Medal of Honor winner thrills students with story of heroism

The New Star: Medal of Honor winner thrills students with story of heroism
Vietnam War veteran Sgt. Sammy Davis put his lips to a silver harmonica and played “Shenandoah” for a gymnasium full of middle school students. His hope — it would bring them peace.

But they had already fallen silent.

It’s a tune he’s played more than a dozen times before for his friends, their families and his fallen brothers whose names are etched into the Vietnam War Memorial, he told the students.

After he hit the last note, the students rose from the bleachers for a standing ovation.

Davis, one of 85 living Medal of Honor recipients, and at age 65, one of the youngest, visited West Ridge Middle School in West Monroe on Tuesday as part of a pre-Veterans Day presentation to inspire patriotism among youth. The selection of the school in particular was no coincidence: Davis’ granddaughter, Hannah, is enrolled there.

When Davis was in high school, he knew he wanted to join the Army, so he volunteered to serve in Vietnam. He hailed from a family of service members and wanted to follow in the footsteps of his father, who had been served as an artilleryman.

It was his job to provide continuous support to the infantry, he said, and that could require maintaining up to 10 hours of nonstop cover followed by a sudden lulls of absolute quiet.

It was that kind of “eerie quiet” that blanketed his unit early one November morning in 1967. Suddenly, Davis’ unit was pelted with heavy mortar. It was 1,500 Vietnamese soldiers vs. 42 Americans, he said.

Davis’ crew, armed with a 105 mm howitzer, received a direct blow from the enemy, throwing Davis into a foxhole. He lost consciousness for a while, but when he finally awoke he grabbed the damaged howitzer once again and gave it all he had. He couldn’t risk letting the other side overrun it, he said.

“I didn’t do anything heroic that night. I did my job,” Davis said.

“It was just like a bad dream,” he said. “I didn’t think that I was probably going to see daylight.”

Davis fired all remaining rounds of the howitzer, a phosphorous shell, and a final “propaganda shell” filled with leaflets, according to a Military.com report.