In Every Weapon I Had, author Paris Davis shares the story of a Green Beret commander’s heroism during the Vietnam War, and the long fight to recognize his bravery. You can read an introductory excerpt below.
Introduction
Some Corner of a Foreign Field
10:00 A.M.
June 18, 1965
Near Bong Son, Binh Dinh Province, Vietnam
There was no easy way off the hill. Bullets snapped around me as I scanned the rice paddies to my north and east, watching for North Vietnamese or Viet Cong soldiers trying to circle around our flanks. The sun blazed down on bullet-riddled corpses scattered across the fields. The stench of shit and blood and smoke filled my nose. As I looked down the barrel of my rifle, my pinkie curled around the trigger because a few hours earlier, a grenade had shredded my index and middle finger.
To my east, I saw smoke rising from the North Vietnamese rest camp we had raided at dawn, and beyond that the wide delta where the lazy waters of the Song Lai Giang River spilled into the South China Sea. The battalion we were fighting had come ashore here, part of the flow of North Vietnamese fighters into Binh Dinh Province in the northern highlands of South Vietnam. Their camp lay in ruin, a graveyard for the troops we had ambushed. But the VC had counterattacked. We were fighting for our lives.
The Vietnam War was already ten years old as I crouched on that hillside. But in mid-1965, the war was changing. The U.S. strategy of building up the army of the Republic of South Vietnam and propping up its government was failing. Fury in the U.S. over the Gulf of Tonkin Incident in August 1964, when North Vietnamese and American ships traded fire at sea, had poured gasoline on the smoldering war. President Johnson, re-elected in a landslide soon after Tonkin, was frustrated over the war and impatient with his advisors who couldn’t agree on how to either win the conflict or get out with honor. The loudest voices, including General William Westmoreland, the commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, argued for more troops, more bombing, more search and destroy missions. To Westmoreland, the northern highlands where I was fighting were strategically crucial. It was here that the enemy was entering the south from the Ho Chi Minh Trail and from the sea to wage war on the tottering government and drive the Americans out. If the flow of North Vietnamese could be stopped, it had to be here.
My A-team of Green Berets, Detachment A-321, had built up a Special Forces camp not far from the village of Bong Son. For two months, we had been training a regional force of local Montagnards—the indigenous hill people with little love for the heavy-handed South Vietnamese government—and the ethnically Chinese Nung to fight the North Vietnamese and the National Liberation Front, the guerrillas in the south that President Diem derisively called Viet Cong, which meant “Vietnamese communists.” The force we assembled, the 883rd Regional Forces Company, was trained and ready. When we received intelligence and aerial reconnaissance of the North Vietnamese camp to our northeast, we decided to lead the men into combat for the first time.
Eighty Montagnard and Nung soldiers in four platoons had marched with me out the gates of our Special Forces camp under cover of night, along with three other Green Berets from our detachment. We attacked at sunrise. Our dawn operation had gone exactly as planned. That is, until bugles rang out in the forest to signal a counterattack. Four hours after we launched our surprise attack, only about a dozen of those soldiers from the 883rd were alive with me on the knoll. We were pinned down, encircled by far more NVA and Cong than we had estimated. Only one other Green Beret had made it to the hill so far with me, my senior demolitions specialist, Staff Sergeant David Morgan. In our retreat, a mortar round had knocked him into a leech-infested cesspool, unconscious. I had dragged him out when he came to, his blouse soaked with shit and muck.
Another member of my detachment, Master Sergeant Billy Waugh, was pinned down in a trench in the field. A sniper had shot his foot to pieces. He screamed at me across the field to get him, calling me everything but a child of God.
My junior medic, Specialist Robert Brown, was missing. He had gotten separated in the retreat and was somewhere in the field, out of sight. I didn’t know if he was alive or dead. Just before we left camp the night before, he had passed around candy cigars to celebrate the birth of his baby boy back in Ohio.
Though we were practically surrounded, we had cover. When we came under fire and retreated to the hill, we found dugouts that the NVA had abandoned when we attacked. Some of our fighters remembered their training at our camp and returned fire without hesitation. Others froze. Paralyzed with fear, they couldn’t respond to the withering gunfire and the mortar blasts. I scrambled from foxhole to foxhole, quietly coaxing the men to hold their position and keep firing. I stayed in continual contact with our commos—our radio men—back at camp on a battered PRC-10 radio, relaying the NVA coordinates for air strikes.
I knew where the enemy was, and where our planes needed to lay preparations on the enemy. The NVA were dug in on high ground like ours across the rice paddies, with trees and a village for additional cover. We were running low on ammo, and I needed air support. As I surveilled the battlefield, I silently recited a line from my favorite poem, a sliver of verse from World War I that I tweaked for this war: If I should die, think only this of me / That there’s some corner of a foreign field / that is forever America.
