People From Texas

"By the time he returned to base camp, Benavidez was convinced he was dying. “My eyes were blinded. My jaws were broken, I had over thirty-seven puncture wounds. My intestines were exposed,” Benavidez wrote in his book with John Craig, Medal of Honor: One Man’s Journey From Poverty and Prejudice. For his actions on May 2, Benavidez received the Distinguished Service Cross. Following a year of recovery, Benavidez returned to active duty. He retired as a master sergeant with a total disability in 1976 and returned to Texas. After years of bureaucratic machinations to gather pertinent information surrounding Benavidez’s heroic actions in the war, President Ronald Reagan presented Benavidez with the Medal of Honor on Feb. 24, 1981. Benavidez died in 1998 and is buried at Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery in San Antonio. Because the Medal of Honor is presented “in the name of the Congress of the United States,” it is frequently called the Congressional Medal of Honor. The terms are used interchangeably, but regardless of designation, the Medal of Honor remains the most prestigious and treasured of all decorations in the armed services. Doss, Inouye and Benavidez are typical of the Medal of Honor recipients who have received the coveted award on behalf of their fallen comrades. May their shadows loom large and serve as a beacon to every soldier who wears the uniform of the U.S. Army."

"Like Doss and Inouye, Staff Sgt. Roy Benavidez embarked on a journey from poverty and prejudice to receive the highest accolades of a grateful nation. Born on Aug. 5, 1935, near Cuero, Texas, Benavidez’s given name at birth was Raul Perez Benavidez. He changed “Raul” to “Roy” when he joined the Army in 1955. The son of a Mexican farmer and a Yaqui Indian mother, Benavidez was a high school dropout and a troubled youth until he joined the Texas National Guard in 1952. Seven years later and after multiple overseas tours, Benavidez graduated from Airborne School at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. The school transformed Benavidez’s life. In his words, “Until I became Airborne, I had often allowed my temper and my insecurities to control the direction of my life.”"

"February 24, 1981, was a special day in the life of Master Sergeant Roy Benavidez. On that day, the nation watched proudly as this brave soldier was awarded the Medal of Honor by President Ronald Reagan, a recognition given only to very special service members who have displayed courage well beyond that expected of our citizens. I find Roy's life one with which I can empathize and one that should make all Americans proud of the opportunities America offers to those strong enough to seize the chance. Roy's is a classic study of success in America- born poor in South Texas, an orphan harassed for his Mexican-Indian ancestry. As a boy, Roy was helped by his relatives and his community. As a young man, he found the U.S. Army the perfect place to exhibit his burning desire to contribute to the country he loved despite his difficult beginning. Sent to Vietnam as an adviser, he became known as "Tango Mike/Mike," a radio call sign his fellow soldiers made up for "That mean Mexican." He was mean in the best sense: tough and burning to fight America's and his unit's designated enemies. Roy soon earned a reputation for courage that bordered on recklessness, and he was wounded so badly that army doctors said he would be paralyzed for life. They didn't reckon with Tango Mike/Mike."

"I know the content of my heart. I am a good soldier. I go where I am ordered. That kind of loyalty, at least, is noble and vital for the preservation of freedom. When I am asked if it is worth it to lose a loved one in military service I answer "Yes." Our duty as survivors is to pass on the pride in the noble service made by our child, parent, spouse, or buddy. The reason that he or she served, the reason that all American men and women serve, is best expressed in that portion of the West Point motto: "Duty, Honor, Country.""

"Our men developed strong compassion for the plight of these proud, independent people. The desire to be free from oppression seemed to extend to the last man, woman, and child. The greatest tragedy of war could be seen in the children, and they touched everyone. We were soldiers, but we were human beings, too. Our toughest, meanest sergeant often visited the kids in the orphanages to take them gifts and to clown around with them. If a word was ever said to him about this contrast in his behavior, he would give a look so mean and threatening as to make anyone shut up fast. Some guys adopted kids and sent them home, and some married Korean women who had borne their children. Some claimed their Korean children and had them, shipped back to the States when their tour ended. The children left behind by American soldiers were a horrible reminder of the price paid for occupying foreign lands. Many soldiers never considered the consequences of fathering these children, who were left to a life of despair. They were abandoned by their fathers and scorned by the people of their mothers' culture. I had never been an orphan in the sense that those kids were."

