He’s one of 11 brothers who served in the U.S. military. Columbus man shares his story
Born 75 years ago on the date that was Armistice Day and became Veterans Day, retired U.S. Army Sgt. 1st Class Lebronze Davis entered the world with a natural connection to the military.
But this holiday honoring the men and women who served in the nation’s armed forces could be a family reunion for him as well as a birthday.
Davis, a Columbus resident, is one of 11 brothers from Wetumpka, Alabama, who served in the United States military, totaling 158 years:
Alphonza, 29 years, Army
Arguster, 26 years, Air Force
Ben Jr. (deceased), 33 years, Navy and Army Reserve
Calvin, 4 years, Navy
Edward, 20 years, Army
Frederick, 2 years, Army
Julius, 13 years, Air Force
Lebronze, 20 years, Army
Nathaniel, 3 years, Army
Octavious, 2 years, Army
Washington (deceased), 6 years, Army.
Some were drafted. Some volunteered. All served with pride.
“We wanted to do the right thing,” Davis told the Ledger-Enquirer. “We didn’t have nobody run to Canada or anything like that to keep from going to the military. We did our obligation.”
And they not only survived their military service, but just one of them officially was wounded. Davis laughed as he explained how Julius earned his Purple Heart during the Vietnam War.
“They had incoming one night,” Davis said, “and he hid under a desk and bumped his head.”
Discipline and responsibility
Davis was in his family’s army before Uncle Sam’s Army. His parents, Hattie and Ben, instilled discipline and responsibility in him and his 15 siblings (another one died at birth) on their Wetumpka farm.
“You do what you are told when you’re told to do it,” he said. “So when I was in the Army, I already was ready for that.”
His childhood was filled with hours of picking cotton and driving mules.
“I have walked behind a mule enough to walk from Alabama to New York, across to California and back two or three times,” he said. “… Everything we ate, we raised it, except for a few things Mom and Dad would go to town for on Saturdays.”
Davis considered his older brothers heroes, especially when they came home from military service in their dress uniforms.
“I mean — sharp,” he said. “They looked good. I wanted to be that same way.”
The morning after he graduated from high school, Davis rode a bus to Baltimore to get away from farm work and stay with an aunt and uncle. But he returned home two weeks later, not liking his car wash job and the city was “too fast for me,” he said.
Davis moved with his twin brother to Detroit, where he cut paper for an envelope company. A year later, they got drafted.
“I’m here now,” Davis recalled thinking, “so I’m going to make the best of it. And I did.”
‘Something significant’
When he finally put on his own military uniform and joined his brothers in the family’s tradition of national service, Davis said, he felt like he “belonged to something” significant.
Davis went through basic training at what was then Fort Benning and advanced training at Fort Gordon. He served in Vietnam for a year, 1968-69. Four of his brothers also were deployed there, but he was the only one in infantry.
Davis laughed as he noted he escaped the Vietnam War with only an insect bite. But he had close calls.
A soldier in front of him was killed while he was loading ammunition. His 116-man unit went into a patrol one day that ended with 36 of them walking out.
“I prayed hard,” he said.
But the scariest time for Davis came away from a battle zone. During his final week in Vietnam, he ventured into Pleiku for souvenir shopping. He caught a ride to go downtown, but it dropped him off on the side of road on the outskirts of town. He stood there for about 45 minutes by himself — without a weapon.
“I was so afraid,” he said, “I was shaking.”
Davis finally got a ride back to his base. He vowed not to go out again.
“I didn’t care about no souvenirs no more,” he said.
‘Give that man a drink!’
When he returned to the United States via Fort Lewis, Washington, he waited at a bar for his plane ride home. Folks hollered, “Give that man a drink!” But he wasn’t 21 yet, so he didn’t get served until a more understanding waitress left a drink for him on the table.
Davis figured he would leave the Army, “but they offered me a few dollars to re-enlist, and I did.”
He was stationed at Fort Carson, Colorado, then Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, where he was a drill sergeant.
“I trained I don’t know how many troops,” he said.
Overseas assignments in Germany followed. Back in the U.S., he was stationed at Fort Polk, Louisiana, then Fort Benning, where he was a trainer in the basic officer’s course.
Davis retired as a sergeant first class in 1988 with 20 years of active duty.
Civil service
Davis fulfilled his retirement dream of living in Florida. But he returned to the Chattahoochee Valley after six months of driving a tractor trailer in Pensacola.
“That didn’t suit me,” he said.
Back in Columbus, he worked in civil service at Fort Benning’s Lawson Army Airfield, refueling, marshalling and parking aircraft for 17 years. During Operation Desert Storm, Davis gave a deploying soldier on each departing plane a rosary and told them, “Bring it back.”
“I got one back,” he said.
Davis receives military disability care for his prostate cancer, linked to the herbicide Agent Orange he was exposed to during his service in the Vietnam War.
No regrets
On the front yard of his house in the Copper Oaks section of Green Island Hills, Davis has a patriotic display of 11 miniature flags, representing the military service he and his 10 brothers gave the country, plus a banner thanking all troops.
“I do not regret one single moment,” he said of his military career.
Despite graduating high school into a segregated society, Davis said he wasn’t raised with racial prejudice and barely felt it in the Army. The lone incidence of racial intolerance was when he was a drill sergeant and a trainee told him, “You wouldn’t be nothin’ in my hometown.”
Compare that to the cherished letters he received from trainees or their parents, thanking him for his positive influence.
Asked how he felt about putting his life on the line for a country that didn’t treat him as an equal citizen at the time, Davis said, “I didn’t feel. The only thing I felt was orders. When you’ve got orders to be here, there or anywhere, that’s where you be. … All I thought about was living.”
Trying to summarize what military service did for him, Davis struggled.
“That is something hard to explain because it’s done so much, for not only me but my brothers and all the other young men who didn’t have nothing going,” he explained. “I didn’t have a scholarship, and I didn’t want to go to college. All I wanted to do was work because that was all I was used to doing.”
The Army honed his work ethic — and punctuality.
“No matter what you do, you be on time,” he said.
Bottom line for Davis and his love for the United States and its military: Fighting for freedom is worth the sacrifice.
“People that can’t understand that, they’re in a lost world.”