* * *
I had asked for this. Back at First Special Forces HQ in Okinawa, my commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Elmer E. Monger, had asked me to lead Detachment A-321, one of four detachments chosen to set up camps in Binh Dinh Province, where the North Vietnamese were flooding across the border and disembarking from the sea to wage guerrilla war on South Vietnam. I jumped at the chance, even after I was warned that I might have trouble. There might be soldiers on this team who would resent a Black commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Monger had warned me. They might be hostile. I volunteered anyway. I did it because I wanted to. I also did it because I had to. A Black soldier had to be as good as the white soldiers around him. On the battlefield, no one cared what color you were. Back home in the states, sit-ins and protests and marches over segregation and civil rights were tearing the country apart. Out here in this rice paddy, under the scorching sun of Vietnam, the only colors that mattered were the colors of your flag.
By mid-morning, we had been out here for about four hours, trying to avoid being overrun. I had fought in every way possible that morning: with my rifle and my fists, with grenades and the butt of my rifle. I used every weapon I had. I wasn’t sure how many Cong I had killed that morning, but I was certain there would be more.
I don’t remember exactly when the voice crackled over the PRC-10 demanding an update on the battle. It came from an aircraft somewhere overhead. I didn’t recognize the voice. It wasn’t either of my commos back at camp, Kenny Bates or Ron Wingo. It wasn’t a forward air control pilot overhead, and it wasn’t my B-team commanders, Captain Clair “Tiny” Aldrich or Major Billy Cole. It wasn’t anyone in Fifth Special Forces that I knew of. I didn’t know who he was. But I knew what he was: an officer who had no business being there trying to get in on the action.
“Sir, we have two Americans who are critically wounded and the other I don’t really know. I understand he might be dead,” I said over the PRC-10.
“Captain, I want you go move out of the area right away,” the officer said.
This had happened to me before. Colonels and even generals who craved promotions would scramble a helo when they caught wind of combat. Then they’d buzz overhead and barge into the action to try to gather extra medals and commendations. If a bullet was fired anywhere nearby, the officer was eligible for a combat infantry badge. The joke was that even if there was no incoming fire, an officer just had to say, Did you hear that bullet? That was good enough to qualify for a combat medal.
“Sir, I’m just not going to leave,” I said. “I still have Americans out there.”
Pulling out would have alerted the North Vietnamese to where all our troops were, and we would have been vulnerable. But that wasn’t the most important reason for me to stay. As the commander of this operation, there was no way that I could walk away and leave injured men on the battlefield. It would have been a far more serious dereliction of duty to leave my men to die at the hands of an enemy than to cross an officer who had no business trying to direct a battle from the safety of the sky. There was another part of this situation specific to me. As one of the few Black Special Forces officers anywhere in Vietnam, I found it unthinkable to walk away from soldiers of any race or color. Not to mention that as a Black man, it would be a stain that would never wash away.
The officer wasn’t listening. “I’m ordering you to move out,” he said again. I refused again. This time I used some choice words that I’d never used with a superior officer, or any officer for that matter. I never knew who that officer was, and I never will.
To me, I wasn’t disobeying an order or defying a superior officer. I was just observing a basic principle of leadership, which was that it was both impossible for me to leave and wrong to abandon my men on the battlefield. A leader would never do that. Not only would my men never forget it, I would never forgive myself. Especially knowing that one of those men had just had a baby. If I did find Brown and get him off, at least there was a chance he might see his boy. There was zero chance of that if I didn’t. When the officer gave up, I went back to what I had been doing: figuring out how to save my men.
* * *
This is not just a story about Paris Davis. I prefer to talk about “us” more than “me.” It’s a story about my fellow Green Berets on and off the battlefield. These were soldiers who were with me in the quiet moments at our camp in Bong Son, who laughed as we played with our monkey, Joe, and our pet bear. These were the soldiers who fought beside me as machine-gun fire rattled around us and dirt from exploding mortars rained down on our heads. This is about soldiers like Ron Deis who flew overhead through a hail of bullets to survey the battlefield. This is about Bobby Brown, who lived long enough for his young son to walk alongside his wheelchair back home in Ohio. This is about Captain Tiny Aldrich, who relieved me on the battlefield and stood by me when I was forced out of my command years later. This is about then-Major Billy Cole, who nominated me for the Medal of Honor for that battle. This is about David Morgan, cut down as he surveyed another battlefield three months later. These friends supported me long after the war was over. This is Paris Davis talking when I say this book is about all of them.