"I sort of adopted a young orphan by the name of Kim. I have him little assignments and paid him with scrip and food. Once when we had an inspection coming up, I was sent with a squad to police the area and get rid of all the trash. By the time we were done we had a couple of truck loads of junk, and we hauled it back to the big garbage pit a few klicks down the road. We dumped it, then sent Kim out with a five-gallon can of gasoline to set it on fire. Maybe my instructions to Kim got lost in translation. What I told him to do was to sprinkle a little here and a little there, not to throw it all on one spot. The next we saw he was on the opposite side of the pit from us, and he was lighting a match. He must have dumped the whole can in one place because when he dropped that match, it looked like he'd been consumed by the fires of hell. We went running toward the plume of fire and smoke and all I could hear was Kim yelling, "Benavito, Benavito." (He couldn't pronounce my name very well.) We ran to him and put out the flames by rolling him on the ground. When we could examine him we saw that he had lost his hair and eyebrows, most of his clothes, and was completely black from the soot. That boy was a pure mess, but fortunately, he wasn't seriously hurt."

"The Koreans treated us all the same, too. A lot of them liked us, or tried to. Most Koreans really appreciated the American blood that was spilled on their soil to help maintain their freedom. Some didn't. To some few, a distinct minority, we were just another group of invaders, like the Japanese in the last war and the Chinese before them. They could hardly be blamed for feeling that way after living for so many years with foreigners in their land. Getting to know the Koreans helped me to begin to develop an understanding about the cost of freedom. Not all of the Koreans were Slicky Boys. The Korean soldiers I worked with were excellent. The ROK Army soldiers and Marines were much less well equipped, fed, and paid than we were, but they were committed to doing what they could to preserve their five-thousand-year-old culture. They had an intense hatred for communism that I would see again when some of them fought in Vietnam."

"Okay, I thought, we're stateside, I'll try to look like it. I started looking for the post barbershop. Man, I couldn't even get near it. Some guy by the name of Elvis Presley had just been drafted, and he was at the barbershop getting all his hair chopped off. There were more people and cameras than I had ever seen in my life. None of us knew much about this Presley kid. When we asked, someone told us that he was some kind of blues or rock-and-roll singer. From the look of the crowd around the barbershop, I thought the President of the United States was inside."

"Korea was becoming somewhat civilized, at least for the commissioned officers stationed there. An officers' club had been established near the artillery company's camp, and a three-quarter-ton truck was en route to it carrying a supply of liquor. The truck broke down, and foolishly the driver decided to go for help. I was told that a GI named Gotch-Eye Ireland happened on that truck while the driver was away from it, examined it, and discovered its contents. Gotch-Eye hurried back to his battery, then went to the motor pool to obtain a three-quarter-ton vehicle and some help in order that he might "liberate" that whiskey. The people in the motor pool, of course, had to be involved, for the motor pool sergeant had to sign off on the truck. The soldiers "liberated" the bourbon, scotch, gin, and vodka, leaving sissy liquor such as creme de menthe and sherry for the officers. They hid the truck, and when night fell they removed the bottles from it and took them into the hills. At daylight, MPs conducted a tent-to-tent search but found no trace of the liquor. The captain who commanded the battery called a meeting of all the noncoms. "I am upset," he said, "but I will be even more upset if I do not have periodically in my tent a bottle of bourbon. If I do not, I will take further action. I will see that another search is conducted and that the perpetrators of this incident are court-martialed." Needless to say, the captain got his bourbon. Apparently, he thought as the dogfaces, who could only get three-two beer, did- that the liquor would be wasted on some of the shavetail second lieutenants who drank at the officers' club. The enlisted men used to say of the second lieutenants that their motto was, "We're gentlemen because we're officers." The GI's response was, "Yeah, but it took an Act of Congress to make you one.""

"Serving in Korea was not all misery for me. I felt more a part of something than I ever had in my life. I was a U.S. soldier. Maybe I was a little shorter, or a little darker, or had a different-sounding name from some, but to the other troops I was just one of them. A poor dogface freezing his butt off, too. It did me good. The Army had always separated me a little bit as a Hispanic, and I had always separated myself, too. Now they didn't have a choice and neither did I."

"When President Reagan placed the Congressional Medal of Honor around my neck, it all came racing back to me. The blood flooding the floor of the helicopter and gushing out of the doors as we banked and ran from that Cambodian jungle. The sights and sounds of my six hours in hell. The agony of the wounded and dying kept repetitively flashing through my mind while I watched the honor guard and heard the president, my commander-in-chief, read the details of the award. I was not ashamed of the tears that blinded my eyes."

