On 2 May 1968, a 12 man SOG team was surrounded by about 1,000 NVA. They dug in and tried to hold them off, but were not going to last long. MSG Roy Benavidez heard their distress call over a radio and boarded a rescue helicopter with first aid equipment. He did not have time to grab a weapon, so he voluntarily jumped into the hot LZ armed only with his knife. He sprinted across 75 meters of open terrain through heavy fire to reach the pinned down team. By the time he reached them, he had been shot 4 times, twice in the right leg, once through both cheeks, which knocked out four molars. He ignored these wounds and began administering first aid and dragged half of the wounded men to the chopper. The enemy fire got worse, and Benavidez was hit in the left shoulder. He got back up and ran to the platoon leader, dead in the open, and retrieved classified documents. He was then shot in the abdomen, and a grenade detonated nearby peppering his back with shrapnel. The chopper pilot was mortally wounded then, and his chopper crashed. The MSG ran to the wreckage and got the wounded out of the aircraft, and arranged them into a defensive perimeter to wait for the next chopper. The NVA was building up to wipe them out, and Benavidez called in tactical air strikes and threw smoke to direct the fire of arriving gunships. Just before the extraction chopper landed, he was shot again in the left thigh while giving first aid to a wounded man. He still managed to get to his feet and carry some of the men to the chopped, directing the others, when an NVA soldier rushed from the woods and clubbed him over the head with an AK-47. This caused a skull fracture and a deep gash to his left upper arm, and yet he still got back up and decapitated the soldier with one swing of his knife. He had lost 2 quarts of blood and the battle lasted 6 hours. He had been wounded 37 times. (Cont.)