Nor is this story only about valor and sacrifice on one battlefield. It’s a chronicle of a moment in American foreign policy, a snapshot of a crucial point in the Vietnam War. As the decades slip past, this history and its meaning are vanishing. Like other conflicts that have come before this one, Vietnam is growing hazy for the generations that have come since. It’s a war that escalated and spread for reasons that are hard to understand today, in a moment when communism in Southeast Asia commanded the same attention and alarm as our decades-long Cold War with the Soviet Union. This book is intended to tell the story of how my team came to be at that critical point in a critical time when Vietnam was a tinderbox, and the war was on the brink of a major escalation.
Our camp in Bong Son was considered one of the most effective anywhere in South Vietnam. It was where General Westmoreland returned again and again as he sought to build a firewall to contain the flood of North Vietnamese soldiers into the south. It was where we carried out President Kennedy’s strategy of using Special Forces to inoculate against communism’s spread. It was where we quietly and effectively carried out operations that Congress and the American public frowned on in the open.
When I joined Special Forces, there weren’t many Black Green Berets within the newly expanded Special Forces ranks. It had only been about thirteen years since President Truman had desegregated the military. When Lieutenant Colonel Monger asked me to lead the detachment in spring 1965, the war and civil rights were fueling domestic protest back home. Eventually, the two issues became sides of the same coin as the draft sent young Black men to Vietnam in greater numbers than white ones. When a cargo plane dropped my detachment in Binh Dinh in April 1965, we arrived just weeks after the infamous march over the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, when state troopers beat marchers and unleashed dogs. The images of “Bloody Sunday” echoed across the globe. Opposition to both the war abroad and segregation at home became intertwined. I found myself a target of reproach as a soldier and as a Black man who volunteered to serve.
Racism didn’t define my experience as a soldier, but it was always present, sure as God made little green apples. I experienced it in Airborne School and Ranger School. I saw it when a white pilot that my detachment had saved when he ditched over Binh Dinh crossed the street when he saw me coming, so he wouldn’t have to introduce his girlfriend to a Black man.
Perhaps the most enduring symbol of my experience as a Black man in the U.S. military came in the fact that my nomination for the Medal of Honor was “lost” multiple times, disappearing into the Army’s bureaucracy. I will likely never know exactly how that nomination was lost. My reputation in Vietnam was no secret. Charlie Black, a highly regarded war correspondent for the Columbus Enquirer, called me “one of the most famous Special Forces officers in Vietnam” in a 1965 article. Duty officers in Saigon tracked the events of this battle minute by minute in real time. My own commanding officer submitted my nomination not once, but twice. My advocates have told me that racism was undoubtedly behind the repeated disappearance of my nomination. While I’ll probably never know for sure, it was probably deep-sixed in Pacific Command in Hawai’i, and never even made it to the higher-ups in the Pentagon.
Medals are so important for those of us who have served. When soldiers come home from war, it shines a light as bright as a night star on those of us who did something extraordinary. For civilians, awards and medals can seem confusing, especially when they see a uniform covered with chest candy and don’t know the meaning of all those bars and pins and medals. But even when civilians don’t know what each one means, they know that it shows bravery, diligence, dedication, or just patriotism. Within the military, it means more: that we have transcended duty. If there’s a V for valor on a Bronze Star, that means your stuff doesn’t smell. We have gone above and beyond in some way. It shows that we have worth and we did something that was extraordinary and different, that we didn’t sit at a desk and work in an air-conditioned office building pushing papers and sharpening pencils. And the Medal of Honor: well, that means we’ve done something that no one has done before.
I finally felt the weight of the medal on my chest in March 2023. As President Joe Biden placed the award around my neck, I mouthed the words of the poem that I had recited to myself like a whispered prayer each time I went into battle: If I should die, think only this of me.
1: Bristol Avenue
1949
Cleveland, Ohio
There’s only one way to tell the story of my life, and it begins in my hometown of Cleveland, Ohio. Cleveland in the 1940s was a city of factories that smelted steel and iron into machine tools and sheet metal and automobiles and sewing machines and bicycles.1 Things that lasted. Cleveland was also the city that made me. And it was the city that I had to leave as a teenager to get away from a situation that shattered my family.
When I was a kid, I had a job delivering The Cleveland Plain Dealer newspaper. I’d load up my wagon every morning with a stack of papers and pull the wagon from house to house. I tried to empty that wagon as quickly as I could so I could get to school.
The Plain Dealer was the one of the most popular morning newspapers in Cleveland, and everyone read it. The job gave me some pocket money, and the paper route wasn’t so bad in summer. In winter, it wasn’t so good. No matter how tight I pulled my jacket shut, it felt like the wind blowing off Lake Erie was blowing right through me.
