May 2, 2023 • 43 mins
Author Ben Thompson and Professor of History Dr. Pat Larash discuss the most-decorated American soldier of the Vietnam War, First Sergeant Robert Howard, a one-man army who survived 14 wounds and was nominated for the Medal of Honor three different times. His story might not be as well known as those of Sergeant York or Audie Murphy, but his unbelievable exploits battling for his life deep in the jungles of Southeast Asia are no less heroic.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Badass of the Week is an iHeartRadio podcast produced by
High five Content. Sergeant Bob Howard is wounded. He's tired,
he's surrounded. It is the dead of night, deep in
the jungles of Vietnam, and Sergeant Howard's Special Forces unit
is in trouble. Bullets slip through the dark brush around
(00:23):
him from every direction, the pops and cracks of AK
forty seven snapping from unseen positions lit only by the moon,
and the occasional red orange bursts of explosives. The green
Bray sergeant has already been shot several times. He's so
wounded he can barely walk. His hands, riddled with shrapnel
from a claymore mine, function just well enough for him
(00:43):
to squeeze the trigger on his rifle to return fire
on an enemy that closes in on him from every direction.
Of the thirty seven men that had deployed on this
mission with him, only six remain. They aren't certain of
how many North Vietnamese are approaching, but they estimate the
number in the hundreds. Bleeding, exhausted, running low on ammunition,
(01:05):
Sergeant Howard gets on the radio with command. He requests
an airstrike. When they ask for the coordinates, he gives
them his current position. Sergeant Bob Howard might not be
walking out of this jungle alive, but he's determined to
take as many of the enemy with him as possible
when he goes Hello and welcome back to the Badass
(01:46):
of the Week podcast. My name is Ben Thompson and
I'm here as always with my co host, doctor Pat Larish.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
Pat, how's it going today?
Speaker 3 (01:54):
It's going okay. How are you?
Speaker 1 (01:55):
I'm doing okay, I'm doing okay. I've got my assortment
of beverages here that I like to have when I'm
when I'm recording.
Speaker 3 (02:04):
What is your libation of choice?
Speaker 1 (02:06):
I'm weird, so I like to have like a cup
of coffee, a bottle of water, and then I have
a little side drink with me. I make one of
the the Winston Churchill like whiskey sodas, so I eat
a little bit of of liquid courage to uh to
get on here and try to record and to to
you know, perform. I guess that's a thing that I
(02:28):
can kind of sip on while we're doing this, and
I I still remain coherent by the end of the recording.
And but it loosens me up enough that I can
keep going. So it's a it's good. Uh what do
you what do you drink when we when we do
these kind.
Speaker 3 (02:42):
Of along the same lines, you know, a little bit
of liquid courage, something to take the edge off. I've
got to get a stout here. This is the type
that comes in a can with that little nitrogen ball,
so it when you pour it into the glass, it
makes a nice head and it's nice and smooth and
you know, doesn't pack too much of a punch, you know. Yeah.
And then in my mug here, I've got Earl Gray
(03:03):
tea with some honey in it, because a little bit
of caffeine is not bad, and a little bit of
honey to kind of, you know, help my voice.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
Yeah, yeah, I mean that's not too far off from
what I'm doing here.
Speaker 1 (03:13):
Right. We've got a drink and I've got a caffeine
and an alcohol. It's not so bad. There's this distiller
called Jefferson Jefferson Reserve, and they make they make bourbon,
but they make it in kind of the older style,
the way that like, you know, all those Founding followers
were big you know, whiskey makers. George Washington. I think
(03:34):
at some point was like the biggest whiskey maker in
the entire what is now the United States, which is
kind of interesting because he's also famous for putting down
the whiskey Rebellion. But maybe he just wanted to like
get rid of his competition. Yeah, but yeah, Jefferson Reserve.
I mean, they're not a sponsor or anything. I would
be open to them doing that if they wanted to
(03:55):
in the future. And it's nice and I enjoyed it. Yeah,
Today I'm gonna be talking about a good story, one
that I would get a lot of requests for on
the website. I've written about a lot of war heroes
and stuff on the website, a lot of people who
would survive crazy battles, and you know, a great hero
who charged this bunker with machine guns and he killed
(04:15):
all these guys with grenades and pistol and all this stuff.
And you know, these stories are great and I like
writing about them and I like reading them. But this
one is kind of above and beyond a lot of
the other ones. So today I'm going to talk about
a guy named Robert Howard.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
Robert L. Howard.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
He's got to be confused with Robert E. Howard, who's
the dude that wrote Conan. But if the shoe fits,
it fits most.
Speaker 3 (04:38):
So Ben, Ben, do you mean the dude who wrote
Conan O'Brien or the dude who wrote Conan the Barbarian?
Speaker 1 (04:44):
Robert E. Howard wrote Conan the Barbarian.
Speaker 3 (04:47):
He just keep it straight.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
Robert L.
Speaker 1 (04:48):
Howard is a little more Conan the Barbarian and a
little less Conan O'Brien, although he was also an actor,
so maybe there's a little bit of Column, a little
bit of columbe And he is like pretty funny.
Speaker 2 (04:58):
I I heard him talk a little.
Speaker 1 (04:59):
Bit, and he's got a little of a sense of
humor to him, as I imagine most battle heartened soldiers might.
So he's the most decorated soldier of Vietnam, the Vietnam War,
definitely among the most decorated soldiers in American history. But
you know, because of the nature of what he was doing,
there are a lot of things that we don't actually
(05:20):
know because they haven't been declassified. So he over the
course of five tours of duty in Vietnam, he served
with the Army Rangers, Special Forces. He was airborne, he
was air attack, he was the only soldier to ever
be nominated for the Medal of Honor three times for
three separate actions, and for him, all three of those
actions came within a thirteen month period. He trained Randall Gordon,
(05:44):
who was the Medal of Honor winner, who was one
of the Delta Force snipers that history is famous from
Blackhawk Down, one of those two Delta Force guys that
was defending one of the crash sites at black Hawk
Down during the Battle of Muggadishu. And he also appeared
in a couple John Wayne movies, because why not. So
let's get into it. Greatest American War hero of Vietnam.
(06:04):
You know it's going to be a good story, and
we're going to talk about it right after this. Okay,
we're back, and I'm going to talk about Sergeant Robert
Lewis Howard. He was born July eleventh, nineteen thirty nine,
(06:25):
in Opa Laca, Alabama. He was only two years old
when his father was drafted to fight in World War
One in nineteen forty one. His dad and all four
of his uncles they decide they're going to be paratroopers,
and they become paratroopers in World War Two, and all
but one of the five brothers is killed in action
during the war, including Howard's father.
Speaker 3 (06:46):
Oh wow, yeah, Oh that's rough.
Speaker 1 (06:48):
So five brothers is kind of saving private Ryan deal, right, Like,
five brothers go and one comes back, Robert.
Speaker 2 (06:54):
Howard, he goes by.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
Bob goes to live with his grandmother, and you know,
his mom is still in the picture, but she has
to work a lot. She gets a job at a
textile mill to kind of help raise money for the family.
And whenever he talks about it, he says he was
raised by his grandma and right after high school in
nineteen fifty six, he enlists in the army at age seventeen.
(07:16):
He's in Montgomery, Alabama, and he decides, you know what,
I'm going to be a paratrooper too. I'm going to
follow my father's footsteps, which you know, is kind of
kind of gutsy considering that like eighty percent of the
brothers that enlisted as paratroopers didn't make it back. But
I think there's also something to be said for Bob
Howard wanting to wanting to get out there and follow
(07:36):
the family. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, So Bob Howard's he's a
big dude. He looks like Johnny Unitas with face scars.
He's big, strong, got the crew caught. If you told
if you saw a picture of this guy in civilian clothes,
you'd say, this guy's probably a Green Beret, which he was.
He's got this commanding voice with this pretty thick Alabama accent,
(07:59):
but when he talked, it sounds like a drill instructor.
When this guy talks, there's video on YouTube of him
like giving presentations and things. And I mean, this guy
has a pretty commanding personality, and he excels as a paratrooper,
and he starts to quickly be raised up into positions
of commands. So he makes it up to sergeant pretty quickly.
(08:24):
So he listened in nineteen fifty six, and in nineteen
fifty six, there's not a ton happening. The Korean Wars over,
World War two's over, and Vietnam hasn't begun yet. So
when Vietnam starts, he's among the first waves to go over.
He goes over in nineteen sixty seven, so he's already
a nine year veteran. He's an experienced soldier. He's a
(08:45):
sergeant in the one hundred and first Airborne. It's the
unit from Band of Brothers. It's one of the more
famous of the American paratrooper divisions. He's got a lot
of experience and they need that. Nowadays we send people
overseas by sea one thirty aircraft. But in the old
days that you got on a boat and it was
a seventeen day voyage across the Pacific on a troop
ship that was loaded up to double capacity.
Speaker 2 (09:06):
And to listen to Bob.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
Howard tell this story, this was the worst part of
the whole war, I think because he had a lot
of He had a lot to say about this overcrowded
ship with saltwater showers and pack so full of people
that you have to everybody had to stand up to
eight because there wasn't place for everybody to sit in
the cafeteria or the mess hall, wow, or the galley.
Speaker 2 (09:26):
I guess it's called a galley on a ship.
Speaker 3 (09:28):
Yeah, galley.
Speaker 1 (09:29):
Yeah. He was talking about it, and he says, you know,
I was ready to I was ready to go to
war just because it would get me off this boat.
Speaker 3 (09:35):
Do you think they did that deliberately, just like to
get the troops.
Speaker 4 (09:38):
Ready and rare to go, just make this ship so
miserable that you really just run off the boat onto
even if there's some machine guns waiting for you.
Speaker 3 (09:49):
What's facing him there? Like for real, Like we're joking
about machine guns, but what's actually facing him there?
Speaker 1 (09:54):
Well, there was a chance that they were for real
going to do that, right, So, like he goes over
on a big ship, but then he transfers to a
land craft I mean think D Day, right, and he's
being deployed to like help like form a beach head
in South Vietnam. So they were preparing to be coming
out into combat like basically Omaha beach style. It didn't happen.
(10:14):
He didn't get shot at when he got off the boat.
But what did happen was the boat didn't want to
get any closer to shore because the for whatever reason,
it didn't and they opened up the boat and these
guys basically fell in water that was over their heads
and had to kind of swim to shore. And he says,
like I think I was I felt like I was
going to drown before I even got to see the battle.