"Frankly, I don't believe in luck. Everything happens for some purpose. To begin with, I'm alive. I shouldn't be; I should have been dead many times over. No, I can't walk too well, I'm missing one lung, and I lock up like an old rusty gate if I sit too long, but I am alive. Most of my buddies aren't; almost all of them are gone. Over fifty-eight thousand other guys that I didn't know died with them, but I'm alive, and I'm here, and I owe them the telling of this story. Every one of them had his own story. Maybe he just stepped off a plane one day and got it from a misplaced mortar round. Maybe he was walking back from the latrine when a sniper got him. Maybe he's a bigger "hero" than I'm supposed to be, but few are alive to tell the tale. Every one of those guys sacrificed his life, or his limbs, or his humanity, or his youth, or his mind, and I'm alive to tell about it. Up until now, nobody has really cared too much about hearing our side of it, our stories. Maybe it's different now. But I can't tell everybody's story. I can only tell mine. This is not a story about war. It's a story about freedom and its cost."

"The name Tango Mike/Mike had become synonymous with my given name, Roy P. Benavidez. Apparently it was much easier to pronounce and remember than the name Benavidez. The name definitely had become my alter ego. Our alphabetical code names, which we called our Alpha names, were used exclusively on all radio transmissions to confuse the enemy who were monitoring us. If you were captured the enemy wouldn't know that Benavidez, R.P., was also Tango Mike/Mike."

"There's a right of self-defense here that's involved: We know the government has to respond, so we will not be subjected to these types of attacks in the future. But the response should be measured, restrained as much as possible, to protect innocent civilians. It should not just be military. We should pursue diplomatic ways, legal ways, any other ways we can address that."

"I've always been very happy as a priest and I expect to be very happy in just kind of getting to know people. I think one of the most important things a priest does is that he has an opportunity to spend time with people and I'm looking forward to that."

"The church has always been the center of our our life for our family, it's our spiritual home and I thinks it's kept us balanced and helped us get through some tough times, I don't know where I'd be without my faith."

"A nation that does not prepare for all the forms of war should then renounce the use of war in national policy. A people that does not prepare to fight should then be morally prepared to surrender. To fail to prepare soldiers and citizens for limited, bloody ground action, and then to engage in it, is folly verging on the criminal."

"To make a war, sometimes it is necessary that everyone guess wrong."

"Americans in 1950 rediscovered something that since Hiroshima they had forgotten: you may fly over a land forever; you may bomb it, atomize it, pulverize it and wipe it clean of life—but if you desire to defend it, protect it, and keep it for civilization, you must do this on the ground, the way the Roman legions did, by putting your young men into the mud."

"There had been many brave men in the ranks, but they were learning that bravery of itself has little to do with success in battle."

"If war is to have any meaning at all, its purpose must be to establish control over peoples and territories, and ultimately, this can be done only as Alexander the Great did it, on the ground."

"The United States will be forced to fight wars of policy during the balance of the century. This is inevitable, since the world is seething with disaffection and revolt, which, however justified and merited, plays into Communist hands, and swings the world balance ever their way."

"For the first time in recent history, American ground units had been committed during the initial days of a war; there had been no allies to hold the line while America prepared. For the first time, many Americans could understand what had happened to Britain at Dunkirk."

"Revolution and terror are synonymous; only with the passage of time does any revolution become respectable."

"Collective security had a fine sound, but it was still little more than a word; it would still be the United States, and the United States alone, that held the far frontier. No one else had the will or the power."

"It is the nature of peoples to see the ancient foes, and to ignore those newly arising."

"America is rich and fat and very, very noticeable in this world. It is a forlorn hope that we should be left alone."

"To continue to utilize the forces of our Air and Navy without an effective ground element cannot be decisive."

"History has shown very clearly that for democracy to continue, the people, and not the generals or even the executive authority, must have control over the military."

"The problem is to see not what is desirable, or nice, or politically feasible, but what is necessary."

"War was to be entered upon with sadness, with regret, but also with ferocity."

"Because the American people have traditionally taken a warlike, but not military, attitude to battle, and because they have always coupled a certain belligerence - no American likes being pushed around - with a complete unwillingness to prepare for combat, the Korean War was difficult, perhaps the most difficult in their history."

"Yet every democratic government is reluctant to face the fact. Reservists and citizen-soldiers stand ready, in every free nation, to stand to the colors and die in holocaust, the big war. Reservists and citizen-soldiers remain utterly reluctant to stand and die in anything less. None want to serve on the far frontiers, or to maintain lonely, dangerous vigils on the periphery of Asia. There has been every indication that mass call-ups for cold war moves may result in mass disaffection."

