Sammy l davis biography

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Simultaneously, an estimated fifteen hundred Vietcong soldiers launched an intense ground assault, failing to overrun the Americans only because a river separated the two forces.

Davis’ squad was operating a 105 mm howitzer that fired eighteen thousand beehive darts in each shell. Although severely wounded, Sammy ignored warnings to take cover and manned his unit's howitzer artillery gun and fired several shells on his own.

The attacking enemy drove to within 25 meters of the friendly positions. Simultaneously, an estimated reinforced Viet Cong battalion launched a fierce ground assault upon the fire support base. The resultant blast hurled the gun crew from their weapon and blew Sgt. Davis into a foxhole. When Davis regained consciousness, he was convinced that the heavily outnumbered Americans couldn’t survive the attack, so he decided to fire off at least one round from the damaged artillery piece before being overrun.

Upon detecting an enemy position, Sammy manned a machine gun to give his fellow soldiers overing fire. That moment, later woven into the film Forrest Gump with Tom Hanks’s likeness, forever tied Davis’s story to American pop culture.

Dixie, he began a second mission: traveling the country to speak with schools, veterans’ halls, and civic groups.

With wounds that prevented him from being able to swim, Sammy crossed a river on an air mattress to help rescue three wounded American soldiers. “But it’s worth fighting for.”

More than half a century after Vietnam, Sgt. Sammy L. Davis continues to embody the courage and humility Hoosiers hold dear. Scrambling up the bank, he found three wounded soldiers, one of them suffering from a head wound that looked fatal.

Nevertheless, Sgt. Davis loaded the artillery piece, aimed and fired. That day, his unit was west of Cai Lay when they fell under heavy mortar attack by the Viet Cong. But an enemy recoilless rifle round scored a direct hit on the howitzer, knocking the crew from the weapon and blowing Davis sideways into a foxhole. When he saw how close the enemy had come, Davis took over a machine gun and provided covering fire for his gun crew.

Sgt. Davis (then PFc.) distinguished himself during the early morning hours while serving as a cannoneer with Battery C, at a remote fire support base.

He struggled to his feet, rammed a shell into the gun, and fired point-blank at the Vietcong who were advancing five deep directly in front of the weapon; the beehive round cut them down. Undaunted, he returned to the weapon to fire again when an enemy mortar round exploded within 20 meters of his position, injured him painfully. Upon reaching the 3 wounded men, he stood upright and fired into the dense vegetation to prevent the Viet Cong from advancing.

At his home near Freedom, Indiana, he can be found mowing the yard barefoot, watching Gunsmoke reruns with Dixie, or sharing stories with visitors while their cat—cheekily named Big Booty Judy—wanders nearby.

He’s attended every presidential inauguration since Richard Nixon, and he often stops at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., pausing before the names of 58,318 fallen brothers and sisters.

“Freedom isn’t free,” Davis likes to remind students.

Davis then went back for the other two wounded soldiers and pulled them onto the air mattress across the river to the firebase. Sometime before dawn, as he lay unconscious, he was seriously wounded in the back and buttocks by a beehive round fired from an American weapon. He eventually made his way to an American howitzer crew and resumed the fight.

While he was recovering in the hospital, Davis learned that he was going home.

He petitioned General William Westmoreland to be allowed to stay with his unit.