Because you know, you're wearing all this gear, right, You're
(10:37):
carrying your rifle, you're carrying your backpack, you're carrying everything
that you're going to need for your deployment, and it's
just insta wet. Everything's insta wet. You fall into the water,
you got to like kind of swim and struggle and
fight your way up onto the shore, which he did.
And you know, they established his beachhead, and they create
this kind of camp out on the on the beachhead,
a little base there to help establish the American presence here.
(11:01):
We're going to use this to start bringing more and
more people and aircraft and helicopters and all of these
things in to establish a firebase. But what happens is,
you know, the North Vietnamese weren't waiting for them on
the beach, but they did launch a counter attack as
soon as this beachhead was being set up. If they
could throw the Americans back into the water early, that
that's a good strategic thing for them. So they attack.
(11:24):
Like within the first couple of nights that Bob Howard
is in me Sergeant Howard is in the in country.
The base gets ambushed in the middle of the night
and he goes out to fight and he gets shot
through the jaw and he falls backwards. Can do a
pit with a dead body next to him. Oh ye,
and he's so wounded that he can't move, he can
(11:45):
barely like function. So he lays there for three hours
next to this dead body before someone finally finds him
and gives him medical attention. So that's a rough awakening.
That's a rough introduction to the Vietnam War for Sergeant
Howard here. So it's the first of the fourteen wounds
that Howard will receive in Vietnam, and it leaves him
with this really badass looking scar. Honestly, like, he's got
(12:07):
this pretty solid, like cheek scar from where he got
shot through the jaw by an AK forty seven. And
you know that carries some weight. I think it definitely.
It definitely adds a level when you look at pictures
of this guy. He wears his badass on the outside,
you know. So he goes to the hospital and he's recovering,
and while he's in the hospital, he decides he wants
(12:28):
to volunteer for the Special Forces. Of course he does, right,
So he goes to the Special Forces and when he
gets out, of course he's tough enough to pass the training.
He gets put into the fifth Special Forces Group and
he's part of a group that trains South Vietnamese recon
units long range recon patrol, which is hard work. Right,
You are scouting the enemy positions. You are going out
(12:50):
into unmapped areas and drawing the map of where the
bad guys are. And in order to do that, you
need to see them, and you need to be really
close to them, and you don't have a lot of backup,
and you're out the middle of nowhere. So that's kind
of what this guy is training people to do as
as part of this unit. Later on nineteen sixty seven,
he's a he's a team leader for recon and he
(13:11):
is part of this group called I don't know if
there there's a way to pronounce this acronym.
Speaker 3 (13:17):
Give it a try.
Speaker 2 (13:18):
Yeah, I'm gonna try.
Speaker 1 (13:19):
I would say mac v SAG Military Assistance Command Vietnam
Studies and Observations Group, which sounds very innocuous. It sounds
like a.
Speaker 3 (13:28):
Bunch of people doing data entry at desks or something.
Speaker 1 (13:32):
Right, Yeah, exactly. It sounds like it sounds like three
dudes in ties with like buddy hollyglasses, slide rules. Oh sorry, yes,
slide rules, and you know, sitting at these computers typing
up and looking at pictures of things, but.
Speaker 3 (13:50):
Maybe with a very very large mainframe somewhere in the building.
Speaker 1 (13:53):
Yes, exactly exactly.
Speaker 3 (13:55):
I look at these letters and I'm calculating plays in scrabble, honestly.
Speaker 1 (14:02):
I mean MCVSAG is probably pretty solid scrabble word, i'd imagine.
So he is in the Military Assistants Command Vietnam Studies
and Observations Group, which, like we said, sounds innocuous, but
it is actually like frontline Green Beret reconnaissance stuff, the
sort of thing he was training the South Vietnamese for.
(14:22):
He is now he's going out on some of these
missions with them, and he is a demolitions team leader
for what's known as a Hatchet Force that's sent to
disrupt activities on the ho Chi Mintrail.
Speaker 3 (14:35):
Search and destroy, also look for a missing personnel.
Speaker 1 (14:38):
Yes, yeah, as part of their portfolio.
Speaker 3 (14:40):
Yeah. So yeah, he's fucking up on the ho chim Intrail.
Speaker 1 (14:43):
He is fucking shit up on the ho Chi Mintrail.
That's kind of his job is to create chaos and laos.
Chaos and laos.
Speaker 3 (14:49):
Now, chaos and leos now. But we're not at war
with laos.
Speaker 1 (14:55):
Right, No, No, So this is part of the reason
why a lot of it's possible that there are many
more badass exploits of Sergeant Robert Elahauer that will not
come to light because the United States is not supposed
to be operating in Laos or Cambodia, so he would
run his supplies down through those two countries so he
could bring them in anywhere in Vietnam. It was particularly
(15:19):
effective at reinforcing the Vietcong in the south. He could
bring weapons into the guerrillas that we're fighting down there.
And because Laos and Cambodia were sovereign nations that we
were not technically at war with, the US was not
supposed to be operating over there. But you know, if
you want to disrupt their supply lines, you kind of
have to write where the supply line is right exactly.
(15:41):
Cambodia was looking at the Khmer Rouge. We're looking at
Paul pot right, and he's got strong ties to China,
which the Vietnamese had strong ties to the Soviet Union.
We're backing a lot of their stuff, and the Chinese,
we didn't really want to involve them if we could
help it, so we didn't want to make the Cambodians man,
because that brings China into it. The whole thing with this,
(16:01):
and we didn't want to acknowledge that we were in
any of these places. But we also were going to
have a difficult time executing this war without being able
to disrupt their supply lines. So the forces that are
being sent out for this are mostly South Vietnamese. There
aren't a ton of American soldiers operating here. When they
say like Special Forces advisors, this is what they're talking about,
(16:23):
Like Sergeant Howard's out there, but a lot of the
people in his force are South Vietnamese soldiers. Kind of
the theater of operations for Sergeant Howard is along this
razor edge between Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam working to disrupt
the Ho Chiman Trail. And that's where one of the
first actions that he becomes famous for happens. It's on
(16:44):
November twelfth of nineteen sixty seven. His platoon was dropping
in for one of these search and rescue, search and
destroy operations and they're coming in by helicopter. Right. He
trained as a paratrooper, but in Vietnam because the Canon
Jungle was so difficult to operate and there's a lot
of we're using a lot more helicopters than aircraft to
(17:05):
deploy to deploy soldiers. So he is very famously like
insanely brave.
Speaker 3 (17:12):
You don't say.
Speaker 1 (17:13):
Yeah. The way that they describe him coming in on
this mission, which I imagine was just one of many
missions he executed over his career, was that he was
like shooting from the helicopter as it was landing, and
he jumps out of the helicopter before it hits the
ground to help like set up the perimeter for the
rest of his guys to deploy. And within a very
(17:33):
short period of time, he's only there with thirty thirty dudes. Right,
He's got thirty guys with him. He's a sergeant, he's
a pretty he's a first sergeant, I believe at this point.
So he's a little bit one of the more senior sergeants.
And they drop into this area and the Vietnamese, the
North Vietnamese, are waiting for them. The Americans are out
numbered probably ten to one.
Speaker 3 (17:53):
So we're talking like three hundred dudes.
Speaker 2 (17:55):
We're talking around three hundred guys.
Speaker 1 (17:57):
We're talking a battalion, which at least anywhere between three
hundred and eight hundred guys. Yeah, So what's what the
reconnaissance is there for is to kind of figure out
what we're looking at. And when they landed, they realized
they were very seriously outnumbered and this is gonna be
a problem. But because of the jungle and because the
insearch and extraction is very difficult, sometimes these people would
(18:20):
be these teams would be stuck in the deployment zone
for a long period of time. So he's there for
a week. He fights off the initial ambush, and over
the course of the next week, they are doing their
reconnaissance mission, trying to scout enemy positions, and they keep
getting attacked. They keep getting ambushed. As they're going through this,
he's wounded in battle, he's shot. Over the course of this,
(18:40):
he's ambushed three separate times, and on all three times
he kind of rallies his guys to fight off the
attacks and drive back the enemy and then gets them
out of there before the enemy can regroup and.
Speaker 2 (18:49):
Come back at him.
Speaker 1 (18:50):
He's shot, he's shooting the enemy. He's administering first aid,
he's maneuvering his troops, he's commanding guys, he's encouraging the
guys who are maybe starting to morales, starting to break.
Is doing all manner of heroic things that you expect
your sergeants to do. And finally, after a week of
fighting through this jungle, they get to a clearing where
the extraction.
Speaker 2 (19:10):
Team is going to come.
Speaker 1 (19:10):
They're going to sent a rescue helicopter to pull these
guys out of here because they're surrounded.
Speaker 2 (19:14):
They're in big trouble.
Speaker 1 (19:15):
The enemy is closing in on them with artillery and
mortars and soldiers, and the first helicopter they send in
is an ambulance helicopter to give medical aid to the
wounded Americans in South Vietnamese. So they get to this clearing,
the helicopter appears, it's starting to come in over the
canopy and it gets hit by an RPG and it
goes down. It's just not super encouraging. So what to
(19:47):
Sargent Howard do? She sprints one hundred and fifty yards
across an open field through AK forty seven machine gun
fire to pull the pilot and the crew members out
of the burning helicopter before it explodes. Wo drags them
back to his position, gets them a weapon, and is like, Okay,
you're here, You're here, you're here. We're gonna have to
hold this position until the next helicopter shows up. Wow,
(20:10):
which they do. They hold it off, and the second
helicopter comes, they send some gunships, they send some more ambulances.
Howard has been shot like four or five days ago.
He's been shot a couple of times, and he refuses
to get onto the extraction helicopters until every other guy
on his team is on board. So he's the last
(20:31):
guy out and he was the first guy in. And
for all of these actions combined, they nominate him for
the Medal of Honor for running over and rescuing all
those guys out of the helicopter and then fighting off
an enemy counter attack. He doesn't get the Medal of
Honor because because it's a little sketchy, like where this
battle took place, and we didn't want to really be
(20:52):
awarding Medal of Honors to oh for stuff in battles
that happened in Cambodia. Yeah, which it's possible that's where
this was. They give him the Silver Star, which is
which is the third highest awards.
Speaker 3 (21:04):
Still no slouch, Yeah, yeah, silver Star is.
Speaker 1 (21:06):
A big award, right, it's a it's a Big Medal.
It's the third highest medal you can get for bravery
and combat. But that's what he ends up with. But
he was nominated for the Medal of Honor, and then
over the course of the next year, he's going to
be nominated twice more for two different things that he did.
And so we're going to get into that.
