One of the Green Berets’ First Black Officers Will Be Awarded the Medal of Honor

One of the Green Berets’ first Black officers will receive his long-overdue flowers in the form of a Medal of Honor for his service in the Vietnam War.

According to CBS News, President Joe Biden called Col. Paris Davis to tell the retired veteran he will be recognized for his valor. 

“The call today from President Biden prompted a wave of memories of the men and women I served with in Vietnam – from the members of 5th Special Forces Group and other U.S. military units to the doctors and nurses who cared for our wounded,” Davis said in a statement released by him and his family. “I am so very grateful for my family and friends within the military and elsewhere who kept alive the story of A-team, A-321 at Camp Bong Son. I think often of those fateful 19 hours on June 18, 1965 and what our team did to make sure we left no man behind on that battlefield.”

CBS also reported that Col. Davis’ paperwork for the Medal of Honor suddenly disappeared in 1965, at the height of the civil rights movement.  

​​“This is a veteran, a war hero, who was submitted for our nation’s highest honor, and the paperwork for that award was actually lost,” Doug Sterner, military historian, said to CBS. “The military is redundant in paperwork, if nothing else. And so it’s very rare for that to occur,”  Sterner explained.

In June 1965, Davis led a 19-hour raid northeast of Saigon. During this raid he was shot and hit with a grenade, but he would not abandon fellow-Americans, Billy Waugh and Robert Brown, who were both injured, according to CBS. 

“We were stacking bodies the way you do canned goods in a grocery store,” Davis said to CBS News.

The Green Berets were created in 1952 to help stop guerrilla warfare. 

Read CBS News‘ story in its entirety here.