Army base drops Confederate’s name, honors pioneering Hispanic general

A Pentagon committee selected Cavazos’s name after the League of United Latin American Citizens, an advocacy group, recommended him and Master Sgt. Roy Benavidez as candidates to replace the namesake of the base, John Bell Hood, a Confederate general who resigned his commission in the U.S. Army to fight against it.

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A panel established by Congress has identified new names for nine Army installations, all in former Confederate states and honoring Confederate officers.

Last month, Fort Lee in Virginia was renamed for Lt. Gen. Arthur J. Gregg and Lt. Col. Charity Adams, two Black military pioneers. Fort Pickett, also in Virginia, was renamed in March for Col. Van T. Barfoot, a World War II Medal of Honor recipient. Fort Rucker in Alabama was renamed for Michael J. Novosel Sr., a Vietnam Medal of Honor awardee.

In Korea as a junior officer, Cavazos made it a routine for his units to rehearse operations in similar terrain behind friendly lines. The training helped reestablish the reputation of his men, many of whom had hailed from the 65th Regiment, a Puerto Rican Army National Guard unit that had been shamed for fleeing the battlefield in an earlier engagement during the war.

On June 14, 1953, Cavazos’s unit was ordered to attack an entrenched Chinese position.

After capturing the objective and “destroying vital enemy equipment and personnel,” his unit withdrew under heavy enemy bombardment. As they pulled back, though, Cavazos “remained alone on the enemy outpost to search the area for missing men. Exposed to heavy hostile fire, Lieutenant Cavazos located five men who had been wounded,” according to a citation published on the Home of Heroes military history reference site.

After evacuating the wounded one at a time, Cavazos made two more trips to no man’s land, “searching for casualties and evacuating scattered groups of men who had become confused.” Despite being sprayed with shrapnel and rocks on his back from Chinese shells that had landed nearby, he refused medical treatment until he was sure his men had been all accounted for.

Cavazos was one of the more than 1,000 winners of the Distinguished Service Cross and Navy Cross — the Navy’s equivalent award — given to service members during the 1950-1953 Korean War. That was among the almost 7 million Americans who served in that period.

Cavazos won the Distinguished Cross a second time while serving in Vietnam as a battalion commander. His citation says Cavazos led a counterattack against Viet Cong positions with “such force and aggressiveness” that the enemy was overrun and fled. The fighting at one point “reached such close quarters” that friendlies couldn’t provide supporting fire.

Cavazos was best respected for mentoring other soldiers of color.

Colin Powell, who would become the country’s first Black Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman and secretary of state, told Cavazos over dinner in 1982 that he was considering leaving the Army because of a personality conflict with his boss that resulted in a “crippling performance evaluation.” Cavazos dissuaded him. Powell later remembered him as his career’s savior.

Retired Maj. Gen. Alfred Valenzuela, another Latino general, credited Cavazos as an inspiration. “I told him what he meant to us poor Hispanic kids,” Valenzuela said, according to the Army. “We all looked up to him as an American soldier, a Hispanic soldier. He was the guy we wanted to be. If we couldn’t be him, we wanted to be near him and serve with him.”

Cavazos was one of five children born to a Mexican American family in Kingsville, Tex. All five went to college. (His brother Lauro, a Democrat, served as the country’s first Latino Cabinet member under Republican Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.)

Cavazos was a football player on scholarship at Texas Technological College, now Texas Tech. After breaking his leg in his sophomore season, he gave up football and went through the school’s Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, launching his military career.

Cavazos’s history at Fort Hood includes a stint leading the Army’s III Corps, before taking over the U.S. Army Forces Command. He retired from the Army in 1984, after 33 years.

After Cavazos’s death in 2017, Gen. Gordon Sullivan, an ex-Army chief of staff, remembered him as a soldier’s soldier in an interview with the Associated Press. “He was courageous, and they knew it, and they knew he couldn’t ask them to do anything that he wouldn’t do with them.”