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The Borinqueneers: The Regiment That Held the Line, and the Convictions That Were Pardoned but Never Cleared

They were the Army's segregated Puerto Rican regiment, and in Korea they were good enough to cover the 1st Marine Division's retreat from the Chosin Reservoir and to be among the last men off the beach at Hungnam. Two years later, after a hill called Jackson Heights, the Army court-martialed ninety-six of them in fifteen trials — the largest mass courts-martial of the Korean War — for a collapse its own chief of staff would tell Congress was caused by rotations, a language barrier, and officers without battlefield experience. The sentences were pardoned away within two years. The convictions were never formally cleared. This page is the documented record of what the Borinqueneers did, what was done to them, and the one entry in the ledger that is still open.

The service and the promise

The regiment began in 1899, when Congress authorized a unit of volunteer soldiers in Puerto Rico, newly acquired from Spain in the Treaty of Paris. It was redesignated the 65th Infantry Regiment in 1920 — in the words of the law that would one day honor it, the military’s last segregated unit composed primarily of Hispanic soldiers.

Its first two wars were fought under a policy that did not trust it with the front. In May 1917 the regiment was sent to the Panama Canal Zone — in part, Congress later found, because Army policy restricted most segregated units to noncombat roles, even though the regiment could have contributed to the fighting in the First World War. In the Second World War it went to Panama again in January 1943, then overseas in the spring of 1944, earning campaign credit for Rome-Arno, Rhineland, Ardennes-Alsace, and Central Europe. It was service — real service, under fire — but service metered out by an institution that had decided in advance how much of it to allow.

Korea removed the meter. On the voyage to Asia in September 1950 the men gave themselves the name they are known by: Borinqueneers, from Borinquen, the Taíno word for Puerto Rico, meaning “land of the brave lord,” joined to “buccaneers.” Their regimental motto was Honor et Fidelitas — honor and fidelity.

What they did in Korea is not in dispute, because Congress wrote it into law. In December 1950 the regiment covered the rear guard of the 1st Marine Division during the retreat from the Chosin Reservoir to Hungnam — one of the greatest withdrawals in modern military history — securing the port and standing among the last units to leave the beachhead on Christmas Eve, while 105,000 troops and 100,000 refugees were evacuated under its protection. In the winter of 1951 it conducted the last recorded battalion-sized bayonet assault in Army history. General Douglas MacArthur wrote that the Puerto Ricans of the 65th were “writing a brilliant record of achievement in battle and I am proud indeed to have them in this command.” Over the whole war, the regiment fought in nine campaigns; its men earned ten Distinguished Service Crosses, 256 Silver Stars, 606 Bronze Stars, and 2,771 Purple Hearts, on the Army Historical Foundation’s accounting. More than 740 Puerto Rican soldiers were killed and more than 2,300 wounded, out of some 61,000 who served.

One of those men stands for the regiment’s valor at its highest. Master Sergeant Juan E. Negrón, of Company L, took up the most vulnerable position on his company’s exposed right flank near Kalma-Eri on April 28, 1951, after an enemy force overran part of the line. Told that elements of the company were withdrawing, he refused to leave. He held the position through the night, hurling hand grenades at short range, and in the morning fifteen enemy dead were found around his position. He received the Distinguished Service Cross. What that decoration was actually worth would take sixty-three years to settle.

The promise made to a segregated regiment is narrower than the promise made to other soldiers: serve, prove yourselves, and the institution will judge you by the same standard as anyone else. The Borinqueneers kept the first two parts in full. What follows is the record of the third.

What happened

By the fall of 1952 the regiment that had held at Hungnam was being dismantled by policy while it was still in the line. Congress found that in 1952 senior commanders opened Puerto Rican replacements to non-segregated units — a milestone in Army policy that, in Congress’s own word, “paradoxically” harmed the regiment by depriving it of some of Puerto Rico’s most able soldiers. The Army’s own later history is blunter: the regiment’s experienced, bilingual noncommissioned officers — the men who bridged Spanish-speaking enlisted soldiers and English-speaking officers — rotated out, and the bridge went with them.

In September 1952 the regiment defended Outpost Kelly in the Chorwon Valley and lost it to sustained Chinese attacks, suffering more than five hundred casualties in a month of fighting around Kelly and the position that followed — its deadliest stretch of the war. The regimental commander, Colonel Juan César Cordero Dávila, was relieved. His replacement, Colonel Chester B. DeGavre, a mainland officer, replaced the regiment’s officer staff with non-Hispanic officers. What DeGavre did next is recorded in every serious account of the regiment: the men were ordered to shave their mustaches until they could prove their manhood in battle; the regiment was stripped of the Borinqueneers name it had painted on its vehicles; its rice-and-beans rations were cut; and, in the account carried by the regiment’s historians, at least one soldier was made to wear a sign reading “I am a coward.”

