The Ballad of Roy Benavidez: The Life and Times of America’s Most Famous Hispanic War Hero

Historian Sturkey (Hattiesburg) offers up an overstuffed cradle to grave account of Vietnam war hero Roy Benavidez (1935–1998), a Mexican American sergeant in the U.S. Army who in 1968 displayed extraordinary courage under fire in Cambodia, saving the lives of eight men and getting severely wounded. He never fully recovered and was medically retired in 1976, but in the 1980s, as the nation’s most recent living Medal of Honor recipient, he was feted as a paragon of military pride. His life became “an endless stream of parades, media appearances, [and] groundbreakings” and in his home state of Texas he was “practically royalty.” Sturkey argues that President Ronald Reagan turned Benavidez into a “political prop,” holding a grand ceremony to award the medal in 1981, even as his administration slashed programs that helped veterans, including stripping Benavidez of his Social Security disability benefits in 1983. Sturkey aims to dig into Benavidez’s position as a bridge between Reagan’s “unapologetic military boosterism” and dismantling of the welfare state, a through line which gets lost in a flow of minutiae that doesn’t bring much biographical clarity (not until late in the book does Sturkey explain that “one could argue that [Benavidez] had always been self-promoting.... He doggedly pursued the medal for years, aligning dozens of influential allies”). It’s a murky story of the intersection between politics and heroism. (June)