Retired Army Col. Paris Davis, 83, stood in the East Room of the White House on Friday as President Joe Biden draped the Medal of Honor around his neck, nearly six decades after he saved the lives of three fellow troops during the Vietnam War.
The retired Green Beret, who was a trailblazer as one of the first Black officers to join the Special Forces, told Military.com on Thursday that he wouldn't have done anything differently even if he had to do it over again.
He would tell his 26-year-old self — a captain then serving in Vietnam on June 18, 1965 — to “make sure you're wearing your boots, and you have some food, and you do what you did.”
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He would have also invited that colonel down to the battlefield, the one hovering overhead in a helicopter who ordered him to abandon his Special Forces troops wounded in the rice paddies of Binh Dinh province. Davis, who disobeyed the order, said he would have “kicked [the colonel's] ass if he'd come down there.”
During a 19-hour battle, Davis saved three Americans under his command and killed more than a dozen enemy fighters using a pistol, M16, machine gun, grenade and a 60mm mortar — all while suffering wounds to his legs and losing half a finger while under fire from hundreds of Viet Cong fighters.
Biden told the story Friday of one of Davis' rescuees, his unit's medic, who had just…