Speaker 3 (21:23):
This guy is like, he's the quintessential badass.
Speaker 1 (21:25):
He is the quintessential badass. But among those stories, this
is one of my favorites, and so that's why I
wanted to do it for the podcast, because I've been
holding onto this one for a long time and it's
it's fun to finally be able to get to tell it. Okay,
So the Silver Star action began November twelfth, nineteen sixty seven,
lasted about a week, so he gets extracted November nineteen,
nineteen sixty seven. Next time he is cited for bravery,
(21:48):
it doesn't mean it's the next time he did something brave,
but the next time he is cited for his bravery
is a year later. November twenty first, nineteen sixty eight.
Sargant Howard is attached to a joint Southetnam and US Force.
That's reconning enemy positions along the Laotian border. I mean,
like I said, the Jochi mantrail runs through Laos. You
could get on a high ground that's probably in Vietnam
(22:11):
and look down at them and recon without being in
too much trouble.
Speaker 2 (22:15):
So he was doing that, and.
Speaker 3 (22:17):
Yeah, sure you can sure he was in Vietnam. Yeah, yeah, anyway, anyway,
I'm interrupting.
Speaker 1 (22:23):
He is reconning enemy troops along the Laotian border, and
he spots a big enemy bunker complex. It's a storage
facility for food and ammunition that they're using to funnel
into North Vietnamese positions along the main battlefront and also
bring into ad Viet Kong forces in the south. It's
(22:43):
a larger scale attack, but he decides he's going to
send his little team because his guys are elite now, right,
they've been in country for year and a half now,
they've been fighting, They've seen tons of combat. His guys
are as good as they get.
Speaker 2 (22:55):
Right.
Speaker 1 (22:55):
These are the top South Vietnamese troops, these are the
top American troops. He's going to send them on a
flanking maneuver around the side. So while the main attack
is going to come at these bunkers. He's going to
go around to the side and try to hit them
from an area that's going to kind of maybe be
able to turn their flank. While this is happening, he
engages the enemy. They say that he shoots somewhere between
(23:16):
four and six enemy soldiers while he's fighting his way
through here by himself, because he's of course leading from
the front, as you do.
Speaker 2 (23:23):
But then there's a bunker.
Speaker 1 (23:25):
Around the edge that has a heavy machine gun on it,
and it opens up a machine gun fire everywhere. There's
a couple of positions there. They're all firing at the
Americans and the South Vietnamese. They have to take cover.
One of the machine gun rounds hits something near Sergeant Howard.
I heard one report that it was this gun. Another
it was like a tree nearby. A ricochet knocks him
(23:46):
on his back. He gets up.
Speaker 2 (23:50):
He's bleeding out of his forehead.
Speaker 1 (23:52):
He might have been unconscious for an indeterminate period of
time while he was laying on his back.
Speaker 2 (23:57):
He doesn't remember.
Speaker 1 (23:58):
But he gets up. He sees this machine gun nests
firing at the rest of his guys, and there's a
sniper up in the tree that's shooting at them, and
so Sergeant Howard, with you know, gunshot wound to the head, decides,
I'm gonna keep going by myself. All the rest of
my men have taken cover somewhere else, but I'm not
quite sure where they are. So he decides he's going
(24:19):
to gonna go solo on this. He goes around the flank,
kills that sniper on the way. Like I said, I
heard a story that it was his rifle that got
shot and he had to kill that sniper with a pistol,
which is very impressive. But he goes to that other
bunker and he captures it with grenades. From that bunker,
he sees another bunker, so he calls in an airstrike
(24:39):
on that bunker using his radio. This guy's just like
one man army, right, yes, And the air strike comes
in blows up that other bunker that he saw. He
goes over there to make sure everybody inside of it's dead.
Speaker 2 (24:59):
They're not all dead.
Speaker 1 (25:00):
There's a machine gun that's still working in there, and
there's a couple of guys in there shooting at him,
so he knocks it out with a grenade. The airstrike
wasn't going to do it, so he had to go
finish the job himself.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
If you want a.
Speaker 1 (25:13):
Job done right, do it yourself. You gotta do it yourself. Apparently,
I wish I could. I wish I could replicate this
guy's like strong Alabama accent, because it's everything he says
just sounds like the most badass thing you've ever heard.
Then goes back finds his unit, who are being pinned
(25:34):
down by a third enemy machine gun position from a
heavy bunker. He then gets a portable anti tank weapon
and uses that to destroy that third bunker.
Speaker 3 (25:45):
Let's just let that sink in.
Speaker 1 (25:46):
Okay, Yes, Yeah, they don't want to provide a number
for how many of the enemy he's managed to take
out by himself, but he has taken out three hardened
enemy machine gun positions. He has single handedly turned the
flank of the enemy position at this supply depot, and
the supply depot falls, and he is nominated for the
Medal of Honor again. But again, this might have been
(26:07):
in Laos, so he might not have technically supposed to.
Speaker 2 (26:10):
Have been there in the first place.
Speaker 1 (26:11):
Yeah, he gets the Distinguished Service Cross, which is the
second highest award for bravery offered by the United States Army.
And none of this is the action that he is
known for. Wait, none of this is the thing that
he's the most famous for. None of this is his
Medal of Honor. Action hasn't happened yet.
Speaker 3 (26:29):
Wait, there's more.
Speaker 2 (26:30):
There's more, and we're going to get to it right
after this.
Speaker 1 (26:44):
Okay, we are back and we are talking about Sergeant
Robert L. Howard, the most decorated American war hero of
the Vietnam War. We have already followed him from Tuscaloose, Alabama,
to the shores of Vietnam. He's been shot in the face,
shot in the head, He's been badly wounded. He's received
the Silver Star for pulling some guys out of a
(27:06):
burning helicopter. He's received a Distinguished Service Cross for destroying
three enemy machine gun bunkers with grenades, a pistol, a rifle,
and an anti tank weapon. But now we're going to
get to the thing that he is most known for,
which is none of those other things I mentioned. So
we are in December of nineteen sixty eight, which is
only a month after that Distinguished Service Cross action that
(27:27):
we had just talked about. He's a first sergeant and
he's operating in the Kantum region. I'm sure my Vietnamese
pronunciation is very poor there. So there was another group
from the special forces that are Macvisog that was out
there operating along the border, and one of the American
soldiers had been captured, believed captured. He was wounded, and
(27:51):
while the rest of the recon force was able to escape,
there's one Green Beret who's still out there and the
North Vietnamese might have him. So Howard and his guys
are sent in to search and rescue, find that guy,
bring him back. He's deployed by helicopter the way that
we've seen him deployed a few times. There's only maybe
forty or so Americans and South Vietnamese that are going
(28:14):
in on this search and rescue mission, but they are
going in against somewhere between three and five hundred North
Vietnamese or they're waiting for them in ambush, in defensive
positions with heavy weapons. And the second these guys hit
the ground there under attack. He gets off on the
landing zone, he's under attack from every direction. The helicopter
(28:34):
gets shot down and he's kind of disoriented. The mission's
kind of like a complete anarchy. From the moment they approach,
he's just trying to like keep his guys alive. So
he's like, all right, we got to fight. We got
to get uphill, we got to get to the high ground.
We got to get out of this ambush. They're waiting
for us. It's a trap, and he.
Speaker 2 (28:53):
Is taking the lead. He's running first.
Speaker 1 (28:55):
Of course, as he does, HiT's him and this lieutenant
who is the commanding officer of the unit, and they're
going up through the forest.
Speaker 2 (29:04):
They don't know what's waiting for them there, but they
just know they got to get to the high ground.
And he's blown up. There's an explosion.
Speaker 1 (29:18):
Howard believes that it was a Claymore mine, which is
a big explosive that's full of like pellets, like think bebes.
Think a bunch of bebes attached to an explosive that
it blows up and it just sprays bebes out towards you.
Speaker 3 (29:30):
Oh that sounds nasty.
Speaker 1 (29:32):
Is probably not very fun to be blown up by
a Cloymore mine. I'm not gonna lie. Yeah, he gets
knocked down, he loses his weapons, he's blinded, and his
hands are messed up.
Speaker 3 (29:42):
Oh yuck.
Speaker 1 (29:43):
And so when he comes to, he's been unconscious for
an indeterminate period of time. He can't see because his
face is so messed up that he's bleeding into his
face and it's blinding him, like he's blinded from the
flash and the explosion, but also from all the blood
that's running down his face.
Speaker 2 (29:58):
He can't really work his hand, and he can't fill
his legs.
Speaker 1 (30:03):
He hears a sound, and he smells something flammable liquids
and fire, and he's hearing the sounds.
Speaker 2 (30:12):
Of gunfire happening all around him.
Speaker 1 (30:15):
But Howard looks over and he sees that there is
a North Vietnamese guy with a flamethrower who is flamethrower
ing anybody who he finds that was still alive, and
he's coming towards Howard, and Howard can barely move. He
as soon as he comes to with his vision, he's
like making eye contact with this flamethrower guy. Howard's not
the kind of guy who just gives up. Because he
(30:36):
blows hands up and he blow his legs up and
you blind him. He does what you would expect him
to do, I suppose, what no normal human being would
do in this situation. Because we are not Robert L. Howard,
because we are not extremely badass Vietnam War heroes. He
pulls out a grenade and he pulls the pin on it.
Speaker 3 (30:52):
Even those hands are still messed up.
Speaker 1 (30:54):
Probably yes, yeah, yeah, okay, barely can work him. But
he gets a grenade out. He makes eye contact with
this flamethrower guy pulls the pin on the grenade, and
you can hold a pin, like, once you pull the
pin on grenade, you can hold it and no, one won't
blow up. It's when you when you let go that
like the timer starts. So he's holding the grenade. He's
looking at this guy. He had that grenade, and the
(31:15):
flame thrower guy decided I'm not gonna mess with this.
I'm not gonna flame this guy and then get blown
up by a grenade. So he leaves.
Speaker 3 (31:22):
What happens to the grenade.
Speaker 2 (31:24):
He throws it at the guy. After the guy leaves.
Speaker 3 (31:26):
Okay, I meant you know, you gotta do something.
Speaker 1 (31:31):
Yeah, he throws it at the guy. The guy walks away.
Because this is Robert Howard and that's how he rolls.
Then he can kind of hear like some some groaning
and some pained noises and it's that lieutenant he was
going with, and that guy's hurt pretty bad. Not that
Howard's not, but this lieutenant's also hurt pretty bad, and
(31:53):
he's calling for a medic that's not going to come.
