-popular but dangerous drug that was later banned in the United States and Europe due to dangerous side effects it can have on a patient’s heart. These risks were largely unknown when Roy was taking the drug in the mid-1960s, but physicians at the time did suspect that Darvon could be addictive, and they knew that it causes brain fog, memory loss, drowsiness, and a host of other side effects that can mentally impair users.10

Roy was taking an excessive amount of Darvon, self-diagnosing his dosage based on the extent of his daily pain. At a time when most doctors recommended patients take no more than six hundred milligrams in twenty-four hours, Roy reported ingesting as much as 1,500 milligrams per day. He took the pills as needed, and he typically ended his working days with a visit to the Non Commissioned Officers Club, where he would have several drinks before driving home to his wife and newborn daughter. “It’s really amazing I never killed myself on that short drive,” he later reflected, but he needed something to manage the pain. His physical discomfort was just as crippling, if not worse, than the risks of the drug.11

A visit to a local doctor likely saved him. Whenever Roy was in a lot of pain, he would see a Fayetteville physician who was willing to treat him without a formal appointment. This local doctor told Roy that the pills and his drinking were creating a dangerous cocktail that could lead to addiction and other severe health problems. Roy was never one to be very careful about his own health, but his greatest fear was being discharged from the Army, so he resolved to quit Darvon. He claimed that he left pills sitting in that doctor’s office and quit cold turkey.12

Roy needed to train. He had undergone physical therapy to learn to walk again, but his body required additional work to recover more fully. The pills were a temporary solution; he needed to build strength and flexibility to improve his condition. “Your back and legs are cramped up tighter than a drum,” the doctor had told him. “The pills are just masking it. You’ve got to stretch those injured muscles and build them back up again.” After finally being confronted with the realities of his recovery, Roy started working out. Each morning, he woke up early to run and lift weights at the gym. At the beginning, the pain was “unrelenting,” he wrote, but it gradually began to improve. He would never again live completely free of pain, but the exercise helped.13

Roy’s desk duty was untenable. He was no clerk. America was at war, and Roy at thirty-one years old was still in the prime of his fighting life. He was in a tough spot, wanting to train but also feeling as if he needed to hide the severity of his injuries to protect his enlistment. Fort Bragg was crawling with men soon off to war. The Army needed fighters, not desk jockeys. So long as he wasn’t training with his peers, the threat of dischargement hovered in the back of his mind. Roy knew he had to become a soldier again.14

On a warm Saturday morning that September, Roy had walked out to retrieve his newspaper when he spotted a friendly neighbor who was in one of the airborne units. That morning, this neighbor was scheduled to go to a training session and cajoled Roy to join him. “Come on, Hoss,” Roy remembered his friend telling him, “I see you running every morning, you’re in great shape. At least come along and keep me company.” Never one to back down from peer pressure, Roy agreed to go along.15

When they arrived at the drop zone, Roy stood off to the side while a hundred or so men began to prepare to load onto helicopters for their jumps. According to Roy, these men were office workers who had little time to train during the week and needed to complete drills on the weekend to remain jump certified and thus entitled to an extra fifty-five dollars per month in pay.16

As Roy watched, he thought about jumping himself. He knew his body wasn’t ready. No commander would have signed off on him jumping, and he was terrified of the pain that would shoot through his body when he tried to land. But that day also presented him with the chance to do some real training for the first time in months. No one at the jump site knew the full extent of his injuries. As Roy stood there watching and thinking, an unknowing sergeant slapped him on the back and asked, “You jumpin’ or what?” Roy reacted. He told the man he would jump, and the sergeant assigned him to a group scheduled to go up in about forty minutes.17

But Roy couldn’t just board a helicopter and jump. He had been on special duty and needed the signature of a commanding officer to authorize his participation. With only a few minutes to resolve this dilemma, Roy got an idea. He sauntered over to another sergeant running the drills and offered the man a cold drink, volunteering to hold the officer’s clipboard to give the man a short break. There was nothing out of the ordinary about this nice gesture, just one soldier helping out another on a hot North Carolina day. The sergeant thanked Roy for the thoughtful suggestion and walked off to enjoy his refreshment. Roy flipped through the paperwork in the clipboard until he found a “refresher slip,” which he quickly completed with his own information and backdated by several weeks. He then forged the signature of an officer who had recently left for Vietnam. That falsified form gave Roy the approval he needed to jump.18

