EPILOGUE
EVEN BEFORE ROY and his family returned to El Campo the next day, the phone at the Benavidez home was ringing with requests for interviews and invitations to speak across the nation. Roy told his family what President Reagan had said to him in parting—that it was his duty to share his story, especially with the children. “They need to hear stories like yours,” Reagan said. An Army public affairs officer informed Roy to be prepared for a flurry of media interest in him, that it “would probably last a few months, maybe a year,” says Denise, “and then it would calm down, and everything would get back to normal.”
The following day, Roy brought the Medal of Honor to the El Campo cemetery, where he stood by the graves of Grandfather Salvador and Uncle Nicholas and thanked them. Next he went to the home of Art Haddock—Roy’s boss at the Firestone tire store and his mentor—and gave him a hug. The following week, he accepted his first speaking invitation at the El Campo junior high school and began to hone the message he would continue to deliver to any school that requested him to speak. “Like a fool,” he would say to audiences, “I dropped out of school. I’m not proud of it. An education is the key to success.” And then he told his story, from the streets of Cuero to the jungles of Vietnam—never mentioning Cambodia.
“He would always tell me that I should never forget who I am, never forget where I came from,” says Noel, who was in the audience at his own elementary school a few weeks later. “And always give back to the community.”
Shortly thereafter, Roy drove to Jacinto City to meet with Cecil, Maxine, and Debbie McKibben, thanking them again for the actions of their son and brother. In private, Roy said to Cecil that he felt Larry deserved the Medal of Honor—and he intended to put together the documentation necessary to upgrade the Distinguished Service Cross he had already been awarded.
Not long after her brother was killed, Debbie, who had been suffering excruciating headaches, underwent exploratory surgery that left her blind for a number of months. With the slow return of her eyesight came the diagnosis of obstructive hydrocephalus: the flow of cerebrospinal fluid to the brain was being obstructed. Three more surgeries eventually repaired the problem, but it had been a difficult time for the McKibben family. Their faith, as well as their memories of Larry, had given them strength. Although Cecil was grateful for Roy’s offer to champion the upgrading of the DSC, he felt that going through the process to see his son’s heroism and courage recognized officially would dredge up too many old memories and pain best left alone. They would rather hold on to the good ones and keep living life, grateful for the freedoms that Larry McKibben and so many others had paid for with their lives.
In the final tape that Larry sent home to his family, he had talked about the tail rotor blade with the bullet hole that he’d placed above his bunk. Cecil had requested it through Larry’s roommate, Ronn Rosemark, and now it sat in the corner of the McKibbens’ living room as a tribute to Larry’s bravery and service. But it was Larry’s own words from a tape he’d sent from Vietnam that remained indelible in the hearts and minds of the McKibben family:
“The one good thing about this place, you sure learn not to take anything for granted. Not anything.”
IN OCTOBER 1981, Roy was invited to address the cadets at West Point, where he spoke about the importance of the relationships between officers and enlisted men. He shared the story of warrant officers William Darling and Thomas Smith, who volunteered to jump on board Greyhound Three, piloted by Roger Waggie and David Hoffman, to man the door gunner positions, generally held by enlisted men, and go into the fire to pull the men on the ground out. It was an example of “officers and NCOs working together,” Roy said. He then talked about seeing the West Point motto for the first time on the plaque behind the desk of the officer he’d had to answer to for striking the drunk lieutenant in Berlin. He had adopted the motto as his own, he said, and it had changed his life.
Roy had recounted this story to audiences so many times over the previous eight months that it had already made its way to West Point. After his talk the cadets presented him with a coveted West Point saber—the first and only enlisted man ever to receive one—inscribed with the words “MSG Benavidez, we will not only remember you as a great American soldier, but also as the epitome of our motto: Duty, Honor, Country.”
ON FEBRUARY 22, 1983, Roy received a “Termination of Benefits” letter from the Social Security Administration. He, along with more than three hundred thousand other veterans who had been found permanently disabled, now had to prove their disability for a second time in order to continue to receive benefits.
