Medal of Honor: One Man's Journey From Poverty and Prejudice (Memories of War)

by Roy P. Benavidez

I am one blessed man. Frankly, I don’t believe in luck. Everything happens for some purpose.

I developed another kind of soul at Lula’s, a feeling that all men are brothers, just as my fellow Green Beret LeRoy Wright and I were brothers at schools in the States and in Vietnam, where he saved my life.

The experience changed me. The way they looked at me meant more than the quarter, even as much as I wanted that. Little did those gringos realize that running in my veins was the blood of the fierce Yaqui. If there is a crazy, never-give-up, never-quit side of me, I believe that it comes from my Yaqui ancestors. Moreover, I have the blood of the very vaqueros who taught their ancestors to ride, rope, and work the wild stock of the rugged Southwest. Maybe if I had been born five hundred miles farther south I would have been a retired bullfighter by now. I might have fewer scars as well.

Then he would go on to explain that up through my grandfather’s generation, the Mexicans and Mexican-Americans had been able to live to themselves and get along fairly well. “That has to change,” he would say. “My future and yours will be in a different kind of world. We will not give up our heritage, but we won’t let it hold us back either. We will be judged by the way we act and by the respect we earn in the community.”

While we kids avoided Uncle Nicholas’s lectures, we gathered around Grandfather Salvador at every opportunity because we loved his stories, even though they, too, were really parables with a point. His favorite theme was that people had to help each other, and one of his stories was especially damning to the people of his own culture. It expressed his belief that they didn’t help each other as they should. He told of a man who sold crabs down near Palacious where the Colorado River empties into Matagorda Bay and the water mixes with the salt water of the Gulf of Mexico. The man had two baskets of crabs for sale, according to my grandfather, one labeled “American Crabs” and the other labeled “Mexican Crabs.” The basket labeled “American Crabs” had a wicker lid, firmly tied down, but the basket labeled “Mexican Crabs” had no lid. A man from El Campo stopped his car and, interested in buying some of the crabs, asked what the difference was between the American and the Mexican crabs. “See those Mexican crabs just sitting down there in the bottom of the basket?” the vendor replied. “They don’t need no lid. They don’t try to get out. Now these American crabs are a different proposition. You don’t put a lid on them, and pretty soon one of them climbs up on the back of another, and another climbs on his back, then another climbs on his back, and on and on, and pretty soon them American crabs are getting out all over the place.”

Twenty years after that, when I was in the jungles of Vietnam, guys would look at me and wonder how I survived so well. They used to say I acted like I was out on a picnic. “I am,” I’d say, “and I brought a jar of ants to turn loose so you’ll feel like you’re on one too.” Somehow living in that steaming jungle never seemed quite as rough as all those years as a migrant worker.

Uncle Nicholas was not a militant or a rabble-rouser. Instead, he was a peacemaker. Even before he was made a deputy, he resolved problems between the communities. He talked the talk and made the peace. He didn’t do it with his hat in his hand and his eyes on the ground asking for favors, and he didn’t do it with threats. If our folks were wrong he’d say so and stick to it. If the Anglo side was wrong he’d talk sense until their ears fell off or they agreed, just as he sometimes preached to us until we gave up and did what he wanted.

“Booze and bad friends will get you in trouble, Raul,” he said. “Dime con quien andas, y te dije quien eres.” Literally translated, this means “Tell me with whom you walk and I will tell you who you are.” I’ll bet Uncle Nicholas said that to me a thousand times.

So I guess I grew up some and took those responsibilities seriously. Sometimes when someone treats a person with respect that person automatically becomes deserving of it.