3

THE DARKEST WHITE

ROY WOKE UP in a fog. He didn’t know who he was, where he was, or how he’d gotten there. All he could understand was that everything around him was white. The people wore white. The floor was white. The bed he was lying in, the walls, the ceiling. Everything was white.

A big blank spot had taken the place of his memories and reason. He had no awareness that he had been floating for several days in a white purgatory that was the Beach Pavilion at the Brooke Army Medical Center at Fort Sam Houston, San Antonio, Texas.

There were clues in the fog—circles and squares that occasionally took shape and started to make sense. But then they’d evaporate, and he’d slip back into the nothingness that was his past and present. If he could have read, the clipboard in a slot at the end of the bed he was lying in would have reminded him who he was: Sergeant Benavidez, Roy, P.; that he was in the Army; that the year was 1966 and the month was January. That he was thirty years old.

There were other clues in the room that might have answered some of his questions. The guy in the bed next to him had a bandaged stump where his leg used to be. The guy on the other side had no legs at all. Across the aisle, another guy had bandaged stumps in place of his hands, with burn bandages extending up his arms. Roy, by all appearances, was in one piece. No visible wounds commemorated the fact that his childhood dream had come true, that he’d gone to war and seen battle.

—

LATE IN January 1966, the first weekend after Roy was medevaced from Vietnam, a green-eyed woman with dark hair sat with him at the Fort Sam Houston hospital—a 150-mile drive from El Campo. “It’s Lala,” she told him as she held his hand. The doctors had suggested that family members talk to Roy about his past, so Lala would bring along his cousin Leo or his older brother Gene or his uncle Nicholas, and they would sit beside his bed and talk to him, and talk, and talk. Roy opened his eyes for the first time during these early visits, but he didn’t respond.

He had no recollection of Lala, nor was he aware that the bump on her belly was their first child, conceived just before he’d deployed. The doctors told Lala candidly that the concussion from the suspected land mine Roy had stepped on jolted his brain so violently that they didn’t expect him to regain his senses. Even if he did, they were all but certain he would never walk again. However, they considered him lucky. The theory was that the mine—or a large flat piece of it—had jettisoned from the earth and impacted his rear with hundreds or thousands of pounds of pressure. The damage—a twisted spine and fractured bone and cartilage—was visible only in X-rays. But amid the damaged remains of Roy’s spine, the spinal cord itself appeared intact, and for this Lala was grateful. Never once did she leave the hospital without lighting a candle in the chapel and praying for her husband to return to her.

The fog was a blessing for Roy. It protected him, for a time, from the visions that would haunt him for the rest of his life. The “fog machine,” as he described it, was likely traumatic brain injury, and the memories that appeared to him were as unpredictable as a Vietcong ambush.

One morning, the fog lifted for a moment, and Roy saw them, as clearly as he had seen them that day in Vietnam: three Vietnamese children nailed to the wall of a barrack that he and his platoon had helped build for the refugees fleeing their villages in the mountain highlands.

Two boys and a girl had been crucified, long nails through their hands and feet. They were hanging at chest height—target level—their smooth, innocent, small bodies ravaged by bullets. The wall around them was pristine: the VC were good shots. Several bullets had been aimed at one of the boys’ heads. Little remained of his face.

Two women screamed and wailed on their knees before them, reaching out to touch what must have been their children. An older man, no doubt a father or a grandfather, had his hand cupped under the little girl’s foot, catching the blood that dripped slowly from her toe.

—

ROY HAD been crying and screaming off and on for days, perhaps processing his memories from his combat tour. But on one day he found himself in a room seated in a chair at a table. He actually understood that he was seated in a chair. A chair with wheels—a wheelchair!

Spread out before him was an assortment of round and square pegs beside a plate with round openings and square openings. A puzzle toy for children.

He held the pieces in his hand and thought, This is crazy. There’s only one way to do it. The round pegs go into the round holes, the square pegs into the square ones. He’d sat at this table many times, he was told by the medical staff, and had always drawn a blank. Today he inserted all the pegs into their rightful places.

The following day, the green-eyed woman visited Roy again. “Lala,” he breathed.

As if a switch had been flipped, Roy knew who and where he was. How he’d gotten to where he was, however, remained a blank. Sometime later, Roy described his frustration: “My life was a movie in which the projectionist had completely omitted a reel in the middle of the feature. I recalled my arrival in Vietnam…the people, my buddies, the action we experienced together, even the Bob Hope Christmas Show. There must have been a last recon mission, but nothing came to mind. I tried to remember, but there was an incredible blackness.” That blackness got even blacker when the doctors told Roy why he couldn’t move his legs or his feet or his toes—he was paralyzed from the waist down.