Roy jumped three times that day. The first jump went very poorly. His technique was awful, and he somehow managed to set himself in such an odd position that his body spun in the wind like a top. It was an egregious mistake that not even a rookie jumper should make. These were simple jumps for experienced airborne soldiers. Dropping a thousand feet from a stationary helicopter in North Carolina is much easier than jumping out of an airplane flying over a combat zone. Roy called these trainings “the easiest jump that is ever made.” A sergeant rushed over and chastised Roy’s embarrassingly poor jump. “He was furious,” Roy admitted.19

After such an abysmal attempt, Roy felt compelled to execute a proper jump, and he got back in line. This time, his neighbor—the one person on the scene who did have some inkling of Roy’s physical condition—ran over to question Roy. “He thought I was crazy,” Roy recalled, “and he said as much.” Roy went anyway. His technique was better on the second jump, but he landed on his butt, which sent a shockwave of pain through his body. Nevertheless, he felt much better about his performance. “Even with the pain I felt like a soldier again,” he wrote. The third jump was excellent. Roy was once again jump certified. He and the neighbor celebrated with a cold beer and a few gulps of whiskey.20

Lala was furious. “Benavidez!” she yelled, “you’re not supposed to be jumping. You’re going to kill yourself.” Lala was rightfully worried. But she also only knew a third of it. Roy told her he jumped, but he didn’t tell her he jumped three times. The hasty decision paid off. Roy earned the extra fifty-five dollars per month, and had taken a major step forward in convincing both Lala and himself that he was capable of going back into action. After feeling like “the walls of that office were closing in on me,” by September of 1966 Roy was beginning to feel more confident in his ability to resume his full duties as a soldier.21

As late summer turned into autumn, Roy continued his desk job at Fort Bragg. Those months were relatively uneventful. His health was improving, and he performed his duties well. That fall, letters from his superiors commended Roy for “the cheerful willingness with which you accepted each separate duty” and “the purposeful determination with which you set about the accomplishment of that duty.” “The fine quality of your leadership,” wrote one captain, “is evidenced by the high esteem in which you are held by your superiors and subordinates alike.” In November, Roy was invited to deliver a lecture on “personal affairs” to a group of men preparing to head overseas. He did such a wonderful job that a lieutenant colonel and a major general sent him personal notes expressing their “appreciation” and thanking him for “a job well done.” But Roy remained hungry for more.22

Shortly before his first tour in Vietnam, Roy had applied to join the Army’s Special Forces, a group of elite soldiers commonly known as the Green Berets. Created in 1952, the Green Berets were developed specifically for the unique needs of a global Cold War. They first saw combat in Korea in 1953 and in subsequent years deployed to faraway places across the globe, fighting not just in America’s well-known conflicts like Vietnam but also in remote hot spots beyond the purview of the American public. Mobilized for special missions, Green Berets were trained in unconventional warfare. Their methods involved psychological operations, guerilla mobilization, and counterinsurgency tactics. Working in stealth, Green Berets were at once fighters, teachers, linguists, and negotiators. Their motto is “To Liberate the Oppressed.”23

In 1966, there were 10,500 Green Berets stationed in Japan, Vietnam, Germany, Panama, and Fort Bragg, which is where they trained. That year, a song titled “Ballad of the Green Berets” spent five weeks atop the pop music charts, selling approximately nine million singles and albums. The previous year, a novel titled The Green Berets had sold nearly three million copies and was acquired to be adapted into a film starring John Wayne. At a time when few civilians understood the nature of the fighting in Vietnam, Green Berets became the nation’s first heroes of the war. Millions of radio listeners sang along with the lyrics telling the story of the “Fighting soldiers from the sky,” so goes the song, and the “Fearless men who jump and die.” In those years, dozens of American newspapers and magazines published feature articles chronicling the Green Berets’ training and special missions. The Saturday Evening Post called them the “Harvard Ph.D.’s of warfare.” Department stores across the United States carried replicas of their famous headwear. Few civilians knew what they actually did, but at the time, the Green Berets were probably the most famous and celebrated fighting force on Earth.24

