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Web Posted : 07/22/2001
NEW ORLEANS — They gathered Saturday on the west bank of the Mississippi River, facing a ship as stout and stoic as the fierce warrior whose last name is stenciled in black on its bow.
Yvette Benavidez Garcia (center) dabs tears as her father is remembered for heroism in Vietnam, at the christening Saturday of the USNS Benavidez in New Orleans.
Photos by Kin Man Hui/Express-News Photographer
A portrait of Medal of Honor recipient Roy Benavidez is presented at the christening of the naval ship named in his honor in New Orleans on Saturday. The late San Antonian was a Green Beret in Vietnam.
The strategic sealift ship built at the Avondale shipyard in New Orleans was built to carry troops, vehicles and weapons to war.
The USNS Roy P. Benavidez was welcomed into the Navy in the brief moment it took for the late soldier's wife, Hilaria, to release the bottle that smashed against the ship's hull, sending a spray of champagne into the air.
"In the name of the United States," said Benavidez, 67, of El Campo, "I christen thee Benavidez."
A cluster of red, white and blue balloons sailed skyward above the 85-foot-tall bow, festooned with patriotic bunting, and the crowd of 400 broke into applause.
In a ceremony punctuated by patriotic music and, at times, tears, officials and family members gathered on a sticky Saturday not just to cheer the ship, a transport vessel that someday may take soldiers and their equipment into war, but to celebrate a remarkable life.
"We honor a man," said Cmdr. Virgil J. Tillman of the Navy's chaplain corps, "who in the worst of times did his best."
Born in the South Texas community of Lindenau, Raul Perez Benavidez rose from a modest life as a sharecropper's son, migrant worker and seventh-grade dropout to elite, battle-tested Green Beret.
He earned a high school diploma while in the Army and the nation's highest decoration for valor, the Medal of Honor.
Buried at Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery after his death in San Antonio three years ago, Benavidez earned a place among America's heroes by leading a one-man firefight against hundreds of North Vietnamese troops May 2, 1968, in Cambodia. In the end, he saved eight GIs.
Stabbed, shot and clubbed 38 times, Benavidez prevailed only to come within a breath of being sealed into a body bag and written off for dead.
He returned home haunted by wounds that never quite healed, but he quietly pressed on for another 30 years, first serving in uniform and later as a civilian urging kids to share his desire to learn.
"During his whole ordeal, six hours in hell, he was very stoic because he received numerous wounds," said one of Benavidez's three children, Yvette Garcia, 31, of El Campo. "He just kept going, picked himself up and kept going, and that's how he lived his life.
"He never really showed his pain, even though we knew he was living a daily, constant pain of the wounds of war. You never saw it."
It may be that no one ever saw Benavidez coming, until it was too late.
Short and compact, he didn't stand out in Special Forces training at Fort Bragg, N.C., said retired Army Sgt. Maj. Mando Canales, 62, of San Antonio.
The lackadaisical, always-smiling Benavidez said "shucks" a lot but never cursed as the two learned the art of fingerprinting, map reading and the intricacies of long-range reconnaissance.
"He passed the course just as I did, but we were not at the top of the heap," chuckled Canales, a retired schoolteacher who served in an Alamo City honor guard at Saturday's ceremony. "But I think he was saving all his energy and bravado for Vietnam."
The fateful day was a Sunday. As Benavidez left church, the call came over a field radio. Twelve men on a recon patrol had come under heavy attack. There were wounded.
Overhearing the conversation, the soldier known by his call sign as "Tango Mike Mike" grew alarmed. He had friends among those Green Berets.
Then a staff sergeant, Benavidez jumped onto a waiting helicopter armed only with a standard-issue knife and crowbar, apparently oblivious that enemy gunners had driven off other copters that had swept over the Cambodian jungle in hopes of rescuing the men.
"He said, 'I had to go help them because they were my friends,'" said close friend Benito V. Guerrero, 66, a retired Army sergeant major who first met Benavidez in 1958. "Typical Roy."
The chopper was hit by enemy fire before it landed. Benavidez was wounded in the leg and face as soon as he jumped to the ground.
But he kept going, virtually alone.
Four of the Green Berets were dead, the others wounded.
That apparently didn't faze Benavidez, who moved the stranded men into better defensive positions and worked to set up a helicopter extraction site.
He called in artillery and airstrikes, and directed fire for circling helicopter gunships. In time, the rescue began, with Benavidez dragging the wounded men through a hail of fire, then squeezing off rounds at the dense jungle foliage.
But there were too many guns on the other side, perhaps as many as 600 North Vietnamese regulars supported by Viet Cong guerrillas, and no sooner had the helicopter gotten off the ground than it came to earth with a sickening thud. The pilot had been shot dead.
Benavidez was shot — this time in the abdomen and back — while giving covering fire, but he managed to pull the wounded men out of the helicopter.
"In the midst of all that panic and fear, he also had the presence of mind to seize and safeguard classified documents," said Maj. Gen. Kenneth L. Privratsky, commander of the Army's Military Traffic Management Command, which will load and unload the USNS Benavidez. "Just absolute, incredible bravery."
Unwilling to yield in a hopeless moment, Benavidez rallied the survivors and radioed for more helicopter attacks.
He was wounded again and again, once while giving first aid to a fallen soldier, but pressed on until the next helicopter came.
When it did, Benavidez killed a pair of enemy soldiers as they tried to take it down, then made a final sweep of the area for secret papers and missing or wounded men.
When it was over, he lay in the helicopter, near death, his intestines exposed.
"My next semiconscious memory was that of lying on the ground outside the chopper," Benavidez later wrote in a book. "I couldn't move or speak. I was in deep shock, but I knew the medics were placing me in a body bag.
"They thought I was dead and couldn't respond. To this day, I can still hear the sounds of the snaps being closed in that green bag."
Eyes closed, jaw broken, Benavidez was saved when a friend recognized his face and called for a doctor.
"Growing up as a child and now as an adult, I hear a lot of people across the country refer to my father as the true Rambo," said Noel Benavidez, a 28-year-old Houston computer network engineer.
Built at the 264-acre Northrop Grumman Avondale Industries Shipyard, the $200 million USNS Benavidez is the last of seven large, medium speed roll-on/roll-off ships, or LMSRs, the Navy's newest class of vessels.
With each ship having the cargo load space of eight football fields, they can carry an entire Army brigade, including 58 tanks, 48 other tracked vehicles, and more than 900 trucks for use in combat and humanitarian missions.
Once such things as computers, fiber-optic cables, crew quarters and its two propellers are installed, the ship will undergo a series of sea trials before entering service sometime next year, company spokesman Jeff Nowakowski said.
The breadth and height of the ship, which covered the entire field of view of those at the ceremony, left everyone impressed.
"It's huge. I wasn't expecting it that big," Noel Benavidez said.
Garcia said the sleek tri-colored vessel seemed to embody her father's spirit.
"It looks like a stoic ship," she said, "like dad."
sigc@express-news.net
07/22/2001
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