Then came Jackson Heights — Hill 391, named for Captain George Jackson of Company G. The battle ran from October 16 to 29, 1952. Company G held its outpost for days under bombardment, was surrounded, and fought its way back to the main line in the dark after receiving the order to withdraw, rather than be wiped out where it stood. Other companies, ordered to retake the position, refused. The Army Historical Foundation records that one officer and 122 enlisted men were ordered to the division stockade for refusing to attack as ordered and for misbehaving before the enemy, and that a patrol incident on the night of November 3 brought charges against twenty-two more. The Chinese kept Jackson Heights; the 15th Infantry, which retook it, lost it again in November. The position was not holdable. The men of the 65th were the ones charged for failing to hold it.

The trials began on November 23, 1952. The figures here are the Army history’s, as reported from it by the Associated Press: ninety-six men of the 65th, including one officer, were court-martialed in fifteen trials. Four were acquitted, and charges against eight others were dismissed. Ninety-one men — one officer and ninety enlisted men, in the Army Historical Foundation’s tally — were convicted of offenses including desertion, misbehavior before the enemy, and willfully disobeying a superior officer. They were dishonorably discharged and sentenced to confinement at hard labor, most often given as one to sixteen years; some Army-derived accounts give a range running to eighteen. It was the largest mass court-martial of the Korean War.

Almost none of it happened in public. The Army kept the proceedings quiet, and the men were convicted in Korea, an ocean away from anyone who might ask questions. What broke the silence was the men themselves: their letters home reached a local newspaper in Puerto Rico, and by January 1953 the story was out — and the questions the Army had not wanted arrived all at once.

What the institution did afterward

The institution’s own senior officers answered those questions first, and their answers did not blame the men in the dock.

In 1953, General J. Lawton Collins, the Army Chief of Staff, told the House Armed Services Committee that the 65th had been “a very well trained” and “very ably led unit” when it first arrived in Korea, “where it distinguished itself in action.” Collins blamed the failure at Jackson Heights on rotations that had deprived the regiment of its noncommissioned officers, on the men’s inability to speak English, and on its officers’ lack of battlefield experience. “The Puerto Ricans have proven in action in earlier fighting in Korea that they are gallant people,” he said, “and that they will fight just as well as anyone else if they are properly trained and properly led.”

Secretary of the Army Robert T. Stevens acted on that judgment. Blaming the failure on the men’s inability to understand English, Stevens moved to remit the sentences and grant clemency and pardons to all those involved; by 1954, on the Associated Press’s account, he had pardoned or remitted all of the convictions, and the men were reinstated. The regiment fought on — at Outpost Harry in June 1953, the now-integrated 65th earned a Distinguished Service Cross, fourteen Silver Stars, twenty-three Bronze Stars, and sixty-seven Purple Hearts. It was inactivated in Puerto Rico in April 1956, and in February 1959 its colors passed to the Puerto Rico National Guard — the only Regular Army unit ever transferred to the National Guard, where a battalion serves still.

Read the clemency carefully, because its limits are the point of this page. A pardon forgives an offense. Remission cancels the unexecuted part of a sentence. Neither says the trial was wrong, and neither vacates the conviction. The Army freed the men, restored them to duty, and left the verdicts standing in their records. The men went home as soldiers who had been pardoned for Jackson Heights — not as soldiers who had been wrongly convicted for it.

The Army’s own historians eventually said the stronger thing — in a history, not in the men’s files. The Center of Military History’s study of the regiment, From Glory to Disaster and Back, laid the deterioration of the 65th on a shortage of officers and noncommissioned officers, a rotation policy that gutted units of combat-experienced leaders, tactics that produced high casualties, an ammunition shortage, language problems, and inept leadership — and, at division level, on “a command environment guilty of ethnic and organizational prejudice.” The Army’s later report added the finding that goes to the trials themselves: it disclosed bias in the prosecution of the Puerto Rican soldiers, citing numerous incidents of white soldiers who were not prosecuted for refusing to fight in similar circumstances. Secretary of the Army Louis Caldera, who had ordered a further review of the cases in 1999, said at Arlington on September 20, 2000 — words Congress later placed in the Gold Medal law itself — that the 65th had fought “a rearguard action against a more insidious adversary,” the cumulative effects of “ill-conceived military policies, leadership shortcomings, and especially racial and organizational prejudices,” and told the veterans: “Even as you endured misfortune and injustice, thank you for doing your duty.”

