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Meet Master Sergeant Raul Perez Benavidez — also known as the Lazarus Soldier — a Medal of Honor recipient whose faith and courage never wavered.

Meet the Lazarus Soldier.

Master Sergeant Raul Perez Benavidez was an American Christian and Green Beret who served two tours of duty in Vietnam.

He was incapacitated by a mine in 1965, and told that a spinal injury caused by the blast would mean a medical discharge on “total disability.” Disregarding his prognosis, Benavidez fought back to health, and by the end of a pain-filled recovery, “could run 10 miles with a rucksack.”

The Master Sergeant didn’t quit on God either.

He once wrote, “While I was in the hospital, I spent a great deal of time in the little chapel, which was usually empty.”

“I prayed a lot,” he added. “Wherever in the world I was, I maintained my ties to the Church. I believe in Jesus Christ. I am a Christian.”

Motivated by the memory of a father kneeling before his young daughter, who had been crucified by North Vietnamese Communists, Benavidez was determined to go back and help the South Vietnamese.

He said of the incident, “My worst nightmares are the subconscious recollections of that father crying as he sat there, holding his hands up to his daughter’s feet as her lifeblood dripped into his hands.”

“Three children were nailed to the barracks wall,” he recounted. “Nails went through their little hands and nails through their tiny feet. They had been crucified three feet off the ground.”

Worse, Communist soldiers had used the children for target practice.

The Viet Cong were sending a message to locals: “Accept help from the Americans and see what’s gonna happen to you.”

This wasn’t war, he said, this was murder.

“Seeing what the Viet Cong had done to their own countrymen—to the innocent children of their neighbours—made me realise that evil is real and that Satan is alive.”

“That truth I bear witness to,” he continued. “The sight of those children crucified on that wall changed me forever.”

Benavidez returned to Vietnam in 1968.

Before leaving the United States for this second tour of duty, he recalled clashing with hippies at the airport. Tone deaf, the hippies had accused him and eight other newly minted special forces men of being “baby killers.”

The latter couldn’t be more wrong.

In May 1968, five months after returning, Benavidez threw himself into hell and harm’s way. While attending a church service, calls for help started coming in over the radio. Grabbing equipment and first aid, he ran towards the airstrip and pulled a wounded 19-year-old kid from a damaged helicopter, who died in his arms.

Benavidez then volunteered to replace belly-gunner and boarded one of the outgoing, damaged helicopters returning to the fight.

From the moment he hit the ground, he said, he felt like he was running on autopilot. First aid and supplies in hand, he was first hit in the leg. Reaching the wounded, Benavidez was hit again. When trying to help the wounded evacuate, he was shot a third time.

This bullet tore into his back.

Covered in blood, Benavidez said he’d been knocked out. Recovering and with the evac helicopter now ablaze, he rallied the survivors, administered first aid, and managed to direct “heavy air support.”

So thick was the sky with air cover, Benavidez said it reminded him of a “passage of scripture from the Book of Revelation about the sky turning black with locusts.”

After a “lone slick” (medivac) managed to land, still bleeding, Benavidez helped load the wounded. At this time, he remarked, “bullets were flying everywhere. We couldn’t fire back, because we didn’t know where they were coming from.”

Focusing their fire, the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) shot up the medivac.

With bullets ripping into those already on board, Benavidez said the NVA charged at them. Trying to retrieve more of the injured, he was then repeatedly hit in the back of the head by an NVA rifle butt.

Bitter hand-to-hand combat followed, and although Benavidez survived, he was now also nursing a bayonet injury to the arm.

Holding his exposed intestines back with his hands, the master sergeant said he prayed, while continuing to load wounded soldiers onto the helicopter.

Once he and others were in the air, Benavidez remarked, it was a miracle the “chopper” could even fly. On the ground, bleeding and unable to speak, he remembered medics placing him into a body bag.

“They thought I was dead, and I couldn’t respond.”

“To this day, I can still hear the sound of the snaps being closed on that green bag,” he wrote, recounting the event. “My eyes were blinded. My jaws were broken. I had over thirty-seven puncture wounds. My intestines were exposed.”

Before the medics closed the bag, another soldier recognised him and screamed for a doctor.

“He quickly reversed my condition from dead to “He won’t make it, but we’ll try.”

Benavidez survived.

He was awarded the Medal of Honour by Ronald Reagan in 1981, and kept sharing his message until passing away in 1998.

As old soldiers fade, and liberty’s war dead, missing and wounded, disappear from living memory, let’s make every effort to remember them.

To quote Benavidez in his autobiography, reluctantly written about his time in Vietnam, “The following written words chronicle far more than my life.”

“This is a story of the cost of freedom.”

Lest We Forget.

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Republished with thanks to Caldron Pool.