Hispanic American Medal of Honor Winner Roy Benavidez

Over the course of the Vietnam War, a total of 238 Congressional Medals of Honor were awarded to American forces. Of that number, over sixty percent of the 150 Congressional Medals of Honor awarded were done so posthumously. One of the soldiers that won our country's most prestigious award for valor made it out of Vietnam alive, although by no means unscathed. He was Medal of Honor recipient Roy Benavidez, a Latino- American hero whose unquestioned bravery and self-sacrifice in the face of incredible danger saved the lives of several of his fellow soldiers.

Benavidez was born on August 5th, 1935, the son of dirt poor sharecroppers, in Lindenau, near Cuero, Texas. He was an orphan soon after, and went to live with an uncle. He dropped out of middle school in order to help the family survive by working in the fields, picking beets and cotton. He faced the prejudices that many Hispanic-Americans dealt with growing up at that time but he overcame them and by the age of nineteen he enlisted in the Army; after completion of airborne school he was sent to Vietnam. He was gravely injured by a land mine in 1964, so badly that doctors feared he would never walk again. If this soldier had called it a career then and there, he would have been hailed a hero. What he accomplished after he recovered fully enough, to his physicians' amazement, to become a Green Beret, would win Roy Benavidez the Congressional Medal of Honor.