Four months later, Roy stood at a hearing before the House of Representatives Select Committee on Aging to testify for all the veterans who had been deprived of their benefits. He explained that he had volunteered to go to Vietnam to serve his country, and that “those men that went along with me, my comrades, their widows, their sons, their daughters right now are being deprived of their disability benefits. People call me a hero. Mr. Chairman, members of the committee, ladies, and gentlemen, I am not a hero. I appreciate the title, but the real heroes are the ones that gave their lives for this country, the ones that are lying disabled for life without limbs, and the ones that are blind, the ones that can’t move at all, in those beds. I’m here to testify because there has been a gross injustice…. We didn’t ask to go and fight a war for this country and we didn’t…fight for luxury, we didn’t…fight for money, we didn’t…fight for popularity. We went in the defense of this country, to live free…and enjoy the freedom that we have right now, all of us.”
The committee applauded Roy at the conclusion of his testimony, and the following week he was informed personally by committee chairman Edward R. Roybal that all Social Security benefits would be reinstated for him and the three hundred thousand other veterans.
ROY CONTINUED to juggle his time between his family in El Campo and speaking engagements across the country for years to come, to corporations, military schools and bases, and to his favorite audience—children. He also wrote and published two memoirs over the next decade, Medal of Honor and The Three Wars of Roy Benavidez, dedicating the latter to “Our nation’s young people, tomorrow’s leaders.”
In 1986, he hand-delivered a copy of his first memoir to Art Haddock, who had recently suffered a massive heart attack and was convalescing at home. Mr. Haddock, whose faith had been his compass in life, had told his daughter as he was being rushed into the operating room the same thing he’d told Roy thirty years before at the Firestone shop: “God makes no mistakes.” With Roy’s book in hand, he said it again.
On May 26, 1988, Mr. Haddock passed away. Roy walked him to his grave as an honoree pallbearer.
Fred Barbee passed away on October 2, 2007, at age seventy-eight, and his son, Chris, took over as publisher of the El Campo Leader-News. Barbee—who began his career as a newspaper printer during his teens—considered his journalistic efforts to help Roy earn his Medal of Honor one of his most important achievements in sixty-plus years as a newspaperman.
IN MAY of 1997, Mad Dog Three crew chief Paul LaChance’s fourteen-year-old son, Mike, joined his parents at the 240th Assault Helicopter Company’s first reunion in Washington, DC. His son didn’t know a lot about the war in Vietnam—there was only a short paragraph in his U.S. history textbook and his father wouldn’t talk about it. Mike knew he was never supposed to wake his dad up without making some noise first, but he didn’t know what PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, was or that his father’s frequent nightmares were rooted in his memories from the war. He didn’t know that Paul LaChance would curse the Bronze Star with Valor he’d received for running through enemy fire to tackle crew chief James Warr and put out the flames that had engulfed him. He didn’t know his father had said he would give the medal back in a second if he could only erase Warr’s screams from his memory.
Though LaChance wouldn’t talk about the war, he wanted his son to meet some of the men who had been his brothers in arms. In the Sheraton Hotel ballroom, Mike watched his dad shake Pete Gailis’s hand, tears in his eyes. He learned that his father had been a crew chief and door gunner on a gunship, that he was the “line chief” for all the gunships in the 240th, and that he was an “old Mad Dog.”
Gailis and LaChance stood facing each other, shaking their heads and smiling, as if they couldn’t believe it had been almost thirty years since their tours in Vietnam. They could still feel the grip of their M60s, the pendulum weight of the gun supported by the strap in the doorway; they could still smell the metallic oil and the jet fuel and see the earth rushing beneath them and pick out the blinking lights from the tree line. They could still lead their “targets” in their minds and pull the trigger in memories they both loved and hated and ultimately forgave themselves for. “Leveling the playing field” is how LaChance described going in and providing close air support for teams in contact. “Go in, get them out, and come home alive.”
