Native American Lancelot Lewis grew up on the Gila River Indian Reservation in Arizona. He graduated from high school in 1966, enlisted in the Army shortly thereafter, and was sent to basic training at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas. He did his advanced individual training (AIT) at Fort Gordon, Georgia, and then Airborne jump school at Fort Benning, where he took some tests one day because he “didn’t want to go do KP and wash pots and pans.” What he didn’t know at the time was that those tests were designed to evaluate his aptitude for Special Forces, and he excelled. He was assigned to SF training at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, received SF medical training, more medical training at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas, and then preventive medicine training doing clinical rotations at Fort Jackson. Lewis deployed to Vietnam in January 1969, and was assigned to MACV-SOG in Ban My Thuot, near the Cambodian border. He remembers picking up a malarial NVA prisoner of war on his first mission, and he remembers running, and elephant grass, and climbing a rope ladder up to a helicopter. He recalls Georgia red clay (“it got into everything”), and getting surrounded on a hillside in Laos on a dark night, and sticking a strobe light into a rocket tube to show their position to the gunships. He describes treating a wounded baby elephant for shrapnel wounds, using a huge syringe full of antibiotics, three times, proving that elephants never do forget. He also mentions the M5 medical kit, a dispensary, a Commendation Medal, his promotion, and fluorescent survival panels. And he shares the main lesson he took from his Vietnam experience: “Treat others as you want to be treated. Be kind to everybody. Help everybody that you can. That’s about it.”