The neighborhood police took an early interest in me. As I walked along the sidewalk with my wagon, they would wave me over. They were always fishing for information. They wanted to know if I’d heard anything about a fight down the block, or who was shoplifting from the corner store.
I never had much to tell them. I’d be friendly, answering them politely with “Yes, sir” and “No, sir.” They’d tell me that I was good kid. Sometimes they’d pat my head. They’d pick up a newspaper from my stack and glance at the headlines. They’d drop a coin into my pocket.
I’d always let out a big sigh of relief after they walked away. At the bottom of the stack of papers, there was sometimes a brown envelope that I’d pick up from the one of the houses down the street. The guy who lived there ran a numbers game, a kind of illegal lottery, and he used me to courier the envelope back and forth to another house that collected the bets.
The police never did spot that envelope. Still, they were probably keeping an eye on me. They wanted to make sure I didn’t get into any trouble. A few years earlier, every policeman in the city learned my family’s name, along with everyone else in Cleveland.
On February 20, 1948, an above-the-fold article in the Plain Dealer told of a World War II vet who had shot a cop. BURGLAR KILLS HEIGHTS PATROLMAN, the banner headline screamed. That burglar was my oldest brother, Barney Davis Jr.
I was born in 1939. My family lived then on East Eighty-Fifth Street, a quiet street of two-story, clapboard homes. My parents had come to the city in the Great Migration of Black southerners who left the racism of the South for jobs in the North. My dad, Barney Sr., had grown up in Macon, Georgia. He came north with only a third-grade education. My mom, Anna, was from Kentucky. She had more schooling, and took care of the bookkeeping and the finances of the house.
Back then, Cleveland was a destination for many Black families from the South. The city’s history of racial integration had been more positive than that of other cities in the North and the Midwest. A century before I was born, Cleveland was almost completely integrated for the small number of Black families who lived there.
Black tradesmen worked with white tradesmen. Restaurants welcomed Black and white patrons alike. White and Black audiences mingled at lectures and musical recitals, and even church pews were mixed on Sunday mornings. Black kids attended integrated schools. The city had been an important center of abolitionism in the lead-up to the Civil War. After the war, Ohio passed a civil rights law in 1884 forbidding discrimination in public places.
Between 1880 and 1920, the number of Black residents in Cleveland exploded from two thousand to seventy-two thousand. Segregation soon took hold in Cleveland, as it did nationally. While there was no official segregation or “whites only” signs, restaurants began to turn away Black diners. White residents policed parks in their neighborhoods and chased out Black people. The YMCA and YWCA forbid Black members. Discriminatory housing practices pushed Black residents into Cleveland’s Central neighborhood. More and more jobs closed to Black workers.
Still, the number of Black residents kept rising. There were 71,899 in 1930, and by 1950, when I was eleven, it had doubled to 147,847. We had hometown heroes to look up to. In high school, I went to East Technical High School, the same school where Olympic hero Jesse Owens had run track. Langston Hughes grew up in Cleveland, too.
A few years after I was born, we moved to the Kinsman neighborhood, to a house on Bristol Avenue. Kinsman was a magnet for Black families like mine. When we moved in, it was mixed. We had Polish neighbors, and there were immigrants from all over Europe and Jewish residents who had been pushed out of downtown. Railroad tracks boxed in our neighborhood. At night, we could hear the trains rumbling on their way through the city.
Kinsman was a friendly place, with lots of kids. Neighbors were special for us, because one of the things we were taught very early was that no matter what you think about the world, or the city you live in, being social is your backbone, because if you can’t be social, you can’t do very many things The ladies on our street would drop by the house to borrow salt or flour from my mom. She would open her cupboard for them. When she ran short of something in the icebox, or she needed some seasonings, she’d go knock on their doors. At Christmas, we swapped holiday breads with the neighbors, and everyone decorated their houses. Our dad would crawl up on the roof to put up a cross at the peak. Our home was a big three-story house with a front porch and another in the back. When I got older, we’d sleep on the porch roof on warm nights, when cool breezes blew off the lake. The porch was also a way for my older brothers to get in and out of their bedrooms at night without my parents knowing.
Since my parents were from the South, they had a lot of babies. The house was bursting at the seams—nine of us in all, five boys and four girls. The oldest was my sister Edna. My older brother Barney Jr. came next; he was about sixteen years older than me. Then came Delores, Eleanor, Overn, and Carolyn. I arrived after them. Two younger brothers came after me, Ronald and Don, the baby of the family. Two of my uncles, P.D. and Prince, lived with us.
