I stopped doing these bi-weekly Eyrie reminder posts a while back, preferring to let the Substack hang sink or swim on its own. So far, it’s worked out nicely enough with just the link in the Donnybrook post for promo. But I feel tonight’s Eyrie post is really something special, enough so to induce Ye Humble Aulde Blogghoste to call a little main-page CF Muthaship attention to it.
Entitled “Courage, heroism, persistence: what they REALLY look like,” the topic is MSGT Roy Benavidez, of whom, when Reagan hung the MoH around his neck back in ’81 for some truly astonishing exploits on 2 May 1968 as a fighting Green Beret so-jer serving in Vietnam, had this to say: “If the story of his heroism were a movie script, you would not believe it.”
As per his usual wont, Ronnie was exactly, precisely correct about that; just hit the Eyrie link, then carry on from my brief excerpt and commentary to the original article and see if you don’t agree. Since somebody or other (a-HENH!) brought up my commentary just now, here’s a wee dram just to give you the overall flavor.
It’s to our immense cost that, in an age when the words “duty,” “honor,” and “sacrifice” have become dirty words, the concept of “masculinity” itself reduced to little more than a punchline, America seems incapable of producing doughty, indomitable men like MSGT Benavidez anymore. There were precious few of them to begin with, and we’ll always need as many of them as we can possibly get.
That, too, is just true as all git-out. Now go looky, peeps. Subscribe, share, pay-sub to comment, all the usual foofaraw.
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I’m pretty sure I can still recall Benavidez’ particulars from the write-ups I read 43 years ago:
He was at base when a SF team in Indian Country got bushwhacked.
Dude literally rucked up, jumped on the first chopper flying out to them to bring water and ammo and do a medevac, jumps out, rallies wounded survivors and redistributes ammo to the ones who can still shoot, kills attacking NVA in small and large batches, using rifles, machine guns, grenades, and captured enemy weapons, including using a knife and hand-to-hand combat, taking multiple hits the entire time, gets the wounded to a medevac, guns down one charging dude a couple of feet from the chopper, gets hit more times, manages to stagger to the medevac.
When they start pulling wounded off the chopper back at base, a medic takes one look at him and declares he’s dead, whereupon Benavidez, weakened by this time from wounds and blood loss, spits in the guy’s face by way of saying, “Natzsofast, mofo!”
They pull him into surgery, and he survives.
Most of the dudes he rallied and saved get dispersed to hospitals to the four winds, and his medal write-up languishes from lack of corroborating witnesses until it gets rescued and the details run down 13 years later on President Ronnie’s watch.
Benavidez was a farking BULL, and a Special Forces legend, once the whole story came out.
hence Pres. Reagan’s quote.
Nota bene that in the 43 years since the president hung that pale blue ribbon around his neck, Hollywood, collectively, managed to still not make that movie.
What absolute fuckers.