Howard is leading profusely, very close to being dead, but
he can't leave this guy there. He gets up, grabs
this lieutenant and he starts dragging him back down the hill.
They were going on high ground. They're not gonna make it.
He doesn't have the strength to carry this guy uphill.
(32:13):
But to hear Howard talk about it, this guy was
like six ' four, so he's a big dude. He
drags him back down the hill and he sees some
of the American forces have kind of formed a little
bit of a defensive line. They've gotten out of the ambush,
but they've formed this very very small perimeter. He drags
a lieutenant down there. There's this sergeant there in this
(32:34):
little gully or ditch or something, and he's just like
he's having a panic attack, right like, as is completely
understandable in the situation, the sergeant is paralyzed by fear
watching half dead Robert Howard pull this wounded lieutenant down
the hill. Howard looks at this sergeant and says, gimme
(32:54):
a hand with this guy. Sergeant doesn't do anything. Howard says,
probably give me your gun because I don't have one.
The sergeant's like, well, I'm not going to give up
my rifle. So he pulls out his pistol. It's a
forty five caliber pistol, and he's like, you can have this,
and Howard's like, I don't have any extra ammunition for that.
So the only ammo he has for it is what's
(33:15):
in the gun right now. And as soon as he
takes it, a bunch of other North Vietnamese soldiers come
running out of the jungle towards him, and he has
to be fighting them with this pistol.
Speaker 2 (33:24):
Which he does.
Speaker 1 (33:25):
He shoots three or four more guys, but then they
shoot him in the ammo pouch. So he's got a
bag that he's carrying that has all of the magazines
for his rifle, which he doesn't have anymore because it
got blown up by a claymore and they explode, so
something on the order of fifteen to twenty bullets go
into his leg and his back and his side. Oh,
(33:48):
and he goes down again. Of course he's shot fifteen
times at the same time, and when he comes back
to again, it's spent another indeterminate time gap down at
the bottom of the hill, and the Americans and the
South Vietnamese have created a little bit more of a
defensive perimeter down here, and they've got medical up there.
And he wakes up with like a medic tending to him, and.
Speaker 3 (34:10):
Wasn't there a lieutenant involved somehow?
Speaker 1 (34:13):
Yes?
Speaker 3 (34:13):
Is lieutenant still in the pictures?
Speaker 1 (34:15):
So the lieutenants know where to be seen, and the
medic is working on Howard, and Sergeant Howard's like, hey,
is that is lieutenant alive? And the medic says, yeah,
he's still alive, but I don't think he's gonna make it.
And Sergeant Howard says, you make him make it, You
keep that lieutenant alive. And I mean, I got goosebumps
(34:35):
when I heard him say that line in the video
I was watching of him talking about this.
Speaker 3 (34:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (34:40):
So he's very very badly wounded at this point and
he's getting medical care, but he is also the senior
ranking person in charge now, so he is just like
goes to the medic and he says, get every a
live person that you've got that's able to fight.
Speaker 2 (35:00):
I want to talk to him right now. And so
the medic does.
Speaker 1 (35:04):
He goes and gets a live person that's left from
this detachment, and they all kind of come around this
wounded sergeant who's shot up and bleeding everywhere and like
barely alive and can barely walk, but they all come
to him so that he can yell at them and
tell them what to do.
Speaker 2 (35:17):
He's like, all right, here's what we're gonna do. We're
gonna stablish a perimeter. You're going here, You're going here.
Speaker 1 (35:21):
We're gonna fight these guys, or we're gonna die trying
because we're stuck here.
Speaker 2 (35:24):
Give me a radio.
Speaker 1 (35:25):
I need to talk to command. Give me air support.
For the next four hours, they are under constant attack.
It was thirty seven guys. It gets down to only
about six survive this engagement. Then like it kind of
all culminates in this big attack, Like it becomes nighttime.
The North vietname has launched a huge attack on them.
(35:45):
He's on the radio. He sets up a strobe lights
so just basically like the enemy is going to know
where we are, but it also beacons air support like
here's where we are.
Speaker 2 (35:55):
We need help.
Speaker 1 (35:56):
But he's listening on the radio and they can't get
they can't get help in they can get a rescue
mission in there. It's too dangerous, right, there's too many
enemy weapons. There's too much ground fire. Like every time
they start to send helicopters, they get under so much
fire they have to turn back. And so he's just like, fine,
give me nay palm. Here's the coordinates. And the enemy
starts to close in.
Speaker 3 (36:13):
So wait a minute. When you say he says, give
me nay palm, etc. Does he mean like he wants
them to get the supplies to him.
Speaker 1 (36:19):
No, he wants them to drop them on his general location. Ah,
He's sending them coordinates of where the enemy is, and
he's like, put napalm here, and as we did in
the cold open, He's like, here's my position. They're everywhere.
Just start dropping bombs right here. These are the coordinates
for your run. And he talks about it and he
says like there was one run where they had gunships
(36:42):
come through and firing with their heavy machine guns and
cannons and stuff. And he was like, I was laying
on my back and I had my feet apart, and
I could see spray from bullets hitting between my feet.
They're strafing his position while he's there. He survives, of
course he does. He lives. He's one of the six
guys that make it out of there.
Speaker 3 (37:01):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (37:02):
I looked up everywhere I could to try to find
some happy story about that lieutenant surviving. I can't even
find the lieutenant's name. I don't know what happened to him,
So I don't have a completion on that story, which
probably means it didn't end well. But maybe it did.
Speaker 2 (37:17):
I don't know.
Speaker 3 (37:18):
You can't answer every question.
Speaker 1 (37:19):
I cannot. I tried.
Speaker 2 (37:22):
He gets nominated for the Medal of Honor for this,
of course.
Speaker 3 (37:24):
Does he get it this time?
Speaker 1 (37:25):
Well, let's fast forward a few months. He is on
the front lines. He's a captain now right, that actually
gets promoted to lieutenant and then he's up to captain.
He's commanding a company on the front lines. He is
under a big attack from the North Vietnamese. He is
back there with like his troops. As he's running towards
one of the mortar pits, enemy opens up on him.
He gets shot in the foot and jumps into this
(37:46):
mortar pit. He's kind of helping this mortar team work
work the gun and some guy comes running up to
him and it's like, you know, Captain Howard, we have
the Army Chief of Staff is on the radio for you.
And so Howard's like, okay. So he goes back, gets
on the radio and it is General William Westmoreland, who
is the overall commander of all US Army forces, all
(38:09):
American forces in Vietnam, and he says, oh, hey, Bob,
how's it going. And Captain Howard is like, I don't
think it's very good. We need backup. We're under attack.
We're holding him off, but I think we need to
do this and we need to do this. Also, I've
been shot in the foot, but I think but I'm fine,
Like it's gonna be okay. And west Moreland's like, oh,
I was calling to let you know that you're receiving
(38:29):
the Medal of Honor, and so Captain Howard says, that's great,
but I don't think I'm going to be around to
receive it. He does, He receives it. He survives that
battle as well, and in March of nineteen seventy one,
he goes to the White House and he receives his
Medal of Honor, the thing that he was nominated for
three different times. He got the third highest award, he
(38:51):
got the second highest award. Now he gets the first
highest award. President Nixon puts the Medal of Honor around
his neck at a ceremony, and the first thing that
Bob Howard does after he gets the Medal of Honor
is go to the tomb of the Unknown Soldier. And
he says that when I got that medal, I felt
like I was sharing it with members of my family
who sacrificed their lives. So for him, his dad, his uncles,
(39:15):
they had all fought in the war, they had all
fought in World War Two. He talks about some of
the guys that he served with in Vietnam. He says,
you know, I got the medal because people stood for
me as witnesses. But every guy that I served with,
and he can name a.
Speaker 2 (39:28):
Lot of them, they all deserve it. They're all heroes.
Speaker 1 (39:32):
So the Vietnam War ends and Sergeant Howard is wounded
fourteen times over the course of fifty eight months of combat.
He receives the Medal of Honor, the Silver Star, the
Distinguished Service Cross, eight Purple Hearts, four Bronze Stars, three
Air Medals, four Legion of Merits, seven Army Commendation medicals,
et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and.
Speaker 3 (39:52):
A partridge in a pear tree.
Speaker 1 (39:53):
Yes, he is very, very highly decorated. And as I've said,
like there's probably a lot of stuff that we don't
even know about, and he couldn't wasn't eligible to be
cited for it.
Speaker 3 (40:05):
Yes, this is the tip of some iceberg. We don't
know how big.
Speaker 1 (40:08):
Yes, exactly. After the war, he stays in the Army.
He's becomes a company commander in the seventy fifth Ranger Regiment.
He does Special Forces training near Fort Bragg. He trained
Randall Sugart, who, like I said at the beginning, was
the Delta Force guy who got the Medal of Honor
during Blackhawk Down, one of the Delta Force snipers who
was trying to hold off the crash site of one
(40:29):
of the Blackhawks. He also received two master's degrees.
Speaker 3 (40:33):
What were they in? Were they in badassology and I
don't know, some other.
Speaker 1 (40:37):
Subjects badassology and like kicking ass? Yeah, No, they were
like very He went to Central Michigan University and he
got two master's degrees in management and public administration. Bob
Howard goes on. He appears in two John Wayne movies.
He does a parachute jump in the Longest Day, which
must have been pretty cool because his father and his
uncles all did parachute jumps during Normandy.
Speaker 3 (40:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (41:00):
Yeah. And then he appears as an airborne instructor in
the movie The Green Berets, which he was an airborne
instructor for Green Berets, so that was probably a pretty
easy role for him.
Speaker 3 (41:09):
To play type casting.
Speaker 1 (41:10):
Yeah exactly. I don't want to get pigeonholed, you know,
into these roles. They did a parade for him in
New York City in nineteen eighty six. They gave him
the key to the city, and in nineteen ninety two
he retired after thirty six years of service. He was
a full bird colonel at the time, and then after
his retirement he did a lot of great work with
veterans and he also worked at the National Medal of
(41:32):
Honor Museum in Arlington, Texas. He's a living exhibit, yes exactly,
and he knew a lot of the people that in
the video I saw he was doing a little tour
of the museum, and he's like, I trained this guy,
I worked with this guy. I knew this guy. It's
just he is American military history. He had four kids,
five grandchildren, and despite suffering fourteen wounds in Vietnam, he
(41:56):
lives to the age of seventy and dies of pancreatic camp,
which sucks. Is unrelated to all of the bullets and
gunshots that he that he receives. Yeah, he passed away
in February of twenty ten.
Speaker 2 (42:08):
But Robert L.