Becoming a Green Beret was difficult. These were professional soldiers, typically volunteers whose entrance into the Army predated America’s first major battles in Vietnam. They were older, fitter, and more learned than the average soldier. All of them were required to be jump qualified and conversant in at least two languages. Roy called them “the elite of the elite.” According to him, roughly seventy percent of those who tried failed to join. He was determined to be among the 30 percent who succeeded.25

Roy’s initial application to become a Green Beret was lost somewhere in the Army’s ocean of bureaucracy. But as an office clerk, he had access to forms. According to Roy, he re-created the long-lost documents needed for his admission, forging the signatures, backdating the information, and even “aging” the documents by folding and wetting and drying the paperwork. Within a month, he was accepted into the training group at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg.26

The Special Forces training facilities were quite nice. Just two years earlier, the facility had added brand-new headquarters and an academic building that cost a combined $2 million. Another $15 million funded new barracks, mess halls, and administrative offices. A trainee who passed through the center not long after Roy described the accommodations as “modern brick buildings resembling college dormitories.” “Our quarters were immaculate,” this trainee observed, “with brightly painted walls and tiled floors.”27

Special Forces training was designed to prepare soldiers for the mental and physical stress of isolated combat conditions. The trainees spent days in the forest, humping across miles of North Carolina swamps and hills, all while carrying dozens of pounds on their backs. These trainees had to be self-sufficient and capable of surviving in the wilderness, so their gear was inspected before training missions to ensure they carried no extra supplies. Operating in twelve-man A-Teams, they had to catch and kill their own food—chickens, deer, rabbits, and goats. They’d march dozens of miles out into the dense forest to complete complex simulated missions that required precise navigation and survival skills and were complicated by impromptu challenges. The missions could change at any time, as Army sergeants presented some new unforeseen obstacle. A mock ambush or new intelligence might alter their objective and extend missions by hours or even days. This was deadly serious training. If a sentry fell asleep on overnight guard duty, the sergeants might awaken the entire unit and force them to dig six-foot graves to simulate having to bury their dead comrades. The soldiers’ minds were clouded by the fog of starvation and exhaustion, and their bodies were riddled with soreness and pain. It was extremely difficult, and a lot of very athletic and intelligent men washed out. Realistically, the only reason Roy physically had a chance was because the Army was at war and desperately needed more men for these roles.28

Roy began his Special Forces training in February of 1967. He was a staff sergeant, so he was charged with not only learning himself but also leading men of a lesser rank. “The training was tough,” Roy remembered. The men ran miles each day with weighted vests and finished with calisthenics. They “ran obstacle courses” and “made parachute jumps.” They spent weeks at a time in the woods, surviving only on what they could find or kill to eat. Roy was in “a lot of pain,” he recalled. “My back ached constantly. The truth was, I should have still been in physical therapy in a hospital, not physical training for Special Forces.” But each day he somehow forced himself to complete the training. It was a testament to his resolve.29

Green Berets learned at least as much in the classroom as in the field. “My commanders,” Roy remembered, “expected me to study like a college student.” He felt left behind because of his lack of education. Roy had earned his GED, but he had never been in classes with so many intelligent men, some of whom held college degrees. For Roy, the classes in weapons, organizational behavior, combat tactics, meteorology, and oceanography were very challenging and required a lot of studying. There was so much to consume. Green Berets were trained for unusual circumstances in extraordinarily dangerous places. They needed to be able to operate as one-man units, capable of survival in almost any setting imaginable. Such a need required lessons in psychology, propaganda, and infiltration techniques. A Green Beret was expected to be capable of organizing a group of villagers into a team of guerilla fighters. They had to be competent teachers of not only soldiers but also indigenous civilians. Green Berets spent as much as an entire week just learning about methods of instruction. “If you cannot learn to teach,” one Special Forces master sergeant advised in the late 1960s, “there’s no room for you in SF.”30