The 1940s wasn’t an easy time for our family. We were poor, and the country was still pulling itself out of the Great Depression. The start of the war meant more hardship, more shortages. Everyone in the family had to chip in. When my brother Barney enlisted right after his eighteenth birthday, there was one less mouth to feed, but one less set of hands to help out.
With so many of us in the house, everyone had a job to do. My dad and his brothers, my uncles P.D. and Prince, constantly worked on the house, fixing what was broken and painting when it was needed. My dad divided up bedrooms so the kids would have our own rooms. P.D. and Prince helped out with the mortgage.
My dad was a foundry worker at the National Malleable & Steel Castings Co., one of the biggest employers in Cleveland. Almost all the working-age men in my family worked at the plant, and when the boys in the family got older, we worked there in the summer times, too. I remember I had a job grinding sharp edges off the cooled castings after they came out of the molds. I figured I would work at the plant, too, after I graduated from high school.
My uncles P.D. and Prince worked at National Malleable, too. Though they were brothers, they were very different men. Uncle Prince liked to drink. He would get his paycheck at the end of the week and spend it at the bar. He never backed away from a fight.
P.D. wasn’t like that. Even though he had only graduated from high school, he was extremely well educated. He was unmarried, and a union man. He dressed to the nines, and he read constantly. He led our Cub Scout pack as well. He required everyone in the Cub Scout den to have a savings account, and for the first fifteen minutes of every meeting, he made us read. P.D. turned all the kids in our house into readers.
His nickname was short for Paris Darius. Like me, he was named after my grandfather. We were all named for the most famous Don Giovanni in history, Paris of Troy, whose abduction of Queen Helen launched the Trojan War. Our names came from a timeless saga of war and the siege of a faraway land.
P.D. was our family historian. He researched our genealogy and discovered that he and my dad were descendants of a mixed-race marriage. John Davis, my great-grandfather, had been a country sheriff, and he married a woman named Elizabeth Collins. Elizabeth’s mother had been an enslaved servant in the Davis household, and mother and daughter were freed after the Civil War. I guess that’s where my blue eyes came from.
When John Davis’s father died, the couple lived on five hundred acres of his family’s plantation that he inherited. The couple never went into town together. When John died, a lien on the property forced Elizabeth to sell their five hundred acres. She ended up a sharecropper on the very plantation where she and her mother had been enslaved. P.D. and my father were her grandsons.
I don’t recall much about my grandfather Paris, but I do remember an expression that he often used. “The truth never moves,” he would say. By that he meant that what’s happened is history, and history cannot be changed, whether it was the siege of Troy a thousand years before Christ was born, or the siege of Congress on January 6, 2021. When you say something that’s crystal clear, there’s nothing for people to misunderstand. No matter how you color the facts, no matter how you bury information or try to twist it, the truth remains solid as a rock. That’s a truth that more of us should be using now.
* * *
On Sundays after church, the family would pile into our Chevrolet and mom and dad would drive out to Berea, where my dad and his brother had bought a three-acre vegetable farm. As they drove, I could hear my parents speaking in low tones in the front seat about current events, whispering about news that they didn’t want us kids to hear about. They didn’t talk about civil rights in front of us, or what was happening in the world.
Even though we had a big family, our house was quiet, which my parents liked. My father was very reserved and didn’t talk much. He was a person who paused before he acted, to make sure that things were the way they should be. He was strict, too. We went to a Methodist church on Sundays, and if we missed the services we’d go to vespers on Wednesday. My parents would tell my sisters to keep their knees together if they went out. They’d wait up on the porch to make sure that the kids got home when they said they would. Dad made sure that every one of us was at the dinner table at night. Dad would ask us questions about school and about this and that, so we really felt connected.
School, family, and church were important to my dad. He took to heart the Bible’s “spare the rod, spoil the child” proverb. If one of us got into trouble, he’d tell us to go out back and get a switch. If he didn’t think it was stout enough, he’d say, “No, that’s not big enough, go get another.” We’d get a thicker one. Sometimes he wasn’t satisfied until we came back with one that seemed as big as a tree trunk, and then he’d beat the tar out of us. He scared the devil out of me.
My nickname was Chubby. I’m not sure how I got that name, but I kept it all the way through my childhood even though I outgrew my baby fat. The funny part of that was that as I got older, I was anything but chubby. Eventually I grew to be six feet tall and was very good at sports.
I was also good at fighting. I usually didn’t start them. They often started because of my brother Overn. He would get into an argument and would say, “I’m going to bring my little brother here and he’s gonna kick your ass.” That was me. I had more scars than I could count.
Overn was a skilled artist who could draw anything. He also had a dishonest streak. Before I had my paper route, I made some pocket change running errands for neighbors. They’d ask me to go to the store, to run an errand, this or that. I’d get a nickel or a dime.