When he tried to get answers, the doctors were evasive, unwilling to categorize his condition as either permanent or temporary. “Let’s give it some time,” they would tell him. “Continue with your physical therapy.”

After two weeks of “physical therapy,” Roy concluded that the medical staff weren’t working on his legs so much as they were working on his head, preparing him mentally for life in a wheelchair. The realization sank in that his career with the Army was over. “Like a misfired round from a 105 mm howitzer, I was useless to them,” he said.

A dark cloud settled in where the fog had been, and despair poured over Roy. What he called a “pity party” took him down the oldest roads of his past, where he had only flickering memories of his birth father, and his birth mother was little more than a “song in the night” that had drifted off and died. Though he remained close to his adoptive family, the Army had been Roy’s life for well over a decade. It had become his immediate family; his fellow soldiers, regardless of the color of their skin, were his brothers. In the blink of an eye, all that was about to be taken away, just as his parents had been.

—

“SERGEANT,” A nurse said, “you’ve got some visitors. Let’s get you into that chair.”

The chair, the damned chair! Roy lamented to himself. For the rest of my life someone is gonna have to help me into that damned chair.

Lala and Roger wheeled Roy to the dayroom overlooking the parade ground and positioned him so he could look out. For hours they talked while Roy listened to their chitchat—a cousin was getting married, a nephew had been born, an aunt was ill. Everything was moving forward at the speed of life, including the baby. Lala was six months pregnant by this time, and Roy could barely look at her the entire afternoon she sat beside him. When Lala and Roger left, he hated himself for it. This is no life for Lala, he thought. He wished his pathetic, skinny dead legs were gone, that they’d been blown off his body.

—

ROY COUNTED the ceiling tiles in his hospital room every day. Sometimes he did it once, and sometimes he did it over and over. The winning number was 327. If he got to the final row in the grid and counted down to the last one and it was off, he’d shake his head, or shrug, or curse, and start over. He’d keep counting until he got it right. It was his own invention, his own mental therapy, to test his ability to focus. After weeks in the same bed, he felt as if he were going insane. The counting became almost compulsive.

When the chief orthopedic surgeon visited him to check his progress, noting that needle pricks to Roy’s feet and legs continued to elicit zero response and that Roy could not wiggle his toes, the topic of discharge from the Army was brought up. Roy did what any self-respecting, Army-through-and-through sergeant would do. He begged. He begged for a little more time, swore that he was feeling tingles and shocks and other indications that his legs weren’t dead yet. And so he bought himself a few more days, a few more weeks.

Each time the surgeon left, he felt as if he’d dodged a bullet. He would lower his body down into the chair beside his bed, just as he’d learned in “cripple therapy,” as he called it, and do the long, slow push to the little chapel at the end of the ward.

He would maneuver himself down the hall, past what he later described as “the human debris of Vietnam [that] was beginning to wash up on the shores of America.” He saw wounds so severe, so grotesque—hands that looked like burnt match tips, men with multiple amputations—he wondered how it was possible they’d survived.

He would wheel into the simple chapel—the few pews bathed in the gold- and rust-colored light from a stained-glass window—and roll to a stop in front of the figure of the crucified Christ. But he never once thanked God that the mine, or booby trap, or whatever it was, hadn’t exploded, that he was in one piece, that he was alive. Instead, he asked, “Why?” He would say it as solemnly as he’d recited his oath to serve his country. “Why did you do this to me? What use am I now?”

Why? Why? Why?

Roy’s Catholic faith was as deeply rooted in his heart as it was with his family and in the Hispanic communities where he’d grown up. Later in life, he would say he was living proof that a devout altar boy is fully capable of wearing out the hinges on a confessional.

“When I was a little kid, just looking around in the big church taught me something about faith,” Roy said. “I knew even then that there was something bigger than I was, bigger even than the adults I knew. I knew God listens, even when nobody else listens or cares. From the time I was a child and I lost my parents, I have always believed that.”

Roy felt that Nicholas and Alexandria had been answers to his prayers, as was Art Haddock. Grandfather Salvador, too. They were guardian angels who had come into his life during dire times—times of intense prayer. Mr. Haddock had told him, “God makes no mistakes.”

So, if God makes no mistakes, why am I being punished? Always he returned to Why?

As he repeated that question, he began to lose hope, until somehow the word brought him back to Berlin, when he had thought for certain his career was over. “Why?” It was the same question the West Point captain had asked him. Why?

And what had been his answer? Why hadn’t he taken the easy way out and lied? Because Duty, Honor, Country—Deber, Honor, País—forbade it.

Here in the hospital, he knew there was no honor in giving up. He tried to imagine what his life would be if he accepted the medical discharge and went home in a wheelchair, and the person he saw wasn’t the man he wanted to be. “There was no sergeant from the 82nd Airborne back in El Campo,” says Roy. “Instead, there was only a Mexican pepper belly named Benavidez, a seventh-grade dropout who used to work at the Firestone tire store.”