Speaker 1 (42:10):
Howard for being the most decorated American soldier of Vietnam,
we don't Nobody really talks about him.
Speaker 2 (42:16):
There's not a bunch of movies about him.
Speaker 1 (42:18):
He's not a household name like Sergeant York would be
or Audie Murphy, but great.
Speaker 2 (42:22):
American war heroes.
Speaker 1 (42:24):
So yeah, I thought, really awesome, badass story that I'm
very happy I finally get to tell.
Speaker 3 (42:30):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (42:30):
Well, I hope you guys enjoyed that. And I think
that's all we have for today and we will We
will see you in the next on the next episode.
Thanks so much as always for listening, and we'll see
you then, see.
Speaker 3 (42:42):
You badass of the Week is an iHeartRadio podcast produced
by High five Content. Executive producers are Andrew Jacobs, Me,
Pat Larish, and my co host Ben Thompson. Writing is
by me and Ben. Story editing is by Ian Jacobs,
Brandon Phibbs, and Ally Lamer. Mixing and music and sound
(43:06):
design is by Jude Brewer. Consulting by Michael May. Special
thanks to Noel Brown at iHeart Badass of the Week
is based on the website Badass Ofthweek dot com, where
you can read all sorts of stories about other badasses.
If you want to reach out with questions ideas, you
(43:26):
can email us at Badass podcast at Badass oftheweek dot com.
If you like the podcast, subscribe, follow, listen, and tell
your friends and your enemies if you want as We'll
be back next week with another one. For more podcasts
from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you get your podcasts.
Badass of the Week is an iHeartRadio podcast produced by
High five Content. Sergeant Bob Howard is wounded. He's tired,
he's surrounded. It is the dead of night, deep in
the jungles of Vietnam, and Sergeant Howard's Special Forces unit
is in trouble. Bullets slip through the dark brush around
(00:23):
him from every direction, the pops and cracks of AK
forty seven snapping from unseen positions lit only by the moon,
and the occasional red orange bursts of explosives. The green
Bray sergeant has already been shot several times. He's so
wounded he can barely walk. His hands, riddled with shrapnel
from a claymore mine, function just well enough for him
(00:43):
to squeeze the trigger on his rifle to return fire
on an enemy that closes in on him from every direction.
Of the thirty seven men that had deployed on this
mission with him, only six remain. They aren't certain of
how many North Vietnamese are approaching, but they estimate the
number in the hundreds. Bleeding, exhausted, running low on ammunition,
(01:05):
Sergeant Howard gets on the radio with command. He requests
an airstrike. When they ask for the coordinates, he gives
them his current position. Sergeant Bob Howard might not be
walking out of this jungle alive, but he's determined to
take as many of the enemy with him as possible
when he goes Hello and welcome back to the Badass
(01:46):
of the Week podcast. My name is Ben Thompson and
I'm here as always with my co host, doctor Pat Larish.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
Pat, how's it going today?
Speaker 3 (01:54):
It's going okay. How are you?
Speaker 1 (01:55):
I'm doing okay, I'm doing okay. I've got my assortment
of beverages here that I like to have when I'm
when I'm recording.
Speaker 3 (02:04):
What is your libation of choice?
Speaker 1 (02:06):
I'm weird, so I like to have like a cup
of coffee, a bottle of water, and then I have
a little side drink with me. I make one of
the the Winston Churchill like whiskey sodas, so I eat
a little bit of of liquid courage to uh to
get on here and try to record and to to
you know, perform. I guess that's a thing that I
(02:28):
can kind of sip on while we're doing this, and
I I still remain coherent by the end of the recording.
And but it loosens me up enough that I can
keep going. So it's a it's good. Uh what do
you what do you drink when we when we do
these kind.
Speaker 3 (02:42):
Of along the same lines, you know, a little bit
of liquid courage, something to take the edge off. I've
got to get a stout here. This is the type
that comes in a can with that little nitrogen ball,
so it when you pour it into the glass, it
makes a nice head and it's nice and smooth and
you know, doesn't pack too much of a punch, you know. Yeah.
And then in my mug here, I've got Earl Gray
(03:03):
tea with some honey in it, because a little bit
of caffeine is not bad, and a little bit of
honey to kind of, you know, help my voice.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
Yeah, yeah, I mean that's not too far off from
what I'm doing here.
Speaker 1 (03:13):
Right. We've got a drink and I've got a caffeine
and an alcohol. It's not so bad. There's this distiller
called Jefferson Jefferson Reserve, and they make they make bourbon,
but they make it in kind of the older style,
the way that like, you know, all those Founding followers
were big you know, whiskey makers. George Washington. I think
(03:34):
at some point was like the biggest whiskey maker in
the entire what is now the United States, which is
kind of interesting because he's also famous for putting down
the whiskey Rebellion. But maybe he just wanted to like
get rid of his competition. Yeah, but yeah, Jefferson Reserve.
I mean, they're not a sponsor or anything. I would
be open to them doing that if they wanted to
(03:55):
in the future. And it's nice and I enjoyed it. Yeah,
Today I'm gonna be talking about a good story, one
that I would get a lot of requests for on
the website. I've written about a lot of war heroes
and stuff on the website, a lot of people who
would survive crazy battles, and you know, a great hero
who charged this bunker with machine guns and he killed
(04:15):
all these guys with grenades and pistol and all this stuff.
And you know, these stories are great and I like
writing about them and I like reading them. But this
one is kind of above and beyond a lot of
the other ones. So today I'm going to talk about
a guy named Robert Howard.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
Robert L. Howard.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
He's got to be confused with Robert E. Howard, who's
the dude that wrote Conan. But if the shoe fits,
it fits most.
Speaker 3 (04:38):
So Ben, Ben, do you mean the dude who wrote
Conan O'Brien or the dude who wrote Conan the Barbarian?
Speaker 1 (04:44):
Robert E. Howard wrote Conan the Barbarian.
Speaker 3 (04:47):
He just keep it straight.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
Robert L.
Speaker 1 (04:48):
Howard is a little more Conan the Barbarian and a
little less Conan O'Brien, although he was also an actor,
so maybe there's a little bit of Column, a little
bit of columbe And he is like pretty funny.
Speaker 2 (04:58):
I I heard him talk a little.
Speaker 1 (04:59):
Bit, and he's got a little of a sense of
humor to him, as I imagine most battle heartened soldiers might.
So he's the most decorated soldier of Vietnam, the Vietnam War,
definitely among the most decorated soldiers in American history. But
you know, because of the nature of what he was doing,
there are a lot of things that we don't actually
(05:20):
know because they haven't been declassified. So he over the
course of five tours of duty in Vietnam, he served
with the Army Rangers, Special Forces. He was airborne, he
was air attack, he was the only soldier to ever
be nominated for the Medal of Honor three times for
three separate actions, and for him, all three of those
actions came within a thirteen month period. He trained Randall Gordon,
(05:44):
who was the Medal of Honor winner, who was one
of the Delta Force snipers that history is famous from
Blackhawk Down, one of those two Delta Force guys that
was defending one of the crash sites at black Hawk
Down during the Battle of Muggadishu. And he also appeared
in a couple John Wayne movies, because why not. So
let's get into it. Greatest American War hero of Vietnam.
(06:04):
You know it's going to be a good story, and
we're going to talk about it right after this. Okay,
we're back, and I'm going to talk about Sergeant Robert
Lewis Howard. He was born July eleventh, nineteen thirty nine,
(06:25):
in Opa Laca, Alabama. He was only two years old
when his father was drafted to fight in World War
One in nineteen forty one. His dad and all four
of his uncles they decide they're going to be paratroopers,
and they become paratroopers in World War Two, and all
but one of the five brothers is killed in action
during the war, including Howard's father.
Speaker 3 (06:46):
Oh wow, yeah, Oh that's rough.
Speaker 1 (06:48):
So five brothers is kind of saving private Ryan deal, right, Like,
five brothers go and one comes back, Robert.
Speaker 2 (06:54):
Howard, he goes by.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
Bob goes to live with his grandmother, and you know,
his mom is still in the picture, but she has
to work a lot. She gets a job at a
textile mill to kind of help raise money for the family.
And whenever he talks about it, he says he was
raised by his grandma and right after high school in
nineteen fifty six, he enlists in the army at age seventeen.
(07:16):
He's in Montgomery, Alabama, and he decides, you know what,
I'm going to be a paratrooper too. I'm going to
follow my father's footsteps, which you know, is kind of
kind of gutsy considering that like eighty percent of the
brothers that enlisted as paratroopers didn't make it back. But
I think there's also something to be said for Bob
Howard wanting to wanting to get out there and follow
(07:36):
the family. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, So Bob Howard's he's a
big dude. He looks like Johnny Unitas with face scars.
He's big, strong, got the crew caught. If you told
if you saw a picture of this guy in civilian clothes,
you'd say, this guy's probably a Green Beret, which he was.
He's got this commanding voice with this pretty thick Alabama accent,
(07:59):
but when he talked, it sounds like a drill instructor.
When this guy talks, there's video on YouTube of him
like giving presentations and things. And I mean, this guy
has a pretty commanding personality, and he excels as a paratrooper,
and he starts to quickly be raised up into positions
of commands. So he makes it up to sergeant pretty quickly.
(08:24):
So he listened in nineteen fifty six, and in nineteen
fifty six, there's not a ton happening. The Korean Wars over,
World War two's over, and Vietnam hasn't begun yet. So
when Vietnam starts, he's among the first waves to go over.
He goes over in nineteen sixty seven, so he's already
a nine year veteran. He's an experienced soldier. He's a
(08:45):
sergeant in the one hundred and first Airborne. It's the
unit from Band of Brothers. It's one of the more
famous of the American paratrooper divisions. He's got a lot
of experience and they need that. Nowadays we send people
overseas by sea one thirty aircraft. But in the old
days that you got on a boat and it was
a seventeen day voyage across the Pacific on a troop
ship that was loaded up to double capacity.
Speaker 2 (09:06):
And to listen to Bob.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
Howard tell this story, this was the worst part of
the whole war, I think because he had a lot
of He had a lot to say about this overcrowded
ship with saltwater showers and pack so full of people
that you have to everybody had to stand up to
eight because there wasn't place for everybody to sit in
the cafeteria or the mess hall, wow, or the galley.
Speaker 2 (09:26):
I guess it's called a galley on a ship.
Speaker 3 (09:28):
Yeah, galley.
Speaker 1 (09:29):
Yeah. He was talking about it, and he says, you know,
I was ready to I was ready to go to
war just because it would get me off this boat.