Overn told me that if I buried my money, it would grow. So he and I dug a hole in the backyard. I put my savings in it, covered it up with dirt and put a rock on top to mark the spot. Then I waited for my money to grow. I didn’t realize that Overn had dug the money up and spent it. When my dad found out, he told Overn to go out to the back yard and cut a switch.
All of us kids played together. Since there was only about a year between each of us, every one of us had a brother or sister close to their age to play with. We didn’t have a lot of money to buy fancy toys or go the movies, so we’d shoot marbles out on the street and hang around outside. We were right around the corner from Kinsman Elementary School and from the public library, where we’d go to read.
The kids tended to band together into neighborhood gangs, to keep other kids from other parts of the city off their turf. The boys in Kinsman called ourselves the Commodores. We often fought with kids who strayed from other neighborhoods. Some of the boys also shoplifted from the corner store. My friends would peg their pants and cut a hole in their pocket. They’d palm a candy bar and drop it into their pocket, where it would slide down to their socks. The storekeeper would never find it when he asked us to turn out our pockets. The Commodores were part of the reason the police were always sniffing around—there was always someone in our gang getting in hot water. But I wasn’t the one who ended up in trouble in my family—not by a long shot.
* * *
My brother Barney, who was about fifteen years older than me, had joined the Army in November 1941, right after he turned eighteen. He was discharged almost exactly four years later when the war was over. He returned from Europe and came back to Bristol Avenue with the rest of us.
He was even taller than me, about six foot two, and very good-looking. He spent a lot of time keeping his hair looking just right. He liked to polish his black boots. He talked about how he had been a driver in World War II hero General George Patton’s famous Black armored battalion known as the Black Panthers. Barney couldn’t say enough good things about Patton. If someone said Patton was a racist, Barney would fight them.
I don’t know how things went wrong with Barney. I was so young. All I remember was that one day in February 1948, police came to our door. They told my parents that a patrolman had been shot to death during a home break-in in Cleveland Heights, a wealthy neighborhood on the west side of Cleveland. Barney was under arrest in the hospital with gunshot wounds. That was the day that everything went to hell in a handbasket for our family.
Eleanor had been working as a maid for a wealthy family in Cleveland Heights. The husband was a successful jeweler. For whatever reason, the family fired Eleanor and hired another maid. A week later, the family went to Atlantic City, leaving the new maid to watch the house.
The police said that Eleanor told Barney that the family would be away, drew a map of the house, and gave him a copy of the front door key. Barney went to the house with a German Luger that a friend had gotten for him from a pawnshop. Apparently when Barney arrived at the house with his accomplices in a getaway car, he tried to use the key but it didn’t work. He forced his way in, carrying the Luger.
He didn’t know it, but the maid and the owner’s sister-in-law were staying in the house. The sister-in-law heard him and came downstairs thinking that the owner’s son had come home. Instead, she met Barney on the stairs, waving his gun. He rounded up both women and locked them in a bathroom. Then he went through the house overturning furniture and throwing things to the floor, trying to find a wall safe and jewels that Eleanor had told him about. He even yelled up the stairs to the locked-up women, demanding to know where the safe was.
A neighbor heard the noise and called the police. Two patrolmen, Norman Reker and Edward Meyer, arrived in a car. The accomplices sped away. Like my brother, Reker had recently been discharged from the Army. He had only been on the force about seven months. He was at the end of his shift and was about to head home when the call came in.
The two policemen went up into the house. As they came up the stairs and turned a corner, they came face to face with Barney. Everyone opened fire. One of Barney’s bullets hit Reker in the stomach. Reker kept firing as he fell to the floor. Barney collapsed with six bullets in his neck, jaw, thigh, and groin. It was that night that the police arrived at our house. Over the weekend, the police arrested my sister as an accomplice. For whatever reason, prosecutors decided not to bring a case against her, and she was never charged.
The day after the shooting, the news of the burglary and Reker’s death splashed across every edition of every newspaper in Cleveland. I think we heard on the radio that Barney had been charged with first degree murder, but I didn’t really understand what had happened. Sometimes someone would ask me if I was related to Barney, but mostly no one talked to me about it. How was a nine-year-old kid supposed to know anything about those things?
After Barney’s arrest, my mother disappeared into her bedroom for two days. I could hear her crying behind the closed door. When she finally came out of the bedroom, her eyes were rimmed with red. It affected my dad as well. He and Barney Jr. were really close, and Dad didn’t know what his son had been up to.