And here he was, alive, with his family and his buddies.
Gailis, after returning from his tour, had joined the U.S. Army Reserve as a helicopter mechanic, got married, divorced, and then met the love of his life, Susan. With five children from both marriages, dogs from the second, and a home with a picket fence, he considers himself “fortunate now and I was lucky then.” His tour ended “just in time,” he says. After hundreds of combat missions, he had become deadly consistent with his M60. He could, 90 percent of the time, judge the airspeed, lead his targets, and squeeze off just a few rounds to knock an enemy runner down, open up his chest or head, and watch the blood spray.
“There was payback involved,” he says, “after losing so many good friends and seeing so many bodies loaded up. There’d be a farmer on a dike in a rice paddy, and we’d just taken fire, but this guy has no weapon. It was common for them to take a few shots and then toss their AK into the water so it’s a fifty-fifty chance that he’s a VC or a farmer. We’d come around, and he’s just looking up at me, and giving me a terrified ‘Don’t shoot I’m innocent’ look, or is it a ‘Fuck you, I’m not armed, you can’t shoot me’ look? The right thing to do is not shoot.
“So I played this game where I opened up and walked rounds all the way down the dike, kicking up dust, and he’d stand there, nowhere to go. Right before the bullets got to him, I eased off the trigger…and then started up on the other side of him, and walked the rounds away. I played God. I didn’t kill him, but I wanted to. I really wanted to. And that’s when I knew it was time to go home.”
Around the banquet room filled with tables and chairs, none of the hundred or so people present sat. Like LaChance and Gailis, there were smiles, tears, handshakes, and hugs among the servicemen in their fifties. Some looked at each other like ghosts. Most had never counted on their buddies surviving their tours, much less seeing them again in the real world. Some had been desperate to put the horrific memories behind them, while others had pined for the brotherhood of war, which they couldn’t find at home. Most had just moved on to the next stage of their lives.
Very few had kept in touch with each other, so now they shared family photographs and gathered around photo albums—the black-and-white yearbooks commemorating their war. Often their eyes and fingers would stop on the forever-young face of one of the thirty-eight members of the 240th Assault Helicopter Company who were killed in action.
Two men from the May 2 mission—David Hoffman, who had been Roger Waggie’s copilot on Greyhound Three, and Thomas Smith, who had volunteered to man the door gunner position on Greyhound Three on the final, successful extraction—were among twelve pilots and crew killed in a three-ship midair collision caused by poor visibility less than two months later, on June 25, 1968. Three more men from the May 2 mission—William Fernan, who had been Larry McKibben’s copilot on Greyhound One, and Steven Hastings and Donald Fowler, who had been crew chief and door gunner on Michael Grant’s Mad Dog Two—were in a helicopter crash later that summer, on August 1, while supporting a mission on the Cambodian border. Despite search-and-rescue attempts, none of the crew, including aircraft commander Peter Russell, were recovered. Three years later, the wreckage was discovered; Fernan’s remains were identified and returned to his family, while clues at the site—helmets with undone straps, unbuckled pilot’s restraint straps, and opened C ration tins—suggested the other three Americans had survived the crash. They remain missing in action to this day.
Dan Christensen, the only man who had been on Greyhound One to survive the war, never did find his .38. Though he attempted to return to the 240th—with his jaw wired shut and on crutches from the bullet wounds to his leg—he couldn’t talk his way out of the hospital and back to Bearcat. He was sent home and medically retired. Forty years later, his grown children learned about a 240th reunion online. “Seeing those guys was one of the best days of my life,” Christensen says. “We spent the whole weekend just hammering out a lot of things that needed hammering.”
The aircraft commander of Mad Dog Three, Louis Wilson, was wounded on July 31, 1968, while supporting B-56 in another mission, but he survived the war and returned to duty at Fort Benning, Georgia. After leaving the Army in 1970, he earned a degree in nuclear engineering, then joined the Army National Guard in 1980 as a helicopter pilot, retiring as a Chief Warrant Officer 5 in 2006 and from his full-time job as a nuclear engineer in 2013.