Speaker 3 (09:35):
Do you think they did that deliberately, just like to
get the troops.
Speaker 4 (09:38):
Ready and rare to go, just make this ship so
miserable that you really just run off the boat onto
even if there's some machine guns waiting for you.
Speaker 3 (09:49):
What's facing him there? Like for real, Like we're joking
about machine guns, but what's actually facing him there?
Speaker 1 (09:54):
Well, there was a chance that they were for real
going to do that, right, So, like he goes over
on a big ship, but then he transfers to a
land craft I mean think D Day, right, and he's
being deployed to like help like form a beach head
in South Vietnam. So they were preparing to be coming
out into combat like basically Omaha beach style. It didn't happen.
(10:14):
He didn't get shot at when he got off the boat.
But what did happen was the boat didn't want to
get any closer to shore because the for whatever reason,
it didn't and they opened up the boat and these
guys basically fell in water that was over their heads
and had to kind of swim to shore. And he says,
like I think I was I felt like I was
going to drown before I even got to see the battle.
Because you know, you're wearing all this gear, right, You're
(10:37):
carrying your rifle, you're carrying your backpack, you're carrying everything
that you're going to need for your deployment, and it's
just insta wet. Everything's insta wet. You fall into the water,
you got to like kind of swim and struggle and
fight your way up onto the shore, which he did.
And you know, they established his beachhead, and they create
this kind of camp out on the on the beachhead,
a little base there to help establish the American presence here.
(11:01):
We're going to use this to start bringing more and
more people and aircraft and helicopters and all of these
things in to establish a firebase. But what happens is,
you know, the North Vietnamese weren't waiting for them on
the beach, but they did launch a counter attack as
soon as this beachhead was being set up. If they
could throw the Americans back into the water early, that
that's a good strategic thing for them. So they attack.
(11:24):
Like within the first couple of nights that Bob Howard
is in me Sergeant Howard is in the in country.
The base gets ambushed in the middle of the night
and he goes out to fight and he gets shot
through the jaw and he falls backwards. Can do a
pit with a dead body next to him. Oh ye,
and he's so wounded that he can't move, he can
(11:45):
barely like function. So he lays there for three hours
next to this dead body before someone finally finds him
and gives him medical attention. So that's a rough awakening.
That's a rough introduction to the Vietnam War for Sergeant
Howard here. So it's the first of the fourteen wounds
that Howard will receive in Vietnam, and it leaves him
with this really badass looking scar. Honestly, like, he's got
(12:07):
this pretty solid, like cheek scar from where he got
shot through the jaw by an AK forty seven. And
you know that carries some weight. I think it definitely.
It definitely adds a level when you look at pictures
of this guy. He wears his badass on the outside,
you know. So he goes to the hospital and he's recovering,
and while he's in the hospital, he decides he wants
(12:28):
to volunteer for the Special Forces. Of course he does, right,
So he goes to the Special Forces and when he
gets out, of course he's tough enough to pass the training.
He gets put into the fifth Special Forces Group and
he's part of a group that trains South Vietnamese recon
units long range recon patrol, which is hard work. Right,
You are scouting the enemy positions. You are going out
(12:50):
into unmapped areas and drawing the map of where the
bad guys are. And in order to do that, you
need to see them, and you need to be really
close to them, and you don't have a lot of backup,
and you're out the middle of nowhere. So that's kind
of what this guy is training people to do as
as part of this unit. Later on nineteen sixty seven,
he's a he's a team leader for recon and he
(13:11):
is part of this group called I don't know if
there there's a way to pronounce this acronym.
Speaker 3 (13:17):
Give it a try.
Speaker 2 (13:18):
Yeah, I'm gonna try.
Speaker 1 (13:19):
I would say mac v SAG Military Assistance Command Vietnam
Studies and Observations Group, which sounds very innocuous. It sounds
like a.
Speaker 3 (13:28):
Bunch of people doing data entry at desks or something.
Speaker 1 (13:32):
Right, Yeah, exactly. It sounds like it sounds like three
dudes in ties with like buddy hollyglasses, slide rules. Oh sorry, yes,
slide rules, and you know, sitting at these computers typing
up and looking at pictures of things, but.
Speaker 3 (13:50):
Maybe with a very very large mainframe somewhere in the building.
Speaker 1 (13:53):
Yes, exactly exactly.
Speaker 3 (13:55):
I look at these letters and I'm calculating plays in scrabble, honestly.
Speaker 1 (14:02):
I mean MCVSAG is probably pretty solid scrabble word, i'd imagine.
So he is in the Military Assistants Command Vietnam Studies
and Observations Group, which, like we said, sounds innocuous, but
it is actually like frontline Green Beret reconnaissance stuff, the
sort of thing he was training the South Vietnamese for.
(14:22):
He is now he's going out on some of these
missions with them, and he is a demolitions team leader
for what's known as a Hatchet Force that's sent to
disrupt activities on the ho Chi Mintrail.
Speaker 3 (14:35):
Search and destroy, also look for a missing personnel.
Speaker 1 (14:38):
Yes, yeah, as part of their portfolio.
Speaker 3 (14:40):
Yeah. So yeah, he's fucking up on the ho chim Intrail.
Speaker 1 (14:43):
He is fucking shit up on the ho Chi Mintrail.
That's kind of his job is to create chaos and laos.
Chaos and laos.
Speaker 3 (14:49):
Now, chaos and leos now. But we're not at war
with laos.
Speaker 1 (14:55):
Right, No, No, So this is part of the reason
why a lot of it's possible that there are many
more badass exploits of Sergeant Robert Elahauer that will not
come to light because the United States is not supposed
to be operating in Laos or Cambodia, so he would
run his supplies down through those two countries so he
could bring them in anywhere in Vietnam. It was particularly
(15:19):
effective at reinforcing the Vietcong in the south. He could
bring weapons into the guerrillas that we're fighting down there.
And because Laos and Cambodia were sovereign nations that we
were not technically at war with, the US was not
supposed to be operating over there. But you know, if
you want to disrupt their supply lines, you kind of
have to write where the supply line is right exactly.
(15:41):
Cambodia was looking at the Khmer Rouge. We're looking at
Paul pot right, and he's got strong ties to China,
which the Vietnamese had strong ties to the Soviet Union.
We're backing a lot of their stuff, and the Chinese,
we didn't really want to involve them if we could
help it, so we didn't want to make the Cambodians man,
because that brings China into it. The whole thing with this,
(16:01):
and we didn't want to acknowledge that we were in
any of these places. But we also were going to
have a difficult time executing this war without being able
to disrupt their supply lines. So the forces that are
being sent out for this are mostly South Vietnamese. There
aren't a ton of American soldiers operating here. When they
say like Special Forces advisors, this is what they're talking about,
(16:23):
Like Sergeant Howard's out there, but a lot of the
people in his force are South Vietnamese soldiers. Kind of
the theater of operations for Sergeant Howard is along this
razor edge between Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam working to disrupt
the Ho Chiman Trail. And that's where one of the
first actions that he becomes famous for happens. It's on
(16:44):
November twelfth of nineteen sixty seven. His platoon was dropping
in for one of these search and rescue, search and
destroy operations and they're coming in by helicopter. Right. He
trained as a paratrooper, but in Vietnam because the Canon
Jungle was so difficult to operate and there's a lot
of we're using a lot more helicopters than aircraft to
(17:05):
deploy to deploy soldiers. So he is very famously like
insanely brave.
Speaker 3 (17:12):
You don't say.
Speaker 1 (17:13):
Yeah. The way that they describe him coming in on
this mission, which I imagine was just one of many
missions he executed over his career, was that he was
like shooting from the helicopter as it was landing, and
he jumps out of the helicopter before it hits the
ground to help like set up the perimeter for the
rest of his guys to deploy. And within a very
(17:33):
short period of time, he's only there with thirty thirty dudes. Right,
He's got thirty guys with him. He's a sergeant, he's
a pretty he's a first sergeant, I believe at this point.
So he's a little bit one of the more senior sergeants.
And they drop into this area and the Vietnamese, the
North Vietnamese, are waiting for them. The Americans are out
numbered probably ten to one.
Speaker 3 (17:53):
So we're talking like three hundred dudes.
Speaker 2 (17:55):
We're talking around three hundred guys.
Speaker 1 (17:57):
We're talking a battalion, which at least anywhere between three
hundred and eight hundred guys. Yeah, So what's what the
reconnaissance is there for is to kind of figure out
what we're looking at. And when they landed, they realized
they were very seriously outnumbered and this is gonna be
a problem. But because of the jungle and because the
insearch and extraction is very difficult, sometimes these people would
(18:20):
be these teams would be stuck in the deployment zone
for a long period of time. So he's there for
a week. He fights off the initial ambush, and over
the course of the next week, they are doing their
reconnaissance mission, trying to scout enemy positions, and they keep
getting attacked. They keep getting ambushed. As they're going through this,
he's wounded in battle, he's shot. Over the course of this,
(18:40):
he's ambushed three separate times, and on all three times
he kind of rallies his guys to fight off the
attacks and drive back the enemy and then gets them
out of there before the enemy can regroup and.
Speaker 2 (18:49):
Come back at him.
Speaker 1 (18:50):
He's shot, he's shooting the enemy. He's administering first aid,
he's maneuvering his troops, he's commanding guys, he's encouraging the
guys who are maybe starting to morales, starting to break.
Is doing all manner of heroic things that you expect
your sergeants to do. And finally, after a week of
fighting through this jungle, they get to a clearing where
the extraction.
Speaker 2 (19:10):
Team is going to come.
Speaker 1 (19:10):
They're going to sent a rescue helicopter to pull these
guys out of here because they're surrounded.
Speaker 2 (19:14):
They're in big trouble.
Speaker 1 (19:15):
The enemy is closing in on them with artillery and
mortars and soldiers, and the first helicopter they send in
is an ambulance helicopter to give medical aid to the
wounded Americans in South Vietnamese. So they get to this clearing,
the helicopter appears, it's starting to come in over the
canopy and it gets hit by an RPG and it
goes down. It's just not super encouraging. So what to
(19:47):
Sargent Howard do? She sprints one hundred and fifty yards
across an open field through AK forty seven machine gun
fire to pull the pilot and the crew members out
of the burning helicopter before it explodes. Wo drags them
back to his position, gets them a weapon, and is like, Okay,
you're here, You're here, you're here. We're gonna have to
hold this position until the next helicopter shows up. Wow,
(20:10):
which they do. They hold it off, and the second
helicopter comes, they send some gunships, they send some more ambulances.