When his trial came up, my mom refused to let me go to court, though she went. Barney told the jury he was drunk that day and claimed he had no memory of what happened. Our mother took the stand in his defense, sobbing as she told the court about how he had been a well-behaved boy who built model airplanes, and had been eager to enlist in the Army. Afterward, she rushed to his side and hugged him in front of the jury, earning angry words from the judge.
The scene she made in the courtroom didn’t matter. The jury deliberated for an hour, asked for a meal of turkey sandwiches and apple pie, and returned a guilty verdict thirty minutes later. Mom was there in court the day he was sentenced to death, too.
About a year later, my dad and two younger brothers went to visit Barney at the Ohio Penitentiary for the last time. It was a Thursday night in June. He talked with my dad and brothers until 3:30 P.M., ate a bacon and tomato sandwich with coffee and lemonade, and said goodbye to them. Then he walked across the prison courtyard to the death house.
When he arrived at the execution chamber, he refused to allow the prison pastor to pray for him. “I came in by myself, and I’ll go out by myself,” he said. Prison officials strapped him into an electric chair. The pastor read Psalm 23. Then officials flipped the switch. Barney was pronounced dead at 8:12 P.M.
* * *
Barney Jr.’s death broke my parents, leaving them forever wondering whether he’d still be alive if they had done something different. The house was already quiet, and now it was silent as a tomb. Everyone spoke in hushed tones. And it wasn’t just home that changed. Our neighbors treated us differently. We were no longer just the Davises. Now we were the cop-killer’s family. Some neighbors were sympathetic. Others shunned us for what Barney had done: the families who lived on each side of us stopped talking to us. We would hear people whispering about us as we walked by.
My parents became reclusive. My dad started working even longer hours. I think that was so that he could stay away from the house. At night, he would sleep on the sofa because my mother cried in the bed all night. He also started to drink. I knew this because when I brought the garbage out, empty bottles would clank in the trash.
My mom almost stopped going out of the house. She withdrew into herself. She no longer borrowed ingredients for meals from the neighbors or swapped holiday breads. Sometimes she would pull me tight to her and start crying. I don’t think I ever saw her with dry eyes again after Barney was gone.
I never really understood why Barney did it in the first place. He lived in a nice house with us, we always had something to eat, and he was a very nice-looking guy with a paying job. I was pissed off at him even after he was gone. There’s no doubt that Barney’s death changed my life. Afterward, a lot of people watched out for me, looking over my shoulder to make sure I didn’t take the same path. One of my teachers in particular at Kinsman Elementary School, an Italian woman named Miss Caravella, made it her mission to keep me on the straight and narrow.
Miss Caravella took a liking to me. She wanted to know why I was fighting all the time, because I seemed like such a nice kid. I told her about Overn and the fights he would get me into.
“You know, I want to meet your brother,” she said. I think she wanted to straighten him out, too. I don’t know if she was helping me because of Barney, but I did know she had a brother in prison. I knew that because she told me a story about how he tried to escape and couldn’t figure out how to use the gearshift on the getaway car. It was a funny story, but she was dead serious about making sure that I understood that crime didn’t pay.
To keep me busy, she would hire me for little jobs like cleaning her basement and she’d bring me to the museums downtown and to the library. It was because of her, and my Uncle P.D., that I grew up with a lifetime love of reading and literature. Even as an Army officer years later, I wrote down “reading” in the space for hobbies. I did pretty well in school. I was interested in everything. I read every book I put under my nose because I wanted to figure out how the world turned. I did so well that I was on track to graduate from East Technical High School early.
As I got older, the neighborhood was changing around my family. After the war, wealthier and white residents of Kinsman moved out to the suburbs. A new wave of migrants arrived from the South, while redlining and downtown revitalization forced a lot of Black residents into Kinsman. The neighborhood became poorer and less mixed.
I was about twelve when I started delivering the newspaper. It couldn’t have been much longer after that I started my other job as a courier for the local numbers racket. They had it down to a science. Every Thursday, all the bets needed to be in for the numbers that were pulled on Saturday. I would get the envelope either directly from the man or his wife, or I would take it out of a hiding place they had in a space behind their mailbox. Then I’d go about my paper route, and drop it at the house a couple of streets away where the bets would be added up. I was perfect for it, because the people who handled the bets and the payouts were white and would stand out in Kinsman, but nobody would look twice at a little Black kid pulling a wagon loaded with newspapers.
They paid me a little bit for it, around ten or fifteen dollars a week. I gave it to my mom to pay bills and buy groceries. My mom never found out where I was getting that side money, but she had a hunch that I was up to something. “Where are you getting this extra money?” she’d demand. I told her I got tips for being so good about delivering the papers on time.
