Captain Paris Davis was in the middle of a pre-dawn raid on an enemy camp in Vietnam when a grenade chipped off several of his teeth and, more worryingly, ripped part of his trigger finger. Then enemy fire began to bombard the Special Forces team he commanded. His most experienced sergeant was shot down. Then the demolition specialist. So the only doctor.
It was June 18, 1965, and according to after-action reports, the 26-year-old Davis suddenly became the last American standing with a motley company of 90 volunteers from South Vietnam, pinned down by hundreds of enemy troops.
In an undated photo of Ron Reis, Captain Paris David, center, offers a tour of his camp in South Vietnam to the commander of the US forces there, General William Westmoreland, on the left. (Ron Deis via The New York Times)
Certain that he was nearly dead, he began to fight without fear of consequences, pulling the trigger of the M-16 with his little finger, repeatedly running out into the open field to rescue his teammates and refusing to give up the fight, even after receiving several shots.
He made it out alive and was immediately nominated for the highest award in the military, the Medal of Honor. But the Army somehow lost the nomination. His frustrated commander sent him again and inexplicably the nomination disappeared again.
His teammates pushed several more times over the years for the medal, only to be complimented, they said, with silence and indifference. Eventually they came to believe that the Army’s inaction had nothing to do with what the captain had done in 1965 but rather with who he was: one of the first black officers in the Special Forces.
“What other assumption can you make?” said Ron Deis, 77, who was the team’s youngest soldier in 1965 and is one of a group of veterans still pushing for Davis to receive the award.
“We all knew he deserved it then,” Deis said during an interview from her home in Anchorage, Alaska, as she wiped away tears. “He sure deserves it now.”
After 55 years of trying, the group received a sign of hope in January. Acting Defense Secretary Christopher C. Miller personally ordered an expedited review of the lost nomination, to be completed in March. The resulting report will then go up the chain to the Secretary of the Army, the Secretary of Defense and finally President Joe Biden. If everyone signs, Davis, now 81, could finally be recognized.
The Army declined to comment on the award or answer questions about the reasons for the previous delays, and said in a statement that its policy is not to discuss any awards until a final decision is made.
In a recent video interview from his home in Arlington, Virginia, Davis, who retired from the military as a colonel in 1985 after a highly decorated career, shook his head and smiled at the mention of the long-delayed presentation. He downplayed the importance of “all this, medals and all that,” adding: “People must move on,” he said. “We have to make this a better world. This is how I feel.”
Across the generations, there are examples of the military fighting prejudice when it comes to recognizing courage. In the segregated forces that served in WWI and WWII, no black soldier received the Medal of Honor, despite clear examples of selfless heroism. Just decades later, some presidents worked to correct past injustices, but veterans groups say much more remains to be done.
When Davis took command of a Special Forces team in 1965, he was a tough but thoughtful college graduate with a soft-spoken Midwestern humility, his fellow soldiers said. The son of a foundry worker in Ohio, he had studied political science on an ROTC scholarship at the University of Southern Louisiana, played soccer, and was named All-American as a running back. In the Army, his quick mind and explosive strength earned him a place in the elite and in the rebel Special Forces.
He arrived in Vietnam a month after the bloody civil rights march in Selma, Alabama, at a time when Special Forces, like the country as a whole, were plagued by racial tensions. As a rare black officer in the Special Forces, his commander warned him that he would have to work twice as hard.
“You’re going to have a completely white team, and you have some guys from Alabama and one from Mississippi; it could be kind of tough,” Davis recalled his commander saying.
The young captain tried to be friendly, but immediately told his men that if they called him something other than “sir”, he would not waste time denouncing them, he would simply throw them on the ground.
The team was launched from the air into a remote agricultural district of Binh Dinh province, a pathway for enemy troops heading south, where they were to train a force of local volunteers. The United States would eventually send thousands of troops to try to control that province, but in early 1965, Davis’ team numbered just 12.