Al Yurman returned home to the United States after having attended the memorial services for each of the thirty-five of his fellow 240th brethren KIA during his one-year tour. He was asked by the Army to go back to Vietnam because of his experience in the Fishhook area, but he turned down the request and finished his military career toward the end of 1970. (A few months later, American forces under the directive of President Nixon invaded Cambodia to take out North Vietnamese bases, matériel, and troop concentrations.) Yurman went on to work for the National Transportation Safety Board, investigating major airline and private aircraft crashes for more than sixteen years. He remains an expert witness and aviation accident investigator in the private sector.
There wasn’t a man in the room who hadn’t been affected by the war or the May 2, 1968, mission. For Jerry Ewing it was those four words he’d uttered that continued to haunt him, even more than the memory of McKibben’s hunched-over body in the wreckage of his slick.
“It’s not my turn,” he had said when Yurman told him to take a run into the PZ to extract the team. That night after the mission, he had admitted to Yurman how devastated he was by McKibben’s death, that he was so sorry for what he’d said. Yurman had replied, “Jerry, you were just confirming. I had said it wasn’t your turn; you didn’t hesitate. Once I told you I needed you, you were going in. You were doing your job. Larry cut you off.” Yurman’s words did little to console Ewing, who couldn’t shake the fact that he had not just said, “Yes, Sir.”
Ewing returned home from the war a month and a half after the mission and became an instructor pilot for a couple of years at Fort Rucker before getting out of the military and landing a job at Ross Perot’s Electronic Data Systems. He got divorced, then met and married the love of his life, had kids, and life was once again pretty good. Except for those four words. After three decades, he still felt like a coward. If it hadn’t been for that momentary hesitation, he thought, it could very well be Larry McKibben at this reunion rather than Jerry Ewing.
And he might have made it out alive the way William Armstrong, Greyhound Four’s pilot, did after being shot in the head. He’d managed to hold the controls steady and get his slick above the trees before handing them off to his copilot, James Fussell. As it turned out, the bullet had entered at the base of his head as he’d leaned forward and traveled upward between the curve of his skull and helmet lining, fracturing but not shattering his skull. His crew chief and door gunner Gary Land and Robert Wessel, who had kept their M60s running despite their own wounds, had kept the enemy from overrunning the aircraft. As far as Armstrong was concerned, they had saved his life, as he told them when he saw them at the reunion.
As a result of the traumatic brain injury he sustained, Armstrong could no longer fly. After being medically retired from the military, he earned a degree in electronics engineering, worked in the nuclear power industry for twenty-five years, earned another degree in education, and taught until his retirement in 2014. Fussell joined the Air Force and eventually retired as a major after flying line fighters and ground attack aircraft. Land spent nine months in the hospital, finished his enlistment, and was eventually discharged from the Army; he went on to work as an IRS agent and receive a degree in accounting. Wessel finished his enlistment before going to work for the Ohio State Veterans Affairs as a councilor. The Special Forces bellyman who had also been on Greyhound Four, James Calvey, became a custom display designer for high-end trade show vendors.
Those at the gathering began to seat themselves for dinner, and Roy Benavidez, whom the 240th had invited as the guest of honor, approached the LaChance table and asked Mike if he could take the chair next to his. They introduced themselves, and then Mike noticed the medal around Roy’s neck and asked what it meant. When Roy explained that it was the Medal of Honor, Mike innocently asked why Roy had one and his father did not.
Putting his hand on Mike’s shoulder, Roy said, “You know what, son? I’m alive today because of your father and other men in this room. He should have one just like this. He earned it.”
Mike’s face lit up, and he leaned toward his father as he took his seat and said, “You never told me you were a hero, Dad.”
Had it been anybody but his son, LaChance says he would have denied the comment. But this one time he let it hang in the air, like smoke from a rocket strike.