Special Forces soldiers were trained broadly, but each man also specialized in at least one major discipline. Roy prequalified to concentrate in intelligence or light and heavy weapons. He chose intelligence because “it was probably best for my army career since NCO’s were usually promoted faster in that area.” But he then switched to the weapons course before coming back to learn intelligence. In the weapons course, Roy learned how to use “every firearm imaginable, regardless of how basic or how lethal it was.” Green Berets in the field might have to use the tools of the enemy to fight. In some of their missions, they weren’t even allowed to take American weapons into combat. In intelligence, Roy learned how to gather and disseminate information about foreign troops and populations, and he studied critical tactics that taught him how to handle prisoners of war and classified documents.31

Roy spent twenty-five weeks training with the Special Forces Training Group and eight weeks learning his specialties in the classroom. During that time, his six-year enlistment expired, and he received a nine-month extension before committing to another six-year enlistment upon the completion of his training. In November of 1967, Roy officially joined the Army Special Forces as an operations and intelligence sergeant. After graduation, one of the commanding officers commended Roy for “attention to duty, devotion, loyalty, and knowledge” as well as “superior abilities particularly during the period of time you worked as a platoon Sgt.”32

At that time, Army Special Forces were operating not only in Vietnam but also in Latin America. Throughout the late 1960s, Green Berets were sent into Panama, Honduras, Ecuador, and Venezuela to provide aid to American-friendly governments who were trying to stave off socialist revolutions. Especially after the problems with Fidel Castro in Cuba in the early 1960s, American leaders sought to restrict the spread of any Marxist revolutionary movement in Latin America. Between 1964 and 1966 alone, United States Army Special Forces carried out a reported 247 missions in Latin America. “We’re the work horse of the Southern Command,” an unnamed Green Beret officer told a reporter. “We aren’t putting out brush fires in Latin America, but we are trying to keep any more from starting.”33

Roy in his Green Beret uniform. Courtesy of the Benavidez family.

Green Berets in Latin America usually served as advisors for various government entities. Their duties included teaching locals how to construct infrastructure, such as roads and water systems, and how to set up safe lines of communication. The vast majority of the Green Berets sent to Latin America spoke Spanish or Portuguese or both. They operated in small teams of fifteen, making them extremely mobile. These covert actions were largely classified, but the appearance of Green Berets in places like Guatemala sporadically appeared in American newspapers.34

According to Roy, his first duties with Special Forces took him on brief classified missions to Panama, Honduras, and Ecuador. Bilingual and Hispanic, Roy was an ideal soldier to serve in Spanish-speaking countries. Because these missions were classified, little is known about the details of his duties, excepting that he was doing exactly what the Special Forces had trained him to do: working with American-friendly groups to thwart potential revolutions started by what they termed “unfriendly guerillas.” Having been such a great fit for duty in Latin America, Roy thought he might be assigned to Venezuela long-term. “I was so sure of myself,” he remembered, “I even told Lala.” But the Army had other plans.35

The situation in Southeast Asia was much more pressing. By the time Roy finished his Special Forces training in the autumn of 1967, the United States was facing a military stalemate in Vietnam and losing public support for the war. Even as troop levels increased to 465,000, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in November of 1967 privately warned the president, “Continuing on our present course will not bring us by the end of 1968 enough closer to success, in the eyes of the American public, to prevent erosion of popular support for our involvement in Vietnam.” It was a dim but honest view. McNamara warned the president that continuing the current strategy would result in “between 700 and 1,000 US killed in action every month” without making any real progress to show the American public. The United States was not necessarily losing the war in Vietnam, but it was also clearly not winning it anytime soon. “There is, in my opinion,” McNamara continued, “a very real question whether under these circumstances it will be possible to maintain our efforts in South Vietnam for the time necessary to accomplish our objectives there.” The Johnson administration did not share this analysis with the American people, but the future of the conflict looked increasingly bleak toward the end of 1967.36

