You get a sense of why we were in Cambodia, even though LBJ was constantly telling the public we were not there. Why?Ī: Everything in the book leads up to that day. Q: I get the sense in reading the book that you saw this one particular mission as encapsulating the war. He always said the heroes were the ones who didn’t come home.” But when I told his son that I was considering that, he said, “My dad would not appreciate that title. I wanted to call the book “Hero.” It’s an overused term, but I couldn’t think of a better example of a hero than Roy. Sometime after that I asked him if he’d ever heard of a guy named Roy Benavidez. I talked to Chris Kyle, of “American Sniper.” We were doing an interview, and off-camera, I asked him if it would be OK if we talked about his nickname, which is “The Legend.” He said he wasn’t comfortable with that title. Q: Was there an entry about him on Snopes?Ī: No, I couldn’t find one. I looked at the video and I said, “This can’t be real.” The first thing I did was go to (the myth-busting website) Snopes and make sure it was accurate – that this guy had suffered bayonet wounds, was holding his own intestines in, was wounded more than 30 times and survived. In this case, my agent’s mom saw a YouTube video about Roy and his story. Someone has read one and given my an idea for the next.

Benavidez eventually received the Medal of Honor.īlehm, 46, is the author of “Fearless” and “The Only Thing Worth Dying For,” also war stories and both New York Times best-sellers.Ī: All my books have led from previous books.

The story centers on Roy Benavidez, a Green Beret sergeant whose actions that day saved lives and left him so gravely wounded he was being zipped into a body bag before a medic realized he was still breathing. “Legend,” by Cardiff author Eric Blehm, offers a window into the history, politics and heroism of the Vietnam War by focusing on a harrowing mission to rescue an American Special Forces team trapped in Cambodia on May 2, 1968.

Legend by Eric Blehm