The individual account was settled the same way: late, and by review rather than by the original process. Negrón’s Distinguished Service Cross was re-examined under the congressionally mandated review — the Valor Review — of Jewish American and Hispanic American veterans of three wars, to determine whether prejudice had denied any of them the Medal of Honor. On March 18, 2014, President Obama presented twenty-four Medals of Honor in one of the largest such ceremonies in history; Negrón’s daughter, Iris Negrón, accepted her father’s at the White House. He had died in Bayamon, Puerto Rico, on March 29, 1996 — eighteen years before the Army conceded he had earned its highest honor all along. He remains the only member of the 65th to receive the Medal of Honor.

And the collective account was carried, the way these accounts usually are, by the people with the least power to settle it: the veterans and their families, the government of Puerto Rico, the Borinqueneers Congressional Gold Medal Alliance, and Resident Commissioner Pedro Pierluisi, who with Representative Bill Posey of Florida introduced the Gold Medal bill, H.R. 1726, in April 2013, with Senator Richard Blumenthal carrying the Senate effort. It passed both chambers in May 2014.

Where it stands now

On June 10, 2014, President Obama signed the Borinqueneers Congressional Gold Medal Act into law as Public Law 113-120, awarding a single gold medal to the regiment “in recognition of its pioneering military service, devotion to duty, and many acts of valor in the face of adversity.”

On April 13, 2016, in Emancipation Hall at the United States Capitol, before more than two hundred Borinqueneers and family members, the medal was presented. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan said the regiment had showed the country “time and again that, courage does not know color; decency does not pick sides”: “Today we are setting the record straight by giving them the highest award in our possession — the Congressional Gold Medal. They were discriminated against in a segregated unit — we are forever in your debt and this medal is long, long overdue.” The gold medal went to the Smithsonian Institution, as the law directs; bronze duplicates were made for the living veterans and the families of the dead. The 65th was the first Hispanic unit, and the only unit of the Korean War, to receive the medal. April 13 is now National Borinqueneers Day, designated by Congress in the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021.

So the regiment’s honor, as a regiment, is no longer in question anywhere in the official record. Congress has found the facts, the Army’s historians have assigned the causes, and the nation’s highest civilian honor sits in the Smithsonian with the regiment’s name on it.

What has never happened is the narrower, legal thing. As of this page’s writing, no source in the public record — no Army announcement, no act of Congress, no board decision — formally vacates or exonerates the Jackson Heights convictions as a class, the way the Navy set aside the Port Chicago convictions outright in 2024. The ninety-one convictions were overtaken by clemency in 1953–54: sentences remitted, pardons granted, men reinstated. That is relief from punishment. It is not a finding that the convictions were wrong, and it is not the clearing of the men’s records that advocates for the regiment have continued to seek. Claims that such an exoneration is pending or has been granted circulate from time to time; this page found none that the record verifies, and prints none. The distinction matters because it is the one the men themselves always insisted on: they were not asking to be forgiven. On the Army’s own historical findings — the rotations, the language barrier, the leadership, the prejudice, the biased prosecutions — there was, for most of them, nothing to forgive.

Nearly all of the ninety-one are gone now. The medal came in time for some of them to stand in Emancipation Hall and hold its bronze duplicate. The record-clearing, if it ever comes, will come the way Port Chicago’s came: to the names, and to the families.

The ledger

The Borinqueneers are this section’s group exhibit of an honor restored and a record left standing: the regiment decorated at the highest level, the individual convictions pardoned but never vacated. The medal account is closed. The convictions account is not.

What has been done

What has not been done

What is being sought

The record, on video

The Borinqueneers were filmed late — a documentary in 2007, a medal in 2016 — but they were filmed in their own voices, and the Army’s own museum now teaches their history. Five films: the museum’s account, the medal itself, the regiment’s own portrait, the documentary, and the story as Spanish-language television told it.

The Army Museum's history. The National Museum of the United States Army's History Talk on the Borinqueneers — from the War with Spain through Korea, the commitment, the challenges, and the discrimination they served under. (National Museum of the United States Army.)

The medal. The Department of Veterans Affairs' film of the Congressional Gold Medal for the 65th — the regiment's service, and the honor Congress voted in 2014 and presented in 2016. (U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.)

A regiment of heroes. The regiment's own short film of its history — the portrait the 65th's community carried through the Gold Medal campaign. (65th Infantry.)

The documentary. The trailer for The Borinqueneers (2007), Noemí Figueroa Soulet's film — the first major documentary of the regiment, narrated by Héctor Elizondo — whose tagline is the regiment's whole case: their toughest fight was not on the battlefield. (El Pozo Productions.)

"They fought with honor." Univision's Aquí y Ahora, August 3, 2014: "Pelearon con honor y terminaron sin gloria" — the Jackson Heights story and the fight for recognition, told in Spanish. (Univision, via the Borinqueneers Congressional Gold Medal Alliance.)

Sources

Further record

Part of Betrayed, Not Forgotten — this site's accounting for the service members and veterans their own institutions failed. Videos are embedded from their publishers; nothing here is re-hosted.