The 65th Infantry Regiment

The photographs on this page, brought to life.

A Puerto Rican soldier near Corozal, December 1941. The record does not name his unit. Jack Delano, Farm Security Administration. Library of Congress.

They were decorated, and then they were court-martialled, and the Army admitted almost fifty years later that the two things were connected. The regiment was constituted on the second of March 1899 and became the 65th Infantry in 1920. The men called themselves the Borinqueneers, after Borinquen, the old name of the island. They guarded the Panama Canal in the First World War and fought in Italy, the Rhineland, the Ardennes and Central Europe in the Second. They sailed from Puerto Rico on the twenty-seventh of August 1950 and reached Pusan a month later. In Korea they served under the 3rd Infantry Division and earned credit for nine campaigns. They covered the 1st Marine Division's withdrawal from the Chosin Reservoir. They held the port at Hungnam on Christmas Eve while a hundred and five thousand troops and a hundred thousand refugees got out. At the end of January 1951 two of their battalions fixed bayonets and took a hill with them — an action Congress later described as the last battalion-sized bayonet assault in the history of the United States Army. MacArthur wrote of their invincible loyalty. Then October 1952, at a place called Jackson Heights. Company G held an outpost under days of shelling, lost its ammunition supply to enemy fire, and pulled back. The regimental commander, a mainland colonel named Chester DeGavre, had already replaced the Puerto Rican officers with non-Hispanic ones. Now he ordered the men to stop calling themselves the Borinqueneers, cut their ration of rice and beans, ordered the moustaches shaved off, and had one soldier wear a sign that read: I am a coward. A hundred and sixty-two men were arrested. Ninety-five were tried. Ninety-one were convicted, with sentences running as high as eighteen years. It was the largest mass court-martial of the Korean War, and the men in the dock spoke mostly Spanish while the officers over them spoke mostly English. Secretary of the Army Robert Stevens granted clemency and pardons, and by 1954 every sentence had been remitted. A 2001 Army review went further and found bias in the prosecutions themselves, citing cases of mainland soldiers who refused to fight under similar conditions and were never charged. Their Korean decorations: ten Distinguished Service Crosses — one of them upgraded to the Medal of Honor for Master Sergeant Juan Negrón in 2014 — 256 Silver Stars, 606 Bronze Stars, and 2,771 Purple Hearts. President Obama signed the Congressional Gold Medal into law on the tenth of June 2014. The medal was presented in the Capitol on the thirteenth of April 2016, sixty-four years after Jackson Heights. One note on the record: the bayonet charge is often placed at Outpost Kelly. It was not there. Outpost Kelly was September 1952 and no source describes a bayonet charge in it. If your father or grandfather served with the 65th, add his name below. Compiled by MyHistoryStone from published reference sources, August 2026. Corrections welcome.