The Ballad of Roy Benavidez
The Life and Times of America's Most Famous Hispanic War Hero
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
The dramatic life of Vietnam War hero Roy Benavidez, revealing how Hispanic Americans have long shaped US history, from "a major new voice [with] lyrical powers as a biographer” (David W. Blight, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Frederick Douglass)
In May 1968, while serving in Vietnam, Master Sergeant Roy Benavidez led the rescue of a reconnaissance team surrounded by hundreds of enemy soldiers. He saved the lives of at least eight of his comrades that day in a remarkable act of valor that left him permanently disabled. Awarded the Medal of Honor after a yearslong campaign, Benavidez became a highly sought-after public speaker, a living symbol of military heroism, and one of the country’s most prominent Latinos.
Now, historian William Sturkey tells Benavidez’s life story in full for the first time. Growing up in Jim Crow–era Texas, Benavidez was scorned as “Mexican” despite his family’s deep roots in the state. He escaped poverty by enlisting in a desegregating military and was first deployed amid the global upheavals of the 1950s. Even after receiving the Medal of Honor, Benavidez was forced to fight for disability benefits amid Reagan-era cutbacks.
An unwavering patriot alternately celebrated and snubbed by the country he loved, Benavidez embodied many of the contradictions inherent in twentieth-century Latino life. The Ballad of Roy Benavidez places that experience firmly at the heart of the American story.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Sturkey (Hattiesburg) offers up an overstuffed cradle to grave account of Vietnam war hero Roy Benavidez (1935–1998), a Mexican American sergeant in the U.S. Army who in 1968 displayed extraordinary courage under fire in Cambodia, saving the lives of eight men and getting severely wounded. He never fully recovered and was medically retired in 1976, but in the 1980s, as the nation's most recent living Medal of Honor recipient, he was feted as a paragon of military pride. His life became "an endless stream of parades, media appearances, groundbreakings" and in his home state of Texas he was "practically royalty." Sturkey argues that President Ronald Reagan turned Benavidez into a "political prop," holding a grand ceremony to award the medal in 1981, even as his administration slashed programs that helped veterans, including stripping Benavidez of his Social Security disability benefits in 1983. Sturkey aims to dig into Benavidez's position as a bridge between Reagan's "unapologetic military boosterism" and dismantling of the welfare state, a through line which gets lost in a flow of minutiae that doesn't bring much biographical clarity (not until late in the book does Sturkey explain that "one could argue that had always been self-promoting.... He doggedly pursued the medal for years, aligning dozens of influential allies"). It's a murky story of the intersection between politics and heroism.
