Retired Army Col. Paris Davis, 83, will receive the highest military honor 58 years after he was first nominated for heroism during the Vietnam War.
As the sky began to lighten, hundreds of enemy troops staged a counterattack. Machine-gun fire filled the air; grenade fragments knocked out several of Davis’s teeth and blew off part of his trigger finger. Soon, most of his company was pinned down without cover in a rice paddy by soldiers wielding automatic rifles.
“I think one of the good things about a war or any type of crisis like Vietnam is that ... there’s no race at all,” he told television host Phil Donahue in a 1969 interview. “In the dark, Brown is just as Black or White as anyone else. We’re kin ... by virtue of being Americans.”But in the half-century since, many who know his story came to believe that the racism of the Vietnam era hindered efforts to properly recognize Davis’s heroism.
Deis lent help to a dedicated team of advocates — volunteer historians, military officers and battlefield comrades – who in 2014 began documenting events and lobbying on Davis’s behalf. Acting defense secretary Christopher Miller ordered an expedited review of Davis’s case in 2021. Still, their experiences were relative to what they knew as Black men in a racist society. “There was a pretty powerful sense among the Black community in the United States” — buttressed by the Black press — “that the military provided better opportunities for African American men than civilian society did overall,” said Beth Bailey, a history professor at the University of Kansas and author of“That is probably a stronger comment on the state of U.S.
The new draftees began questioning the war’s purpose and the role African Americans were playing in it. The discontent crescendoed with the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, with White soldiers burning crosses and flying Confederate flags and Black prisoners rioting at Long Binh Jail near Saigon.There were often “huge divides” between Black officers and enlistees in how they perceived the racial situation at the time, Bailey said.
Bailey said she believes the twice-lost paperwork in Davis’s case is likely the result of racism – a possible “disconnect” between the Army as a striving institution and discriminatory decision-making on the ground. An Army official said it remains a mystery.
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