Army should remove Ft. Hood's Confederate namesake for a legendary Hispanic soldier, group says
Consider the trajectory of two men in uniform, a century apart.
Roy Benavidez, a Green Beret already shot in the face and ripped apart by grenade shrapnel, watched the helicopter full of the wounded comrades he saved roar into the sizzling Cambodian air — and then fall out of the sky.
It happened during the “six hours in hell,” he would later say of the 1968 battle, where he held his intestines in his hand, stabbed an enemy soldier to death and loaded the wounded and dead onto a second helicopter. Benavidez said he had so many injuries and was so bloodied, he was mistaken for a dead man and stuffed in a body bag until he spat in a doctor’s face.
President Ronald Reagan hung the Medal of Honor around his neck in 1981, saying his survival that day, during an assault by about 1,000 North Vietnamese regulars, was so incredible that if it were a movie, it would be rejected as laughably over-the-top.
Then there is John Bell Hood, who resigned his Army commission at the onset of the Civil War to lead Confederate insurrectionists against the United States. Flashes of brilliance in his earlier campaigns were overshadowed by “reckless” command that sped the fall of Atlanta, one historian wrote, and his losses at the Battle of Franklin were so disastrous that it has been called the Pickett’s Charge of the West.
But in Benavidez’s home state of Texas, where he was raised as the orphaned son of a poor sharecropper who went on to be honored by the president, it is the Kentuckian name of “Hood” that everyone knows.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/07/31/army-should-remove-ft-hoods-confederate-namesake-legendary-hispanic-soldier-group-says/
= new reply since forum marked as read