He remembered that, as his commander had warned, not all men liked taking orders from a black officer. But the combat became a powerful unifier and over time the team grew closer.
Soldiers forget race when they fight together, Davis said in a 1969 television interview. We are related. Not ethnically, but by virtue of being American. “
When the June 18 raid began, he and three other Special Forces soldiers slipped silently through the jungle before sunrise, leading a line of South Vietnamese troops to attack an enemy camp. Davis and the team’s sergeant major, a Texan named Billy Waugh, broke into the enemy commander’s cabin and killed him point-blank, according to witness statements and Army records. The team then ripped through the camp, throwing grenades and shooting at everything that moved. Caught sleeping, dozens of North Vietnamese soldiers died on their cots, while others fled into the jungle.
The captain was congratulating the team on a successful raid when the enemy horns sounded, announcing a counterattack from a much greater force.
The team was pushed back into a muddy paddy field with no cover. One sniper bullet shattered Waugh’s knee, and two more splintered his foot. At the edge of the paddy field, the team’s weapons specialist was knocked out by a mortar blast and the medic was shot in the head.
Davis and his company of local volunteers took refuge on a small hill and spent the next 10 hours suppressing waves of attackers, some of whom got close enough to kill one with the butt of their M-16.
When US warplanes bombarded enemy positions, instead of taking cover, Davis used the distraction to run off and rescue his wounded teammates, post-action reports show. First he brought the weapons specialist. He then ran to find the sergeant major, but was shot in the leg and had to retreat. During the next bomb attack, he limped back through the rice field and grabbed Sgt. A bullet hit Davis’s arm this time, but he lifted the sergeant over his shoulder and carried him back to safety.
Reinforcements arrived and found Davis wounded and covered in blood. The major in command ordered him to evacuate, but he refused, saying he still needed to rescue his doctor.
Under the cover of friendly fire, he threw himself back into the open field, grabbed the wounded medic, and began to crawl backward. “I’m going to die?” he remembered the doctor muttering at him. His answer: “Not before me.”
All four Special Forces soldiers made it out alive that day. Waugh went on to a historic 40-year career as a CIA agent. Waugh, now 91, declined to be interviewed for this article, saying his memory was failing. In a summary of the battle he wrote in 2016, Waugh wrote of his former commander: “I just have to close my eyes to vividly remember the gallantry.”
Knowing that Davis’ heroism easily surpassed the Medal of Honor bar, his commander, Major Billy J. Cole, immediately submitted his name. “He has shown as cold courage as any human I have ever heard of,” Cole proudly told the newspaper that covered his base of operations at Fort Benning, Georgia.
But nothing happened. The older one pushed for an investigation. In 1969, a hearing determined that no record of the original nomination could be found and ordered the Army to resubmit it. The file disappeared again.
During the decades since, the men on the team petitioned their senators to revive the matter, without success. Cole, who died in 2003, became so frustrated that in later years he wondered aloud if the obstacle might be race, according to his daughter, Carol Cole, who helped him write his memoirs. She said not getting the Davis medal “was one of her biggest regrets.”
The cause was picked up in 2014 by a group of veterans and volunteers who specialize in gaining recognition from ignored Special Forces soldiers. They collected tattered newspaper clippings, yellowed Army files and first-hand accounts, and put their work in the hands of high-ranking Pentagon officials who pushed the award forward.
After the Army, Davis founded a small newspaper in Virginia called The Metro Herald, for 30 years regularly publishing articles on the achievements of black residents and local civil rights issues. During that time, he said in the interview, he gave little thought to why he had repeatedly run into danger in 1965 to save his men or why the medal nomination kept being lost.
“I use this term a lot: life comes upon you suddenly; it just happens to you suddenly, ”he said. “Every day, something comes up that you don’t expect.”
After thinking about it for a bit, he smiled and added, “I’m not a victim of anything. The other night, I tried to write the things that I am a victim of. I couldn’t think of anything. “
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She is a freelance blogger, writer, and speaker, and writes for various entertainment magazines.