Raul (Roy) Perez Benavidez was born August 5, 1935 to Salvador Benavidez, his father, and Teresa Perez, his mother. Both of his parents died of tuberculosis when he was young. Benavidez then moved in with his aunt, uncle and their eight children. He lived with them in till enlisting in the Texas Army National Guard in 1952 at the height of the Korean War. He transferred to Army active duty in June 1955. In 1959 Benavidez completed airborne training and then began training for the Army Special Forces. In 1965 he was deployed as an advisor to an Army of the Republic of Vietnamese (ARVN) infantry regiment in South Vietnam. During this deployment Benavidez stepped on a land mine while on patrol and was sent back to the U.S. where Fort Sam Houston doctors informed him that he would never walk again. Disgusted by the …show more content…
Benavidez herd there call and volunteered to help, getting on the next helicopter out. When they got there all of the team members were either dead or wounded and unable to move. He told the pilot to land in a nearby clearing where sergeant Benavidez would have to run about 75 meters under small arms fire to the crippled team. On his way over to them he was wounded in his right leg, face, and head. Even with those injures he took initiative in shuttling the team to the extraction aircraft, and directing fire to allowing the aircraft to land. As the enemy’s fire incises he raced to recover the body and classified documents on the dead team leader. When recovering the team leader sergeant Benavidez was brutally wounded by small arms fire and grenade fragments in the back. The aircraft pilot was mortally wounded and his helicopter crashed. Despite all of the injuries he sustained Sergeant Benavidez collected the documents and went back into wreckage to help the wounded out of the overturned aircraft, and gathered