Pat Barcas photo
West Aurora High School continues its commitment to educating its students on the sacrifices of our nation’s veterans by having Vietnam War veteran and Medal of Honor recipient Sammy Lee Davis speak to the student body.

By Pat Barcas
Staff Writer
Thursday, Feb. 21, 2013
     It’s been said that war will turn boys into men, and some might say that’s what happened to Sergeant Sammy Lee Davis, if he wasn’t a man already.
     Davis outlined his army career at a special assembly Feb. 19 at West Aurora High School, telling students how he and his G.I. friends would capture bugs at their outpost in Vietnam and make them fight in their helmets. He said he was so bored, he wrote his mom and illustrated the millipedes scurrying around the base, taking three postcards to draw out all of the legs.
     She returned postal correspondence with him by sending him a harmonica and telling him not to be so bored. That harmonica would become his trademark later in life, but he first had to survive a hellish attack in the Cai Lay district in Vietnam.
     “As we were preparing for watch that night, our commander said the chance that we would be under attack that night would be 100 percent,” he said to the crowd of students. That was Nov. 18, 1967. “So we prepared.”
     The regiment endured heavy mortar attacks by the North Vietnamese Army and was attacked by 1,500 enemy soldiers. Davis manned a machine gun, then took over the unit’s burning howitzer and fired several shells at the enemy, getting badly wounded in the process.
     He then floated across the river on an air mattress to rescue three fellow wounded soldiers.
     These actions led to him receiving the Medal of Honor the following year. Footage of Davis receiving his medal from President Lyndon Johnson was used in the movie Forrest Gump, with Tom Hanks’ head superimposed over the head of Davis.
     Davis said Tuesday that not only did he become a man in Vietnam, but the war oddly taught him about love as well.
     “It seems strange to say that I learned about love from being in Vietnam, but I didn’t go to war to kill people. I went because I loved my daddy and I wanted to make him proud of me. I went because I loved my grandpa, and because I loved my country,” he said. “Once we were there, the reason we all fought so hard is that we discovered that we loved each other. We were all we had out there, so we became brothers.”
     Only 12 soldiers out of 42 survived the attack that night.
     “I didn’t do anything heroic. I was just doing my job that night, like any soldier would have,” he said. “There were 42 of us there when the fight started. If any one of us had not done his job, none of us would have been standing at the end.”
     He explained that he did learn to play the harmonica his mother had sent him in the Army, and how a friend in the Army had taught him how to play “Shenandoah,” a song that Davis said recharges the soul’s of fallen soldiers. Davis now plays the tune at veteran’s gatherings, and he played it in the gymnasium Tuesday as well.
     “My heart cries every time I see a Medal of Honor recipient,” said Herschel Luckinbill, who gathered more than 25 veterans for the assembly. “Knowing I lost shipmates that were sleeping above me, my heart just goes out to the fallen soldiers.”

Pat Barcas’ e-mail address is pat@foxvalleylabornews.com.