Of particular concern to the Johnson administration was the ongoing infiltration of enemy soldiers and supplies into South Vietnam by way of Cambodia and Laos. The North Vietnamese managed to evade American forces largely by using the border regions of Laos and Cambodia to smuggle goods and troops into South Vietnam. The North Vietnamese would not have been able to continue fighting the war without these safe havens and resupply routes. The most famous of these paths was the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which by the late 1960s bore little resemblance to the familiar images of mud-soaked, barefoot porters struggling to carry supplies on their backs and bikes. By then, the Ho Chi Minh Trail had been developed into a complex series of roads on which thousands of large trucks carried tons of supplies.37

The Sihanouk Trail was nearly as troubling. Unlike the Ho Chi Minh Trail that ran from North Vietnam through the sparsely populated Laotian Annamite Mountain Range, the Sihanouk Trail originated in southwestern Cambodia and ran through major population centers in the middle of the country, including the capital at Phnom Penh.38

The Sihanouk Trail was named for Norodom Sihanouk, the enigmatic leader of Cambodia who was facing his own series of internal and external crises that shaped his relationship with the United States. Sihanouk was a monarch who first took the throne in 1941 and helped lead Cambodia through World War II and the waning days of French colonial rule before Cambodia achieved independence in November of 1953.39

In the wake of French rule, Sihanouk wanted to ensure that Cambodia remain neutral amid a rapidly escalating global Cold War. But the United States, which was not a signing member of the Geneva Accords, attempted to pressure Cambodia to join SEATO, the treaty created in the wake of the Geneva Accords to establish an alliance of American protectorates in Southeast Asia. Cambodia’s participation in the Geneva Accords barred it from joining such a military alliance, but the United States continued to push Sihanouk, promising aid to Cambodia and warning that neutrality in a global conflict was not an option. As Sihanouk tried to navigate relationships with superpowers, he also worked to stave off internal threats from both communist and anti-communist Cambodian organizations that wanted to steer the nation into the orbit of either the North Vietnamese and Chinese communists or the United States and its anti-communist allies.40

Sihanouk was trapped between all sides of the global Cold War. Struggling to maintain Cambodian neutrality as war escalated in Vietnam, Sihanouk initially accepted aid from both the United States and China, but his relationship with America deteriorated in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In 1959, Sihanouk’s administration believed they uncovered an American-backed plot to assassinate him when a package sent to his palace exploded, killing a member of his cabinet. According to Sihanouk, the box was traced to an American base in South Vietnam. Increasingly suspicious, Sihanouk believed that the United States CIA wanted to kill him to install an American-friendly dictator in Cambodia. He later accused the United States of trying to assassinate him on three separate occasions in 1959 and a fourth in 1963. “The CIA never stopped working behind the scenes to bring about my death,” he insisted in a 1972 book titled My War with the CIA. In 1963, Sihanouk decided to stop receiving aid from the United States in the interest of “preserving national dignity.”41

The following year, Sihanouk struck a secret deal with the North Vietnamese to allow the movement of Chinese military supplies through Cambodia in exchange for financial restitution and munitions. By then, he had come to believe that the American-backed South Vietnamese government would lose its war against North Vietnam, and he wanted to ensure his own regime’s survival in the wake of what he considered to be America’s looming departure from the region. Key to Cambodian sovereignty, Sihanouk believed, would be a good relationship with communist China and communist North Vietnam. In other words, Sihanouk thought he was betting on the winner.42

As the war between North and South Vietnam escalated in the early 1960s, violence spilled over the border into Cambodia. In the spring of 1964, the South Vietnamese Army orchestrated an attack on a Cambodian village that resulted in the deaths of seventeen civilians. That October, some unknown group shot down an American aircraft in Cambodian airspace, killing eight American servicemen. A United States spokesman blamed the intrusion on a “map-reading error.” But by then, Cambodia’s leaders had had enough. The Cambodian government openly denounced America’s support of South Vietnamese incursions into their territory and displayed the American plane’s wreckage in a public exhibition in Phnom Penh.43

In April of 1965, an estimated twenty thousand Cambodians joined demonstrations at the United States embassy in Phnom Penh. Protesters tore down and burnt the embassy’s American flag and hurled projectiles through the building’s windows. A few days later, Sihanouk went on Cambodian national radio to publicly announce the “breaking [of] diplomatic relations with the United States.” There was a last-ditch effort, supported by the Soviet Union and China, to form a conference on Cambodian neutrality, but Sihanouk was so aggravated by the attacks on Cambodian soil and a Newsweek article criticizing his family, especially his mother, that he decided to break off diplomatic relations with the United States altogether.44

