In the early hours of June 18, 1965, Capt. Paris D. Davis led the 12 members of his Special Forces team and about 90 South Vietnamese trainees stealthily through the jungle of Bong Son in Vietnam's Binh Dinh province. The company successfully raided an enemy camp, killing scores of North Vietnamese soldiers, some while they were still in their cots. And then the tables turned.

As the sky began to lighten, hundreds of enemy troops staged a counterattack. Machine-gun fire filled the air; grenade fragments knocked out several of Davis's teeth and blew off part of his trigger finger. Soon, most of his company was pinned down without cover in a rice paddy by soldiers wielding automatic rifles.

His orders to return fire met with silence, so Davis began blasting his M-16 with his pinkie, according to reports, killing attackers as they came into view, hurling grenades and pushing back the assault for hours. As helicopters provided cover, Davis rushed out into open terrain to rescue three injured members of his team, disobeying a superior's order to stand down. Among them was Billy Waugh, who went on to storied careers in the Special Forces and the CIA

The 26-year-old leader - handpicked for the mission by Gen. William Westmoreland - was among a rarefied group of Black Army officers, and an even smaller cohort in the elite Special Forces, to serve in the nation's first war with fully racially integrated troops. Three months before the raid, civil rights giant John Lewis and other voting-rights activists had been beaten by state troopers as they marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala. Racial tension at home was rising and would erupt dramatically a few years later between U.S. military personnel in Vietnam.

Yet, as the night turned to day in Binh Dinh province, Davis said the race of his white comrades never came to mind as he ferociously strove to rescue them.

"I think one of the good things about a war or any type of crisis like Vietnam is that ... there's no race at all," he told television host Phil Donahue in a 1969 interview. "In the dark, Brown is just as Black or White as anyone else. We're kin ... by virtue of being Americans."

But in the half-century since, many who know his story came to believe that the racism of the Vietnam era hindered efforts to properly recognize Davis's heroism.

Davis's commander nominated him in 1965 for the Medal of Honor, believing he had more than met the qualifications for the highest military recognition. The nomination package and supporting documentation were lost without explanation. A recreated package also was lost in 1969.

"After years of pondering, I've come to the conclusion that the delay was due to the fact that he was Black, because I can't find any other reason someone would lose two recommendations for the Medal of Honor," said Ron Deis, 79, who was the youngest member of Davis's team in 1965 and one of just three still living. "I'm just overwhelmed that he's going to be alive to receive it."

Deis lent help to a dedicated team of advocates - volunteer historians, military officers and battlefield comrades - who in 2014 began documenting events and lobbying on Davis's behalf. Acting defense secretary Christopher Miller ordered an expedited review of Davis's case in 2021.

Finally, now that Davis is 83, the perseverance has born fruit. At the White House on Friday morning - almost 58 years after his acts of selfless bravery - Davis received the Medal of Honor from President Biden.

"You are everything this medal means," Biden said as he stood next to Davis, who wore his fully-decorated Army uniform. " I mean everything this medal means. You're everything our generation aspired to be. You're everything our nation is at our best: brave and big-hearted, determined and devoted, selfless and steadfast. American."

A good job

When Davis joined the Army, he had one goal, he said: a well-paying job with room to stretch. The son of an Ohio foundry worker had just graduated from Southern University in Louisiana on an ROTC scholarship. A quietly confident all-American halfback with a sharp intellect and quick reflexes, Davis was drawn by President John F. Kennedy's vision of the Special Forces as a sort of counterinsurgency dream team. He passed the training and was soon promoted, a rare Black combat leader in an overwhelmingly White force.

By the mid-’60s, African Americans had begun enlisting in the war in large numbers, lured by the Army's promises of racial integration and better wages than they could get at home. By war's end in 1975, 300,000 would serve.

The reality short of the ideal, with Black soldiers facing racism during basic training at bases in the South. They were also disciplined at higher rates and promoted less often than their White counterparts.

Still, their experiences were relative to what they knew as Black men in a racist society. "There was a pretty powerful sense among the Black community in the United States" - buttressed by the Black press - "that the military provided better opportunities for African American men than civilian society did overall," said University of Kansas history professor Beth Bailey, the author of "An Army Afire: How the U.S. Army Confronted Its Racial Crisis in the Vietnam Era."

"That is probably a stronger comment on the state of U.S. civilian society, but at the same time, it is not completely off," she added.

The lives of Black soldiers in Vietnam turned on a host of factors, Bailey said: who they served with and for whom, where they served and during which years. Particularly in that two-decade war, a period that saw huge racial upheaval in the United States, "there was no singular Black experience."

In 1966, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara implemented a plan to pull hundreds of thousands of poor men into the war. By 1967, Black men made up 23 percent of Vietnam combat troops, whereas African Americans in total comprised an estimated 11 percent the civilian population.

The new draftees began questioning the war's purpose and the role that African Americans were playing in it. Their discontent crescendoed with the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, with white soldiers burning crosses and flying Confederate flags and Black prisoners rioting at Long Binh Jail, a U.S. military stockade near Saigon.

Notably, racial violence was much less common in battle zones, Bailey said.

There were often "huge divides" between Black officers and enlistees in how they perceived the racial situation at the time, Bailey said.

"Black officers in Vietnam, most likely without exception, were highly aware of the racism that pervaded both American society and the U.S. military, the U.S. Army," she said. "But, by and large, they weren't sympathetic with the demands of young Black enlisted men, who by the late 1960s often endorsed understandings of Black power and ... were willing to resort to violence when their demands didn't produce results."

While just a tiny fraction of Army colonels were Black in 1968, there were still significantly more leadership opportunities for African Americans than there had been during previous wars, Bailey said. It was during the Vietnam War that the first African Americans were promoted to the rank of general.

Army leadership began pushing to expand the ranks of Black cadets at the U.S. Military Academy. They experimented with removing racial categories to further equality, Bailey said. And, yet, official recognition of the valor of Black troops was disproportionately low.

Bailey said she thinks the twice-lost paperwork in Davis's case is likely the result of racism - a possible "disconnect" between the Army as a striving institution and discriminatory decision-making on the ground. An Army official said the two cases of lost paperwork remain a mystery.

"But you know, how do I say this?" Bailey said. "We focus on the limits on opportunities and the racism, and that was undoubtedly significant, but there's just a real record of achievement and pride and service and that needs to be highlighted, too."

Letting the soldiers do the talking

After the Battle of Bong Son, Davis went on to earn major honors, including the Silver Star for his heroism for that day in 1965, the Bronze Star in 1966 and the Soldier's Medal for Heroism in 1968, over a highly decorated military career.

He retired from the Army in 1985 at the rank of colonel and started a small newspaper in Virginia, the Metro Herald, and for three decades published articles about Black accomplishments and civil rights issues. He lives in Alexandria with his daughter, son-in-law and two teenage grandsons. He counsels young soldiers and visits injured Army patients at Fort Belvoir.

He does not spend a lot of time looking back and has little interest in discussing racism, he said in a brief interview arranged by the Army at a hotel Thursday.

Every time the matter of the medal has arisen, "I let the soldiers do the talking. It was the soldiers who had the feeling that I wasn't being treated right," said the soft-spoken Davis, wearing jeans and a green sweatshirt. "It was the soldiers who decided that they were going to band together and get this thing done."

He didn't have to raise his voice. He didn't need to. He didn't want to, he said.

"You don't spend your life worrying about something that you have no control over, you know?" he said, adding, "You just don't do it. You just let it happen the way it's going to happen."