You wouldn’t know it by looking at the man getting a salon pedicure in Indiana, but Sammy Lee Davis is lucky to even be walking, much less running like “Forrest Gump,” the galloping movie character based, loosely, on his heroism in Vietnam.

“My back was broke. My ribs were crushed. I was shot multiple times by beehive darts and had one AK-47 rifle bullet in my leg,” remembered Sammy Lee Davis, a Medal of Honor Recipient who was gravely wounded in Vietnam 56 years ago.

Catching up with Davis, 77, on June 12 on his patio in the small Indiana town where he lives found the self-described “country boy” alongside his wife, Dixie, as they awaited his son and his dog to drop by the house.

It’s one of the approximately 165 days in a year the couple gets to enjoy the comforts of home.

The Army war hero and his “Dixie Chick” estimate they’re on the road 200 days every year autographing his memoir, You Don’t Lose ‘Til You Quit Trying: Lessons on Adversity and Victory from a Vietnam Veteran and Medal of Honor Recipient and her companion book about love and grief, faith and joy, Endless Love and Second Chances.

“For us, a vacation is home; our place to go is home,” said Dixie, known affectionately to Davis as “Dixie Chick.”

On a rare day home, the pedicure – which Davis joked he was going to have his nails painted chartreuse – is just to soften his feet, as he’s usually walking around the house barefoot, he admits. The neurology appointment he had that followed, however, is due to his exposure to Agent Orange during the Vietnam War, Dixie said. That’s just one of the aftereffects of his time spent in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War, where from his actions in combat he received the Medal of Honor.

Davis only joined the United States Army after high school in June 1966 because the line for his initially chosen military branch – the Marine Corps – wasn’t moving fast enough for him to enlist and still make it on time for work.

“Those people in my family that were in the Marine Corps were the ones I had the most respect for,” Davis said.

No matter the shade of green or the pattern of his camouflage, though, it was the brotherhood which drove then-Pfc. Davis to put his life in harm’s way during one fateful day in combat.

“He had three brothers,” Dixie said. “And his mom, they always went out and played in the woods all day long, and it was always, ‘You take care of your brother; don’t you leave your brother in the woods.’ And so that probably had a lot to do with what he was thinking that night, even though he was so injured and then being self-sufficient as a little kid.”

Then-Pfc. Davis’ terrible night began at 0150 on Nov. 18, 1967, at Firebase Cudgel south of Ong Tai Creek near Cai Lay, when the first volley of Viet Cong heavy mortars slammed into the cannoneer’s Battery C, 2nd Battalion, 4th Artillery, 9th Infantry Division.

Gripping a machine gun, Davis tried to cover his gun crew while they slaved over the howitzer, but a recoilless rifle round sliced into the powder charges stowed nearby. The explosion wounded the entire team and threw Davis into a foxhole, where he lay with a broken back.

Disregarding orders to stay put, Davis rushed to the burning howitzer and began firing. Knocked down by the gun’s kickback, he’d started reloading when another VC mortar blast detonated 20 meters away, wounding him again. He kept loading, aiming and firing at the VC until he ran out of ammo. One of the projectiles he hurled at the VC was supposed to hold propaganda leaflets.

“I just had all these tiny holes on me, and they couldn’t do a whole lot for them, I guess,” Davis said of refusing medical help in the heat of battle. “But I still did my job.”

Then he noticed So he decided to go fetch them.

Davis would drop a line in the water in each state he lived in back in the states due to traveling around with his oilfield working father, but one way or another, he’d never learned to swim. Maybe that’s why when he noticed fellow soldiers wounded in the creek, he chose to throw down an air mattress to go fetch them.

“When I seen my brothers across the river, I knew I had to do for them what I knew in my heart they would do for me,” Davis said. “So I did. I went across the river and got them. God gave me the strength to go across that river and get my brothers here and bring them back.”

When he reached the bank on the other side, he fired into the black and the brush. That stole just enough time for him and Pfc. William H. Murray to ferry a trio of wounded soldiers back across the creek and to an aid station.

Davis then joined another gun team and kept pounding at the VC for nearly two hours. By the end of the night, seven U.S. Army soldiers were dead and another 98 had been wounded. Half of 44 artillerymen, including Davis, were casualties. In their retreat, the VC took most of their dead with them, but U.S. commanders estimated they’d killed at least 150 of them.

A year later in a White House ceremony, President Lyndon B. Johnson draped the Medal of Honor around the neck of Davis, who’d been promoted to sergeant.

That’s the footage used in the 1994 movie blockbuster Forrest Gump. Actor Tom Hanks’ head is superimposed over the face of Davis.

While his Medal of Honor citation lauds Davis for his “extraordinary heroism,” he plays all of that down today.

“It wasn’t because I was brave. It was because I loved my brothers,” Davis said. “And that’s one of the things that still keeps me going today —  the love I have for my military family and my family and my Dixie Chick.”

Davis did a total of 19 years in the service, but as a retired veteran it’s not always easy to keep going.

Though Davis is diagnosed with PTSD, had open heart surgery, is diabetic and experienced traumatic brain injury during the war, Dixie credits her husband’s kidneys returning to functioning “almost normal” to the therapy he receives.

Between sessions at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and a hyperbaric chamber, Davis can be found mowing his lawn or sitting in his recliner watching TV reruns of “Gunsmoke,” usually with Dixie, even though both of them know he’s already seen every episode. Enduring the 1950s western right along with them is usually their stray turned accidentally adopted cat, Big Booty Judy.

“Being a country kid, you know what to look for between male and female on your animals,” Davis said. “Didn’t see any bumps on this cat. The vet’s looking her over, and he goes, ‘Oh, I hate to tell you this…’ and, I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, our new cat has cancer or something.’ He goes, ‘Big Booty Judy is a neutered male.’”

“He’s still known as Big Booty Judy,” Dixie said.

On those days when Davis is away from home, they trust their 17-year-old granddaughter, Olivia, to care for their cat.

Davis’s family is still growing, too. On that June day, they were waiting for the call that their great granddaughter had come into the world.

Although he’s long built his legacy in his county where he and Dixie live, where there is a sign in each direction that reads: “Home of Sammy Lee Davis, Medal of Honor Recipient” he still finds it important to journey nationwide to connect with younger generations of Americans and remind them why service matters.

According to a 2023 Wall Street Journal/NORC survey, only 27% of Americans still consider community involvement as “very important” — down from a high of 62% only four years earlier.

That’s why in recent weeks he joined fellow Medal of Honor Recipient Drew Dix at the Center for American Values in Pueblo, Colorado, before arriving at the Matt Light All-Conference Football Camp in Greenville, Ohio, to talk to youngsters there.

“So it’s just, we’re everywhere,” Dixie said. “Sam’s been doing this ever since Gen. Westmoreland had him speaking while he was still in the military because he couldn’t really do the job of a soldier anymore. He was too beat up. So he had him traveling all over. It’s what he’s done his whole life.”