One day when I was in high school, I was out in a park near our house playing ball with some of the neighborhood kids when the police showed up with a van. They rounded us all up, put us in the back of the van, and hauled us downtown to the Cuyahoga County Juvenile Court on East Twenty-Second Street, a mile or so from our neighborhood. The juvenile detention center was there in the same complex with the courthouse, filled with kids who had been caught breaking the law. I can imagine that as we drove in, young faces looked down at us through the windows wondering what we had done.
I didn’t have any idea why I’d been picked up. My mind raced. Maybe they had found out about me helping the neighborhood numbers game. Maybe it was the fights I still occasionally got sucked into. Maybe it was because of our little gang, the Commodores. Or maybe it was just because they knew what had happened to my brother and wanted to keep me on the straight and narrow.
The officers led us into a room in the courthouse where lawyers talk to their clients before trial. One explained how this was going to go. “When you get into the courtroom,” the officer told us, “you’re going to be looking up at that judge, and you need to call him ‘judge’ or ‘sir.’ Do you understand?” he asked. We did.
As it turned out, we were getting a dose of tough love. None of us had done anything wrong, but our worried parents had given the police permission to bring us to the judge to scare the bejeezus out of us. As we were in there waiting for the judge to see us, an officer that I knew from the neighborhood wandered in and saw me.
“He’s a good kid,” he said, pointing to me. “He’s got a paper route.” I silently thanked God that my role as courier hadn’t been discovered.
When we filed into the courtroom, the judge scowled at us like we were a bunch of hardened crooks or bank robbers. We hung our heads and crossed our hands nervously.
“I don’t have a lot of respect for those who are in front of me that have to look up while I’m looking down,” he said with a frown. He turned to me. “What school do you want to go to after you graduate from high school? You need to find a place that you can go to, where we can check on you to make sure you aren’t in trouble.”
In truth, I had no plans. No one in our family had ever gone to college. But shortly after the talking-to from the judge, my uncle P.D. told me that he had a friend down in Louisiana, near Southern University, a Black college in Baton Rouge. He’d pulled some strings to get me admitted. I wasn’t too excited, to be honest. None of that mattered, though, because my parents had decided: I was going to college. The judge’s intervention, no matter how unfair, had both put me under the microscope and set me on a course to improve my life.
* * *
When the day arrived for me to leave for Louisiana, my mother cried all the way from our house to the Euclid Avenue bus station. Our Chevrolet was cramped. I had put on my best dress shirt and a light jacket for the trip. I had jammed everything for college into a wicker picnic basket, which was the closest thing we had to a suitcase.
“I hope this works out,” Mom said to my dad through her tears. She told me that they were going straight to church to pray for a safe journey after they dropped me off.
When we arrived at the station, she fussed over me for a bit. She had packed a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with an apple for my lunch. She handed me three or four dollars for spending money, all in change. “Be very careful how you spend this money because it’ll have to last you until you get down to see your uncle’s friend,” she said as she poured the pennies and nickels and dimes into my palm.
She had carried my bus ticket herself so that I wouldn’t lose it. She handed it to the driver. “Please take care of my son,” she said. “I want him somewhere safe on this bus.” She had packed a second peanut butter and jelly sandwich lunch for the driver, and she handed it over to him with the ticket.
He looked surprised. “If I wasn’t right here on this bus, I’d give you a hug,” he told my mother.
Then my mom turned to me. “Come on over here and give me a hug and a kiss. And get on that bus and behave yourself,” she said, her cheeks still wet with tears. I hugged her, then turned to my dad. He thrust out his hand to say goodbye like he might to another adult. “You’re gonna be a man now. Act like it,” he said. We shook hands, and I went up the stairs onto the bus.
The driver had promised my mother that he would take good care of me. He made good on that promise. He sat me down in the seat closest to the door, where he could keep an eye on me. As the bus bounced along, stopping at stations to let passengers on and off, I talked to the driver non-stop. He wanted to know what sports I played and whether I had a girl to help me take my mind off my nervousness over the long trip.
The hours passed as the bus drove south, stopping in small towns and big cities. I was so engrossed in my conversation with the driver that I barely looked at the other passengers or listened to the stops as the driver called them out. I don’t know how long that trip took, but before I knew it, the driver was calling out “Baton Rouge, Louisiana.” I got my wicker suitcase and stepped off that bus into a whole new life.
Ramesh Ghorai is the founder of www.livenewsblogger.com, a platform dedicated to delivering exclusive live news from across the globe and the local market. With a passion for covering diverse topics, he ensures readers stay updated with the latest and most reliable information. Over the past two years, Ramesh has also specialized in writing top software reviews, partnering with various software companies to provide in-depth insights and unbiased evaluations. His mission is to combine news reporting with valuable technology reviews, helping readers stay informed and make smarter choices.
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