8 Historical Figures That Deserve To Be Remembered

By the age of seven, Benavidez was an orphan. At the age of 17, he enlisted in the National Guard, and then three years later, aged 20, he switched to Army active duty.

In 1965 Benavidez was deployed to Vietnam. While on patrol, Benavidez stood on a land mine, and was promptly shipped home to Texas, where he was told that he would never walk again. This didn't fly with Roy, so he took on a private and unsolicited training regimen.

Every night, once the doctors had left him alone, Benavidez would crawl from his bed, and, using his elbows and his chin, he would shuffle across the floor to the nearby wall where he would lift himself completely unaided. Several months later and Roy was able to stand again using his legs to push himself upwards.

He spent a year in hospital before proving his doctors wrong, and walked out.

Simply recovering from his injuries wasn't enough for Benavidez. Despite the scars of his previous visit, Benavidez was back in Vietnam in 1968.

It wasn't long before arriving that Benavidez heard a distress call come in. A patrol of 12 men were pinned down and in need of assistance. Benavidez jumped into a helicopter armed with just his knife and medical bag, and set off.

The battle lasted six hours. Benavidez was stabbed by an NVA solider, but no mortal wound would stop a man like Roy Benavidez. He pulled out the bayonet , stabbed the man, and continued with his mission. He saved eight lives.

After the battle, Benavidez was declared dead. As they began to close his body-bag, he used the last of his strength to spit in the doctor's face. Even with 37 bullet, bayonet, and shrapnel wounds, Roy Benavidez was alive.

Benavidez died in 1998, at the age of 63.