But this move created further problems for Sihanouk because it freed the communist nations to use Cambodian territory however they wanted. Although Sihanouk had allowed North Vietnamese forces to operate in Cambodia, he began to worry that a victorious North Vietnam might further infringe on Cambodian territory, thus threatening the very sovereignty he sought to protect. His only hope was that China would help settle ongoing border disputes, but Sihanouk’s leverage with the Chinese government waned after he cut off diplomatic relations with the United States. The Chinese communists no longer had to worry about Cambodia becoming an American protectorate and could thus abuse Cambodia however they wanted. In trying to save his regime, Sihanouk had deeply compromised Cambodian neutrality by essentially picking a side.45

Meanwhile, the war was changing, causing Sihanouk to begin doubting his initial conclusions about the eventual winner. Like most people, Sihanouk had no idea how many troops the United States would be willing to commit to the defense of South Vietnam. As hundreds of thousands of American soldiers entered the ground war, Sihanouk began to consider the possibility that the communists wouldn’t win after all. Floating unmoored between world and regional powers, Sihanouk’s only clear path toward the maintenance of a sovereign Cambodian nation with him at the head was to seek recognition of Cambodian neutrality in the international community, even as North Vietnamese forces continued using Cambodian territory to transport weapons and stage attacks into South Vietnam. By that point, Sihanouk was virtually powerless to stop them. As a CIA report concluded in 1966, “Sihanouk has also become a prisoner, in a way, of his own past policies.”46

In December of 1967, the CIA reported that a privately owned trucking company based out of Phnom Penh was picking up Chinese arms and ammunition at the port city of Sihanoukville and transporting these goods through the hilly jungles of rural Cambodia to Phnom Penh. After stopping at a warehouse in Phnom Penh, the trucks traveled under the cover of night with protection from Cambodian armed forces to the Vietnamese border. After crossing the border, the trucks traveled another fifteen miles inside of South Vietnam to a base where their cargos were distributed to the communist forces. This was a very big problem for the United States military. These materials were being used to kill Americans and undermine the nation’s global quest against communism.47

In addition to Chinese weapons, the CIA in 1967 reported that ships from the Soviet Union, Cyprus, and Denmark had delivered thirty-three thousand tons of “military equipment” to Sihanoukville, including ammunition, artillery, rockets, howitzers, automatic weapons, small arms, and even several fighter jets. Other reports indicated deliveries of rice and cement. That fall, the CIA received intelligence that a Greek freighter had delivered more than ten thousand tons of “ammunition and weapons, a large number of South Vietnamese and US military uniforms, and a small amount of medical supplies.” Even everyday civilians were helping the North Vietnamese war effort. Cambodian farmers were selling up to one-quarter of the nation’s rice harvest to North Vietnamese insurgents and using elephants to transport crops through the jungle to the soldiers.48

All this intelligence raised serious questions about Cambodian neutrality. The North Vietnamese undoubtably were using Cambodia to stage military attacks. At best, Sihanouk’s government was an unwitting participant in the transportation of materials to the communist forces. At worst, elements of Sihanouk’s government were actively engaged in helping the NLF fight against the United States and its South Vietnamese allies. Either way, by the autumn of 1967, the United States warned the South Vietnamese prime minister, “The increased danger posed by Viet Cong and North Vietnamese use of Cambodia has caused us concern that such use is reaching an intolerable level.”49

Yet, Sihanouk denied the presence of North Vietnamese forces in Cambodia. In December of 1967, he insisted to an American journalist, “I am skeptical about the possibility that Vietnamese forces of any size could be maintained in deserted, inhospitable areas [of Cambodia] difficult to supply with food.” He admitted that NLF troops had occasionally entered Cambodian territory but asserted that they only stayed “a few hours” before leaving. He also called the Sihanouk Trail “pure fiction.” That November, when three American journalists claimed to have found an abandoned NLF camp in Cambodia, Sihanouk rejected their claims and announced a nationwide ban of “all American journalists, no matter who they are.”50

