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war

Who Is The Most Badass Person In History That No One Knows About?

roy benavidez

Short Answer: Medal of Honor recipient, Roy P. Benavidez flew into a gunfight to save 12 Special Forces soldiers with only a knife. He was shot multiple times and believed dead, until he spit in the face of the medic trying to put him in a body bag.

Early Life

Roy Benavidez was born in 1935 near Cuero, Texas, to impoverished sharecroppers of Mexican and Yaqui Indian ancestry. Both parents died of tuberculosis before his eighth birthday. He and his younger brother, Roger, along with eight cousins, were raised by their grandfather, an aunt and uncle, in El Campo.

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Picture of the Day

Medal of Honor recipient, Master Sergeant Roy Benavidez. He had 37 puncture wounds, exposed intestine, broken jaw, and eyes caked in blood. He was pronounced dead until he spit in the face of a doctor who was zipping him up in a body bag.

A devout Catholic, Benavidez was attending prayer services on May 22, 1968 when he heard a desperate radio plea, “Get us out of here! For God’s sake, get us out!” The cry for assistance came from a 12-man Special Forces Recon team. They had stumbled upon an entire infantry battalion of the Vietnam People’s Army (NVA) of perhaps 1,000 men.

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19 Soldiers Who Fought In Afghanistan Reveal Their Preconceptions That Turned Out To Be Completely Wrong

1. That Afghanistan was an actual country. It’s only so on a map; the people (in some of the more rural places, at least) have no concept of Afghanistan.

We were in a village in northern Kandahar province, talking to some people who of course had no idea who we were or why we were there. This was in 2004; not only had they not heard about 9/11, they hadn’t heard Americans had come over. Talking to them further, they hadn’t heard about that one time the Russians were in Afghanistan either.

We then asked if they knew where the city of Kandahar was, which is a rather large and important city some 30 miles to the south. They’d heard of it, but no one had ever been there, and they didn’t know when it was.

For them, there was no Afghanistan. The concept just didn’t exist.

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How Would Japan Have Fared In A Fight, Had The US Landed On Mainland Japan And No Nukes Had Been Dropped Or Developed?

japan ww2

Japan would have lost, horribly.

And it would have been a blood bath for the invaders. I personally question how much of Japan or Japanese culture would have survived such an invasion.

If the US had landed in Kyushu as originally planned, they would have been fighting against about 1,000,000 well fortified troops; troops that were well dug in.

The Japanese would have been heavily bombed and heavily shelled for months, and it still would have been hell for the invaders and death for the defenders. Just like the battle of Okinawa, the Japanese would have lost inflicting horrible casualties.

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Picture of the Day

(photo: PDSA)

Kuno the Belgian Malinois charged through enemy gunfire to save the lives of British soldiers fighting al-Qaeda in Afghanistan is to be awarded the animal equivalent of the Victoria Cross. During the raid, he tackled a gunman and was hit by bullets in both back legs

The retired British Army Working Dog suffered life-changing injuries while supporting the British special forces fighting Al Qaeda and has now been awarded the Dickin Medal – the highest award any animal can receive within the British military – from the People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals (PDSA).

To put it into human perspective: that’s the animal equivalent of winning the Victoria Cross, the UK’s version of the Medal of Honor.

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Comment of the Day

Some people did not recognize me at first when I came back from Vietnam. (I turned 19 a week before my unit was sent to retake Hue during Tet 1968). When the fighting was over, all of us were old. Hundreds of years old, it seemed. My unit took 50% casualties. Our youth had been ripped from us. We were all photo number two. Friends from high school did not recognize me at first. Some thought I was my father (he survived his patrol being air dropped onto a Chinese infantry unit, one of only three men who survived the four day running fight) at first. I looked at pictures of my father before and after Korea, and of my uncle who liberated Buchenwald in WWII before and after the war. They were both like the photos above. Before and after.

War changes you, war ages you. It steals away something which makes you human. It hollows you out. Small wonder so many veterans commit suicide. It is not all John Wayne on “Sands of Iwo Jima”. War is dirty, loud, smelly and extremely frightening. You do things and see things you never saw in a movie, no matter how supposedly realistic it is. I never imagined having to beat another human’s head to past with a rock. The sight, the smell, the rage I felt.

The flower power hippies were right about one thing. War is not good for children or flowers. But blood does, literally, make the grass grow.

– hawgowar

Picture of The Day

soldier after 4 years of war

A soldier’s face after four years of war, 1941-1945

These two pictures are shown side by side in the Andrei Pozdeev museum. The museum caption reads: “(Left) The artist Eugen Stepanovich Kobytev the day he went to the front in 1941. (Right) In 1945 when he returned”. This the human face after four years of war. The first picture looks at you, the second one looks through you.

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