WHEN THE United States finished its involvement in Vietnam, its soldiers returned home but their Vietnamese counterparts would continue the war for two more years. The fate of most—including Bao and the other two CIDG who survived the mission—is not known. The CIDG interpreter, Tuan, however, had been flown to the United States for surgical procedures, where he remained, reportedly living somewhere on the West Coast.
After writing his letter to the Army Decorations Board, Brian O’Connor moved his family to the East Coast, continued his artistic pursuits—both academically and professionally—and earned various awards and degrees, including a master of fine letters and master of fine arts in Shakespeare.
Others veterans continued their military service. First Lieutenant Fred Jones rose to the rank of colonel, having served five years on active duty and twenty-seven years in the U.S. Army Reserve. He retired in 2001, but after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Jones was recalled to active duty, serving five more years in support of the Global War on Terrorism. Currently, at the age of sixty-nine, he serves as a government civilian at the U.S. Africa Command in Stuttgart, Germany, supporting counterterrorism efforts on the African continent.
Robin Tornow, the forward air controller who risked his career by calling the Daniel Boone tactical emergency, was never reprimanded for doing so. In 1989, then Colonel Tornow wrote a letter to Roy, saying, “My 6 months as a FAC with B-56 were probably the most fulfilling in my career. I’ll always reflect proudly on having served with such a great group of individuals.” He retired in 1993 after thirty years of service as a brigadier general in the U.S. Air Force and passed away on August 22, 2010.
A few months after the 240th reunion, Roger Waggie succumbed to cancer; he was awarded the Silver Star posthumously for his actions on May 2, 1968. Most recently, Paul LaChance lost his own battle with cancer in the fall of 2014 after a full life of working various jobs—from trucking to catering—that allowed him to support and spend time with his wife, three children, and his boat, The Other Woman.
Some veterans dropped off the map, becoming difficult or impossible to reach, having moved on completely or continuing to fight private battles more than four decades after the end of the Vietnam War.
ON NOVEMBER 29, 1998, sixty-three-year-old Roy Benavidez passed away at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio from complications of diabetes. Moments before his death, his family circled his bed, held hands, and prayed over him. Noel kissed his father good-bye and said, “No regrets, Dad.” Yvette and Denise did the same.
A soldier in battle dress fatigues entered the room, stood at attention, and saluted Roy’s body, which was then escorted to St. Robert Bellarmine Catholic Church in El Campo, where he and Lala had been married, where his children were married, and where he attended Mass every Sunday he was home. He was buried with full military honors at Fort Sam Houston, not far from the Drop Zone bar and café, Roy’s old hangout where his Army buddies from the Alamo Silver Wings Airborne Association continue to tell his stories at Special Forces Association meetings. They often refer to him as Tango Mike Mike, his almost mythical call sign that they’ll tell you is known throughout the Special Operations community as a phrase spoken when courage needs to be summoned and quitting is not an option: “Tango Mike Mike.”
Roy is survived by his wife, Lala, his three children—all of whom have college degrees framed and on the walls of their respective homes in El Campo—and eight grandchildren, who are either in college or heading in that direction. In addition to his family and his legacy among the Special Operations community, Roy’s name lives on through the Roy P. Benavidez National Guard Armory in El Campo; a conference room at West Point; a U.S. Navy troop and cargo ship (the first U.S. Navy ship to be named after an Army enlisted man); a U.S. Army training center; a community park; two elementary schools (in Houston and San Antonio); and several sculptures.
THE CLASSIFIED after-action reports and briefings that documented Roy’s and other SOG warriors’ actions during the Vietnam War had been teletyped and sent from forward operating bases (including, but not limited to, Kontum, Ban Me Thuot, Song Be, and Ho Ngoc Tao) to the Military Assistance Command Vietnam, Studies and Observation Group headquarters in Saigon. They were then forwarded to the Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Special Assistant for Counterinsurgency and Special Activities.