Howard has been shot like four or five days ago.
He's been shot a couple of times, and he refuses
to get onto the extraction helicopters until every other guy
on his team is on board. So he's the last
(20:31):
guy out and he was the first guy in. And
for all of these actions combined, they nominate him for
the Medal of Honor for running over and rescuing all
those guys out of the helicopter and then fighting off
an enemy counter attack. He doesn't get the Medal of
Honor because because it's a little sketchy, like where this
battle took place, and we didn't want to really be
(20:52):
awarding Medal of Honors to oh for stuff in battles
that happened in Cambodia. Yeah, which it's possible that's where
this was. They give him the Silver Star, which is
which is the third highest awards.
Speaker 3 (21:04):
Still no slouch, Yeah, yeah, silver Star is.
Speaker 1 (21:06):
A big award, right, it's a it's a Big Medal.
It's the third highest medal you can get for bravery
and combat. But that's what he ends up with. But
he was nominated for the Medal of Honor, and then
over the course of the next year, he's going to
be nominated twice more for two different things that he did.
And so we're going to get into that.
Speaker 3 (21:23):
This guy is like, he's the quintessential badass.
Speaker 1 (21:25):
He is the quintessential badass. But among those stories, this
is one of my favorites, and so that's why I
wanted to do it for the podcast, because I've been
holding onto this one for a long time and it's
it's fun to finally be able to get to tell it. Okay,
So the Silver Star action began November twelfth, nineteen sixty seven,
lasted about a week, so he gets extracted November nineteen,
nineteen sixty seven. Next time he is cited for bravery,
(21:48):
it doesn't mean it's the next time he did something brave,
but the next time he is cited for his bravery
is a year later. November twenty first, nineteen sixty eight.
Sargant Howard is attached to a joint Southetnam and US Force.
That's reconning enemy positions along the Laotian border. I mean,
like I said, the Jochi mantrail runs through Laos. You
could get on a high ground that's probably in Vietnam
(22:11):
and look down at them and recon without being in
too much trouble.
Speaker 2 (22:15):
So he was doing that, and.
Speaker 3 (22:17):
Yeah, sure you can sure he was in Vietnam. Yeah, yeah, anyway, anyway,
I'm interrupting.
Speaker 1 (22:23):
He is reconning enemy troops along the Laotian border, and
he spots a big enemy bunker complex. It's a storage
facility for food and ammunition that they're using to funnel
into North Vietnamese positions along the main battlefront and also
bring into ad Viet Kong forces in the south. It's
(22:43):
a larger scale attack, but he decides he's going to
send his little team because his guys are elite now, right,
they've been in country for year and a half now,
they've been fighting, They've seen tons of combat. His guys
are as good as they get.
Speaker 2 (22:55):
Right.
Speaker 1 (22:55):
These are the top South Vietnamese troops, these are the
top American troops. He's going to send them on a
flanking maneuver around the side. So while the main attack
is going to come at these bunkers. He's going to
go around to the side and try to hit them
from an area that's going to kind of maybe be
able to turn their flank. While this is happening, he
engages the enemy. They say that he shoots somewhere between
(23:16):
four and six enemy soldiers while he's fighting his way
through here by himself, because he's of course leading from
the front, as you do.
Speaker 2 (23:23):
But then there's a bunker.
Speaker 1 (23:25):
Around the edge that has a heavy machine gun on it,
and it opens up a machine gun fire everywhere. There's
a couple of positions there. They're all firing at the
Americans and the South Vietnamese. They have to take cover.
One of the machine gun rounds hits something near Sergeant Howard.
I heard one report that it was this gun. Another
it was like a tree nearby. A ricochet knocks him
(23:46):
on his back. He gets up.
Speaker 2 (23:50):
He's bleeding out of his forehead.
Speaker 1 (23:52):
He might have been unconscious for an indeterminate period of
time while he was laying on his back.
Speaker 2 (23:57):
He doesn't remember.
Speaker 1 (23:58):
But he gets up. He sees this machine gun nests
firing at the rest of his guys, and there's a
sniper up in the tree that's shooting at them, and
so Sergeant Howard, with you know, gunshot wound to the head, decides,
I'm gonna keep going by myself. All the rest of
my men have taken cover somewhere else, but I'm not
quite sure where they are. So he decides he's going
(24:19):
to gonna go solo on this. He goes around the flank,
kills that sniper on the way. Like I said, I
heard a story that it was his rifle that got
shot and he had to kill that sniper with a pistol,
which is very impressive. But he goes to that other
bunker and he captures it with grenades. From that bunker,
he sees another bunker, so he calls in an airstrike
(24:39):
on that bunker using his radio. This guy's just like
one man army, right, yes, And the air strike comes
in blows up that other bunker that he saw. He
goes over there to make sure everybody inside of it's dead.
Speaker 2 (24:59):
They're not all dead.
Speaker 1 (25:00):
There's a machine gun that's still working in there, and
there's a couple of guys in there shooting at him,
so he knocks it out with a grenade. The airstrike
wasn't going to do it, so he had to go
finish the job himself.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
If you want a.
Speaker 1 (25:13):
Job done right, do it yourself. You gotta do it yourself. Apparently,
I wish I could. I wish I could replicate this
guy's like strong Alabama accent, because it's everything he says
just sounds like the most badass thing you've ever heard.
Then goes back finds his unit, who are being pinned
(25:34):
down by a third enemy machine gun position from a
heavy bunker. He then gets a portable anti tank weapon
and uses that to destroy that third bunker.
Speaker 3 (25:45):
Let's just let that sink in.
Speaker 1 (25:46):
Okay, Yes, Yeah, they don't want to provide a number
for how many of the enemy he's managed to take
out by himself, but he has taken out three hardened
enemy machine gun positions. He has single handedly turned the
flank of the enemy position at this supply depot, and
the supply depot falls, and he is nominated for the
Medal of Honor again. But again, this might have been
(26:07):
in Laos, so he might not have technically supposed to.
Speaker 2 (26:10):
Have been there in the first place.
Speaker 1 (26:11):
Yeah, he gets the Distinguished Service Cross, which is the
second highest award for bravery offered by the United States Army.
And none of this is the action that he is
known for. Wait, none of this is the thing that
he's the most famous for. None of this is his
Medal of Honor. Action hasn't happened yet.
Speaker 3 (26:29):
Wait, there's more.
Speaker 2 (26:30):
There's more, and we're going to get to it right
after this.
Speaker 1 (26:44):
Okay, we are back and we are talking about Sergeant
Robert L. Howard, the most decorated American war hero of
the Vietnam War. We have already followed him from Tuscaloose, Alabama,
to the shores of Vietnam. He's been shot in the face,
shot in the head, He's been badly wounded. He's received
the Silver Star for pulling some guys out of a
(27:06):
burning helicopter. He's received a Distinguished Service Cross for destroying
three enemy machine gun bunkers with grenades, a pistol, a rifle,
and an anti tank weapon. But now we're going to
get to the thing that he is most known for,
which is none of those other things I mentioned. So
we are in December of nineteen sixty eight, which is
only a month after that Distinguished Service Cross action that
(27:27):
we had just talked about. He's a first sergeant and
he's operating in the Kantum region. I'm sure my Vietnamese
pronunciation is very poor there. So there was another group
from the special forces that are Macvisog that was out
there operating along the border, and one of the American
soldiers had been captured, believed captured. He was wounded, and
(27:51):
while the rest of the recon force was able to escape,
there's one Green Beret who's still out there and the
North Vietnamese might have him. So Howard and his guys
are sent in to search and rescue, find that guy,
bring him back. He's deployed by helicopter the way that
we've seen him deployed a few times. There's only maybe
forty or so Americans and South Vietnamese that are going
(28:14):
in on this search and rescue mission, but they are
going in against somewhere between three and five hundred North
Vietnamese or they're waiting for them in ambush, in defensive
positions with heavy weapons. And the second these guys hit
the ground there under attack. He gets off on the
landing zone, he's under attack from every direction. The helicopter
(28:34):
gets shot down and he's kind of disoriented. The mission's
kind of like a complete anarchy. From the moment they approach,
he's just trying to like keep his guys alive. So
he's like, all right, we got to fight. We got
to get uphill, we got to get to the high ground.
We got to get out of this ambush. They're waiting
for us. It's a trap, and he.
Speaker 2 (28:53):
Is taking the lead. He's running first.
Speaker 1 (28:55):
Of course, as he does, HiT's him and this lieutenant
who is the commanding officer of the unit, and they're
going up through the forest.
Speaker 2 (29:04):
They don't know what's waiting for them there, but they
just know they got to get to the high ground.
And he's blown up. There's an explosion.
Speaker 1 (29:18):
Howard believes that it was a Claymore mine, which is
a big explosive that's full of like pellets, like think bebes.
Think a bunch of bebes attached to an explosive that
it blows up and it just sprays bebes out towards you.
Speaker 3 (29:30):
Oh that sounds nasty.
Speaker 1 (29:32):
Is probably not very fun to be blown up by
a Cloymore mine. I'm not gonna lie. Yeah, he gets
knocked down, he loses his weapons, he's blinded, and his
hands are messed up.
Speaker 3 (29:42):
Oh yuck.
Speaker 1 (29:43):
And so when he comes to, he's been unconscious for
an indeterminate period of time. He can't see because his
face is so messed up that he's bleeding into his
face and it's blinding him, like he's blinded from the
flash and the explosion, but also from all the blood
that's running down his face.
Speaker 2 (29:58):
He can't really work his hand, and he can't fill
his legs.
Speaker 1 (30:03):
He hears a sound, and he smells something flammable liquids
and fire, and he's hearing the sounds.
Speaker 2 (30:12):
Of gunfire happening all around him.
Speaker 1 (30:15):
But Howard looks over and he sees that there is
a North Vietnamese guy with a flamethrower who is flamethrower
ing anybody who he finds that was still alive, and
he's coming towards Howard, and Howard can barely move. He
as soon as he comes to with his vision, he's
like making eye contact with this flamethrower guy. Howard's not
the kind of guy who just gives up. Because he
(30:36):
blows hands up and he blow his legs up and
you blind him. He does what you would expect him
to do, I suppose, what no normal human being would
do in this situation. Because we are not Robert L. Howard,
because we are not extremely badass Vietnam War heroes. He
pulls out a grenade and he pulls the pin on it.
Speaker 3 (30:52):
Even those hands are still messed up.