With so many internal and external forces at play, Sihanouk’s Cambodia was, as he put it, “caught between the hammer and the anvil.” The only body that he knew wouldn’t try to depose him was the International Control Commission (ICC), the organization charged with overseeing the implementation of the Geneva Accords. Led by representatives from India, Poland, and Canada, the ICC had the authority to send observers into Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia to ensure the integrity of the agreements. But their reach was somewhat limited to the cities and not the vast rural areas of the Cambodian-Vietnamese border that stretches over seven hundred miles. When ICC teams did examine rural parts of Cambodia, news of their approach reached the NLF well before the inspectors arrived, allowing for plenty of time to pack up camps and erase traces of their presence. The United States was also skeptical of inspectors from India and Poland because of those nations’ relationships with the Soviet Union.51

As Sihanouk denied the true nature of North Vietnamese forces in Cambodia, he also promised retaliation if the United States ever invaded or attacked Cambodia. “If serious incursions or bombings were perpetuated against our border areas…,” he promised, “we would not hesitate to send to the area everything available in the form of airplanes, tanks, and infantry.” “There would be fighting,” Sihanouk asserted.52

Even more threatening, Sihanouk insisted that fighting against Americans would lead him to request “increased aid” “from friendly powers, particularly China and the Soviet Union.” He also suggested that Cambodia could appeal to China and North Korea for troops who could be used “under Cambodian command” to expel American forces. In another speech, Sihanouk promised to “lodge a complaint with the [UN] Security Council because we are entitled by the UN Charter.” “I will go to the United States,” he promised, “to bring about action against the Americans in their own country.” “I will go there myself,” he vowed, “to make a great speech to inform the world of the acts of the Americans who have come to subdue Indochina contrary to international law.” “It is up to Russia,” he argued, “to support Cambodia effectively and strongly by warning the Americans against attacking Cambodia.” That same month, a CIA report revealed that the Soviet Union had indeed promised to come to Sihanouk’s aid “if the United States should ‘attack’ Cambodia.” Sihanouk was suggesting that the presence of American troops in Cambodia could lead to the start of World War III.53

Meanwhile, America’s military leaders were more deeply concerned about the war they were already in. They had to find a way to stop the infiltration of goods and soldiers into South Vietnam from Cambodia. In December of 1967, General William Westmoreland, the commander of American forces in Vietnam, requested permission for seventy-two hours of “high intensity tactical air strikes” over suspected NLF sanctuaries in Cambodia. Westmoreland was endlessly frustrated that he was prevented from using American firepower to counteract the enemy’s usage of Cambodia. “Had the dissenting students, editorialists, and legislators,” he later sniped, “been on the receiving end of some of those Soviet rockets or other lethal hardware that came through Cambodia, as were their compatriots in uniform, their indignation might have been considerably more muted.” Still, Westmoreland understood the potential diplomatic and international repercussions of such attacks, arguing that the bombing could be completed at night and remain limited to remote areas near the border.54

The White House considered Westmoreland’s request to bomb rural areas of Cambodia but ultimately rejected the idea due to obvious “political problems involved, both foreign and domestic,” wrote the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Yet, the Joint Chiefs concluded that it was “essential that the United States increase political pressure on Prince Sihanouk to take more aggressive action to deny use of this and other sanctuary areas of Cambodia by VC/NVA forces.”55

To “increase political pressure on Prince Sihanouk,” the United States needed to gather evidence verifying the extensive nature of North Vietnamese activities in Cambodia. To gather such definitive evidence, America’s leaders decided to send their own troops into Cambodia to study and observe enemy movements in the “neutral” country. But they couldn’t just march a division across the border; that would precipitate an international and domestic crisis. What the American military needed was a covert force of elite warriors who could be inserted behind enemy lines and blend unseen into the countryside for days at a time while gathering evidence of North Vietnamese military activities. The United States military did indeed possess such a force, and it had been preparing thousands of men for exactly these uniquely dangerous and highly sensitive missions. Those men were known as the Green Berets, and by late fall of 1967, Roy Benavidez was one of them.56