—

THE DISTANCE between the hospital bed and the cold, hard floor seemed great, even for an Airborne soldier; on an evening in March 1966, Roy decided that he was going to get there. The nurses had finished their rounds, and the light on the ward was dim when Roy checked to see if the coast was clear. With his arms, he was able to slide his legs to the edge of the mattress.

Holding the bed railing with his hands, he went over and crashed onto the ground with a grunt.

“What the hell?” a fellow patient called out. “Benavidez, are you all right?”

As he called for the nurse, Roy stopped him. “No, I’m okay. I’m gonna try some therapy. Just leave me alone.”

Rolling onto his stomach, Roy used his chin, elbows, and forearms to pull himself toward the wall, dragging his legs behind him. He never got there. A night nurse discovered him on the floor and helped him back into bed.

Roy fell asleep with a grin on his face. Rolling out of his bed and sliding across the floor was the biggest adventure he’d had in months. The black-and-blue hip he woke up with the next morning was worth it, as was a dull ache. Feeling! There was some feeling in his lower extremities.

The day dragged by, but finally it was evening and he could give it another go. He was quieter with his dismount from the bed, and he was able to repeat the roll onto his stomach, his chin to the floor, elbows and forearms working—inching forward. His objective was a narrow section of wall between the two nightstands separating his bed from the one to the right.

He reached the nightstands, turned himself around, and raised his arms up over his shoulders. Levering his elbows against the nightstands, he pulled himself up, legs straight out before him, before crumpling with exhaustion. The nurses found him there on their next round.

He became the nightly entertainment for the men recuperating around him, who cheered him on every time he fell. It took a week of trying before he was able to raise himself all the way up between the nightstands by pressing his back against the wall and using his arms. This brought his legs almost underneath him, but mostly he was supported by his triceps and shoulders. “I was just sort of hanging there,” Roy said. “I tried to put weight on my legs, and a burning pain shot through my back that felt like I’d been stabbed with a red-hot knife. I collapsed against the wall, and slid to the floor.”

The nurses came running when they heard the cheers. Once they understood that he was trying to walk, they sent him to therapy.

After a week of painful therapy and his own nightly regimen, Roy stood—tears streaming down his cheeks, panting like a dog, hands hovering six inches above the nightstands. He was bearing his own weight.

Soon after, sensation returned to Roy’s toes. He was able to wiggle them. He shuffled a few inches, more and more each day, until he was pushing his own empty wheelchair down the long hallway to the chapel, where he stopped asking questions of God and instead gave thanks for what he realized was a miracle.

The doctors—in particular the chief surgeon, who had originally given Roy the news that he’d most likely never walk again—congratulated him. After five months in the hospital, he had far exceeded their expectations. Then they tried to give him a medical discharge from the Army. He pleaded with them to reconsider. While many young men were doing all they could to avoid military service, Roy didn’t want this get-out-of-jail-free card; he wanted to return to the 82nd and get on with his career.

—

EARLY IN the summer of 1966, Roy put on a crisply starched uniform and walked out of the Beach Pavilion at Brooke Army Medical Center on shaky legs, holding the hand of his wife. Lala, well into her final trimester of pregnancy, had proven herself a warrior of her vows, standing proudly by her man: “for better or for worse, in sickness and in health.” They packed up the trailer and returned to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, arriving in time to watch the fireworks on the Fourth of July. On July 31, their first child, Denise, was born.

While Lala settled into motherhood at the Bonnie Doone Trailer Park, Roy began his new job as the administrative assistant to the personnel sergeant with the 82nd Airborne Division. His daily mission was to help navigate Airborne soldiers and their wives through the minefields, barbed wire, and coils of red tape that lay between them and the benefits associated with their “membership” in the U.S. Army.

Roy was good at what he did, and thankful that the Army had kept him in service, but in his heart he knew he was a soldier meant for the field. He dutifully stamped forms, typed reports, cleared the in-box, and filled the out-box, but his mind was back in Vietnam. Despite the terrible things he had seen, despite being nearly killed and paralyzed, he longed for that intense feeling of being fully alive he’d experienced in a combat zone. Now that he was a parent, he realized that the protective emotion he’d felt for his men was nothing less than paternal. Like a sidelined football player watching his team take the field, he watched the soldiers at Bragg train and deploy.

Always have an option. In a village, on a road, along a jungle pathway—and there in his office at Fort Bragg—Roy was always keeping his eyes and ears open for options. Though he was grateful to be alive, the desk, he knew, would kill him—not quickly like a booby trap or an ambush, but worse. It would kill him slowly.