Copies were stored temporarily at each base in locked file cabinets and archived at the headquarters until April of 1972, when all of the records were burned. Though nobody seems to know exactly who ordered the destruction, “it’s not a stretch to say that the order came from Washington,” says SOG unit historian John Plaster. “Then-Chief SOG John Sadler would not have destroyed the records unless directed to do so by higher authority, and he told me face-to-face that they had been burned.”
At the end of April 1972, MACV-SOG was officially deactivated and the headquarters was closed. The copies of the after-action reports that had been sent to Washington during the war are also apparently gone. Says Plaster, “Several scholars, writers, and SOG veterans have spent years trying to find them. For all we know, they were destroyed, too. When, where, and how, is unknown.”
MACV-SOG WAS officially honored for the first time in April 2001, when President George W. Bush authorized the unit to receive the Presidential Unit Citation (Army) during a ceremony at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. The citation reads, in part:
The Studies and Observations Group is cited for extraordinary heroism, great combat achievement and unwavering fidelity while executing unheralded top secret missions deep behind enemy lines across Southeast Asia. Incorporating volunteers from all branches of the Armed Forces, and especially, U.S. Army Special Forces, SOG’s ground, air and sea units fought officially denied actions which contributed immeasurably to the American war effort in Vietnam.
MACV-SOG reconnaissance teams composed of Special Forces soldiers and indigenous personnel penetrated the enemy’s most dangerous redoubts in the jungled Laotian wilderness and the sanctuaries of eastern Cambodia. Pursued by human trackers and even bloodhounds, these small teams out-maneuvered, outfought and outran their numerically superior foe, to uncover key enemy facilities, rescue downed pilots, plant wiretaps, mines and electronic sensors, capture valuable enemy prisoners, ambush convoys, discover and assess targets for B-52 strikes, and inflict casualties all out of proportion to their own losses…. SOG’s cross-border operations proved an effective economy-of-force, compelling the North Vietnamese Army to divert 50,000 soldiers to rear area security duties, far from the battlefields of South Vietnam….
Despite casualties that sometimes became universal, SOG’s operators never wavered, but fought throughout the war with the same flair, fidelity and intrepidity that distinguished SOG from its beginning. The Studies and Observations Group’s combat prowess, martial skills and unacknowledged sacrifices saved many American lives, and provide a paragon for America’s future special operations forces.
Close to three hundred Special Forces Green Berets assigned to the MACV-SOG were killed in action. Over fifty more remain missing in action—their last known whereabouts being either Laos, Cambodia, or North Vietnam.
IN 1991, during the surge of patriotism that resulted from the onset of Desert Storm—the First Gulf War—Pete Gailis went to the public library near his home in Salem, Massachusetts, wearing for the first time in public a sweatshirt he’d ordered years before. On his front was an American flag with the words: “Vietnam Veteran, Proud of my Service.”
As he headed into the library, he held the door for a woman around his age. “How can you be proud of that?” she asked him.
She walked past, and Gailis replied to her back, “I am proud of my service, Ma’am.”
Reflecting on the Vietnam War in the years since 9/11, Gailis says, “Things have sure changed. People finally realized that politics and service are two separate things. They shouldn’t be, but they are. There were a lot of victories in Vietnam, there should have been a big one, but I think one thing the Vietnam veterans did for all the future generations: we took the bullet when we came home and eventually people realized it wasn’t right. I think one reason people are so supportive of the military today is because of how poorly we were treated after the war. There was a GI who got a cup of blood dumped on him at the airport by a peace protestor when I returned home to Oakland. I was in uniform too and was told by an MP to go to the USO and either stay there until my connecting flight or change into civilian clothes.
“Today I go to the airport and see strangers shaking the hands of men and women in uniform, and it makes me smile. I don’t think those people necessarily believe in the politics of our current wars, they just know this young man or woman is serving his country. That was all we did in Vietnam. I’ll say it again: I’m proud of my service.”