While Roy was training and studying to become a Green Beret, the Cambodian border situation was becoming increasingly chaotic. In December of 1967, as the United States was considering bombing parts of Cambodia and Sihanouk was warning his own congress that Americans were “planning to kill Cambodia,” Roy was just a month out of his training. In March of 1968, he learned that he was going back to the war in Southeast Asia.57

Roy understood that he was returning “to a war in South Vietnam that was very different from the one I had left.” Early in 1968, the North Vietnamese communists launched a major surprise attack known as the Tet Offensive, enabled largely by their usage of Cambodian territory. Between October of 1967 and January of 1968, an estimated forty-four thousand North Vietnamese troops poured down the Ho Chi Minh Trail as part of a major offensive of roughly eighty-four thousand North Vietnamese and NLF forces who launched a coordinated attack on nearly forty South Vietnamese cities. South Vietnamese and American troops fought well and turned back the surprise attack in a decisive victory. Tet was a devastating blow for the North Vietnamese forces, who suffered an estimated forty-five thousand casualties. Just two months after the attack, General Westmoreland told the president, “Militarily, we have never been in better relative position in South Viet Nam.”58

But the reality of Tet as a military victory didn’t matter as much to a shocked American populace who interpreted the rising violence as evidence that the United States was no longer winning the war. Images of Americans fighting North Vietnamese and NLF forces in the streets of Saigon alerted the public that the North Vietnamese were much stronger than they had been told and drew into doubt the possibility of American victory. As one North Vietnamese military official later claimed, “The military victory may have been limited, but the political and strategic victory was just tremendous.”59

A month after the Tet Offensive, CBS Evening News anchor Walter Cronkite traveled to Vietnam to report on the aftermath of the Tet Offensive. When he came home, he famously editorialized that the American war in Vietnam had reached an unbreakable deadlock. “To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion,” Cronkite told millions of American viewers. “It is becoming increasingly clear,” he somberly concluded, “that the only rational way will be to negotiate, not as victors but as honorable people who lived up to their desire to defend democracy, and did the best that they could.” The New York Times agreed, arguing, “Stalemate increasingly appears as the unavoidable outcome of the Vietnam struggle.” The news media did report that the Tet Offensive had been a military setback for the North Vietnamese, but thanks at least in part to these editorials, the opinion of the American people had largely shifted to the conclusion that victory for the United States was no longer in sight.60

By the time Roy began preparing to return to Vietnam in the spring of 1968, the war was tearing America apart. Major political figures, including Robert Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., had issued public condemnations of the war, calling it unwinnable and even immoral. Hundreds of thousands of anti-war activists protested across the United States, their ranks swelled by increasing numbers of students, veterans, and even government officials. Thousands more anti-war demonstrators took to the streets in cities across Europe, including London, Berlin, and Rome, calling for the United States to get out of the war in Vietnam. President Lyndon B. Johnson was burned in effigy in the Philippines. On March 31, Johnson shocked the nation when he announced that he would not seek reelection in that year’s presidential campaign so that he could focus on negotiations to end the American war in Vietnam.61

As Americans’ view of the war devolved, Lala and Roy packed up their family’s trailer in preparation for her to move back to El Campo with their eight-month-old daughter. Roy didn’t write much about Lala’s feelings about his return to Southeast Asia, only remembering that she “didn’t complain, in spite of her disappointment.” “It couldn’t have been easy on her,” he acknowledged, “watching her husband return to the war in Asia that was dominating the headlines on the national news every night.”62

Difficult as war always is, the conditions in the spring of 1968 made for a very challenging deployment for men like Roy Benavidez and their families. Roy and Lala lived in a military community where people were generally more supportive of the war than the broader population. But the sentiment depicted in the national news was impossible to ignore. The nation appeared to be turning against the very war that Roy was about to rejoin. Roy and Lala could see and feel that he was returning to a conflict that was becoming increasingly unpopular among his fellow countrymen, but even they had no idea just how different this experience would be from his previous deployments. Roy, in his second tour, would be undertaking an essential but secret mission far removed from the public view of the war and completely unimaginable to most Americans.63

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