"To me, cases like that really scream out, ‘Hey, it’s not out there. It’s in here.’ There’s no indication that this mother is prone to raise very feminine boys because his twin is not that way."

"Do I dislike sexual minorities? Enjoy hurting their feelings? Want to return us to our Puritanical past? If not, why have I repeatedly offended so many in these groups? My answers are “no”, “no”, “no”, and “because I try to do good science”."

"Autogynephilic transsexuals are not "women in men's bodies" (Anne Lawrence, a physician and sex researcher who is herself a postoperative transsexual, has called them "men trapped in men's bodies")."

"Once you've learned about autogynephilic and homosexual transsexuals and seen several of each, distinguishing them is easy."

"The current popular literature about transsexualism is noteworthy for its ignorance of the distinction between autogynephilic and homosexual transsexuals."

"In order for a feminine boy to become transsexual, something extra must happen. What is the something extra?"

"When they leave prison, men who had been heterosexual before entering usually return to a strictly heterosexual lifestyle. Their prison encounters did not indicate that their sexual preference had changed. The men were simply doing the best they could, given constraints. It would be important to know what these men were thinking when they were having their penises sucked by other men, for example. Were they thinking of the men sucking their penises, or were they imagining their girlfriends at home? The former possibility would indicate more flexibility of true sexual preference than the latter."

"The contention that homosexual orientation (as distinct from homosexual behavior) is a recent and local phenomenon is not supported by the evidence. Men who look awfully similar to the men I’ve been talking about in previous chapters seem to have existed through the ages and in vastly different cultures. Social constructionists’ refusal or inability to see this suggests that they are trying to keep their eyes closed."

"The fact is that we don't know enough about hormonal effects on the human brain to have a very specific theory of how Danny's brain could have developed in a feminine direction while his body developed masculine. If Danny's body also showed signs of feminine development, this would support nature theory, but the lack of anatomical femininity does not disprove it. There has been essentially no research on boys like Danny that is directly biological. Short of dissecting the brain of a feminine boy and comparing it with normal boys' and girls' brains, it is unclear what we would even look for. However, the best conceivable direct test of nurture theory has been tried, and it failed. Amanda became Jason again."

"“Social constructionism” (or “social constructivism”) is a term that might be familiar to anyone who has taken a humanities course at an American or European university since 1990, but it might otherwise sound odd. It is difficult to explain social constructionism in a way that satisfies social constructionists. They think this is because they are profound and people like me simplistic. I think it is because they aren't very clear, and to the extent they are clear, they are incorrect."

"The two types of transsexuals who begin life as males are called homosexual and autogynephilic ... homosexual transsexuals are extremely feminine gay men, and autogynephilic transsexuals are men erotically obsessed with the image of themselves as women."

"...femininity in boys and homosexuality in men are probably caused by incomplete masculinization of the brain during sexual differentiation."

"Homosexuality might be the most striking unresolved paradox of human evolution."

"When most people hear “environment,” they automatically think of the social environment, such as how children are raised or what kind of interpersonal experiences they have. But to a geneticist “environment” means anything not encoded in DNA, and this includes biological factors as well as social factors: diet, germs, and random biological events might also affect development. For example, when one identical twin is born with a major brain defect such as anencephaly (lack of a cerebral cortex, or outer brain) or microcephaly (a very small cortex), the other twin is usually normal. Only environment can cause identical twins to differ, but the environmental problem in this case is biological."

"Another environmental hypothesis that has received some enthusiasm on the political right is the idea that gay people seduce and recruit. I have never understood how this is plausible. A boy with no interest in homosexual activity wouldn't find it pleasant even if he agreed to it. How is this supposed to turn him gay?"

"The bad trend is that scientists and laypeople both think that there is something more impressive about biological markers—a trait that one can measure with a ruler or a blood test or complicated electronic equipment (I'm serious, there is no better definition of “biological marker”)—than there is about psychological or behavioral markers. This is a mistake."

"Nobody ever gave Danny Ryan a dress before he asked for one, and he was punished much more than rewarded for his gender nonconformity. If he grows up to be a gay man, as I expect he will, it will be despite the most obvious influences in his social environment, not because of them. In the short term, Danny will receive no more encouragement from others to become gay than he did to wear dresses. Behavior that emerges with no encouragement, and despite opposition, is the sine qua non of innateness. Boys like Danny are poster children for biological influences on gender and sexuality, and this is true whether or not we measure a single biological marker."