Speaker 1 (30:54):
Probably yes, yeah, yeah, okay, barely can work him. But
he gets a grenade out. He makes eye contact with
this flamethrower guy pulls the pin on the grenade, and
you can hold a pin, like, once you pull the
pin on grenade, you can hold it and no, one won't
blow up. It's when you when you let go that
like the timer starts. So he's holding the grenade. He's
looking at this guy. He had that grenade, and the
(31:15):
flame thrower guy decided I'm not gonna mess with this.
I'm not gonna flame this guy and then get blown
up by a grenade. So he leaves.
Speaker 3 (31:22):
What happens to the grenade.
Speaker 2 (31:24):
He throws it at the guy. After the guy leaves.
Speaker 3 (31:26):
Okay, I meant you know, you gotta do something.
Speaker 1 (31:31):
Yeah, he throws it at the guy. The guy walks away.
Because this is Robert Howard and that's how he rolls.
Then he can kind of hear like some some groaning
and some pained noises and it's that lieutenant he was
going with, and that guy's hurt pretty bad. Not that
Howard's not, but this lieutenant's also hurt pretty bad, and
(31:53):
he's calling for a medic that's not going to come.
Howard is leading profusely, very close to being dead, but
he can't leave this guy there. He gets up, grabs
this lieutenant and he starts dragging him back down the hill.
They were going on high ground. They're not gonna make it.
He doesn't have the strength to carry this guy uphill.
(32:13):
But to hear Howard talk about it, this guy was
like six ' four, so he's a big dude. He
drags him back down the hill and he sees some
of the American forces have kind of formed a little
bit of a defensive line. They've gotten out of the ambush,
but they've formed this very very small perimeter. He drags
a lieutenant down there. There's this sergeant there in this
(32:34):
little gully or ditch or something, and he's just like
he's having a panic attack, right like, as is completely
understandable in the situation, the sergeant is paralyzed by fear
watching half dead Robert Howard pull this wounded lieutenant down
the hill. Howard looks at this sergeant and says, gimme
(32:54):
a hand with this guy. Sergeant doesn't do anything. Howard says,
probably give me your gun because I don't have one.
The sergeant's like, well, I'm not going to give up
my rifle. So he pulls out his pistol. It's a
forty five caliber pistol, and he's like, you can have this,
and Howard's like, I don't have any extra ammunition for that.
So the only ammo he has for it is what's
(33:15):
in the gun right now. And as soon as he
takes it, a bunch of other North Vietnamese soldiers come
running out of the jungle towards him, and he has
to be fighting them with this pistol.
Speaker 2 (33:24):
Which he does.
Speaker 1 (33:25):
He shoots three or four more guys, but then they
shoot him in the ammo pouch. So he's got a
bag that he's carrying that has all of the magazines
for his rifle, which he doesn't have anymore because it
got blown up by a claymore and they explode, so
something on the order of fifteen to twenty bullets go
into his leg and his back and his side. Oh,
(33:48):
and he goes down again. Of course he's shot fifteen
times at the same time, and when he comes back
to again, it's spent another indeterminate time gap down at
the bottom of the hill, and the Americans and the
South Vietnamese have created a little bit more of a
defensive perimeter down here, and they've got medical up there.
And he wakes up with like a medic tending to him, and.
Speaker 3 (34:10):
Wasn't there a lieutenant involved somehow?
Speaker 1 (34:13):
Yes?
Speaker 3 (34:13):
Is lieutenant still in the pictures?
Speaker 1 (34:15):
So the lieutenants know where to be seen, and the
medic is working on Howard, and Sergeant Howard's like, hey,
is that is lieutenant alive? And the medic says, yeah,
he's still alive, but I don't think he's gonna make it.
And Sergeant Howard says, you make him make it, You
keep that lieutenant alive. And I mean, I got goosebumps
(34:35):
when I heard him say that line in the video
I was watching of him talking about this.
Speaker 3 (34:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (34:40):
So he's very very badly wounded at this point and
he's getting medical care, but he is also the senior
ranking person in charge now, so he is just like
goes to the medic and he says, get every a
live person that you've got that's able to fight.
Speaker 2 (35:00):
I want to talk to him right now. And so
the medic does.
Speaker 1 (35:04):
He goes and gets a live person that's left from
this detachment, and they all kind of come around this
wounded sergeant who's shot up and bleeding everywhere and like
barely alive and can barely walk, but they all come
to him so that he can yell at them and
tell them what to do.
Speaker 2 (35:17):
He's like, all right, here's what we're gonna do. We're
gonna stablish a perimeter. You're going here, You're going here.
Speaker 1 (35:21):
We're gonna fight these guys, or we're gonna die trying
because we're stuck here.
Speaker 2 (35:24):
Give me a radio.
Speaker 1 (35:25):
I need to talk to command. Give me air support.
For the next four hours, they are under constant attack.
It was thirty seven guys. It gets down to only
about six survive this engagement. Then like it kind of
all culminates in this big attack, Like it becomes nighttime.
The North vietname has launched a huge attack on them.
(35:45):
He's on the radio. He sets up a strobe lights
so just basically like the enemy is going to know
where we are, but it also beacons air support like
here's where we are.
Speaker 2 (35:55):
We need help.
Speaker 1 (35:56):
But he's listening on the radio and they can't get
they can't get help in they can get a rescue
mission in there. It's too dangerous, right, there's too many
enemy weapons. There's too much ground fire. Like every time
they start to send helicopters, they get under so much
fire they have to turn back. And so he's just like, fine,
give me nay palm. Here's the coordinates. And the enemy
starts to close in.
Speaker 3 (36:13):
So wait a minute. When you say he says, give
me nay palm, etc. Does he mean like he wants
them to get the supplies to him.
Speaker 1 (36:19):
No, he wants them to drop them on his general location. Ah,
He's sending them coordinates of where the enemy is, and
he's like, put napalm here, and as we did in
the cold open, He's like, here's my position. They're everywhere.
Just start dropping bombs right here. These are the coordinates
for your run. And he talks about it and he
says like there was one run where they had gunships
(36:42):
come through and firing with their heavy machine guns and
cannons and stuff. And he was like, I was laying
on my back and I had my feet apart, and
I could see spray from bullets hitting between my feet.
They're strafing his position while he's there. He survives, of
course he does. He lives. He's one of the six
guys that make it out of there.
Speaker 3 (37:01):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (37:02):
I looked up everywhere I could to try to find
some happy story about that lieutenant surviving. I can't even
find the lieutenant's name. I don't know what happened to him,
So I don't have a completion on that story, which
probably means it didn't end well. But maybe it did.
Speaker 2 (37:17):
I don't know.
Speaker 3 (37:18):
You can't answer every question.
Speaker 1 (37:19):
I cannot. I tried.
Speaker 2 (37:22):
He gets nominated for the Medal of Honor for this,
of course.
Speaker 3 (37:24):
Does he get it this time?
Speaker 1 (37:25):
Well, let's fast forward a few months. He is on
the front lines. He's a captain now right, that actually
gets promoted to lieutenant and then he's up to captain.
He's commanding a company on the front lines. He is
under a big attack from the North Vietnamese. He is
back there with like his troops. As he's running towards
one of the mortar pits, enemy opens up on him.
He gets shot in the foot and jumps into this
(37:46):
mortar pit. He's kind of helping this mortar team work
work the gun and some guy comes running up to
him and it's like, you know, Captain Howard, we have
the Army Chief of Staff is on the radio for you.
And so Howard's like, okay. So he goes back, gets
on the radio and it is General William Westmoreland, who
is the overall commander of all US Army forces, all
(38:09):
American forces in Vietnam, and he says, oh, hey, Bob,
how's it going. And Captain Howard is like, I don't
think it's very good. We need backup. We're under attack.
We're holding him off, but I think we need to
do this and we need to do this. Also, I've
been shot in the foot, but I think but I'm fine,
Like it's gonna be okay. And west Moreland's like, oh,
I was calling to let you know that you're receiving
(38:29):
the Medal of Honor, and so Captain Howard says, that's great,
but I don't think I'm going to be around to
receive it. He does, He receives it. He survives that
battle as well, and in March of nineteen seventy one,
he goes to the White House and he receives his
Medal of Honor, the thing that he was nominated for
three different times. He got the third highest award, he
(38:51):
got the second highest award. Now he gets the first
highest award. President Nixon puts the Medal of Honor around
his neck at a ceremony, and the first thing that
Bob Howard does after he gets the Medal of Honor
is go to the tomb of the Unknown Soldier. And
he says that when I got that medal, I felt
like I was sharing it with members of my family
who sacrificed their lives. So for him, his dad, his uncles,
(39:15):
they had all fought in the war, they had all
fought in World War Two. He talks about some of
the guys that he served with in Vietnam. He says,
you know, I got the medal because people stood for
me as witnesses. But every guy that I served with,
and he can name a.
Speaker 2 (39:28):
Lot of them, they all deserve it. They're all heroes.
Speaker 1 (39:32):
So the Vietnam War ends and Sergeant Howard is wounded
fourteen times over the course of fifty eight months of combat.
He receives the Medal of Honor, the Silver Star, the
Distinguished Service Cross, eight Purple Hearts, four Bronze Stars, three
Air Medals, four Legion of Merits, seven Army Commendation medicals,
et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and.
Speaker 3 (39:52):
A partridge in a pear tree.
Speaker 1 (39:53):
Yes, he is very, very highly decorated. And as I've said,
like there's probably a lot of stuff that we don't
even know about, and he couldn't wasn't eligible to be
cited for it.
Speaker 3 (40:05):
Yes, this is the tip of some iceberg. We don't
know how big.
Speaker 1 (40:08):
Yes, exactly. After the war, he stays in the Army.
He's becomes a company commander in the seventy fifth Ranger Regiment.
He does Special Forces training near Fort Bragg. He trained
Randall Sugart, who, like I said at the beginning, was
the Delta Force guy who got the Medal of Honor
during Blackhawk Down, one of the Delta Force snipers who
was trying to hold off the crash site of one
(40:29):
of the Blackhawks. He also received two master's degrees.
Speaker 3 (40:33):
What were they in? Were they in badassology and I
don't know, some other.
Speaker 1 (40:37):
Subjects badassology and like kicking ass? Yeah, No, they were
like very He went to Central Michigan University and he
got two master's degrees in management and public administration. Bob
Howard goes on. He appears in two John Wayne movies.
He does a parachute jump in the Longest Day, which
must have been pretty cool because his father and his
uncles all did parachute jumps during Normandy.
Speaker 3 (40:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (41:00):
Yeah. And then he appears as an airborne instructor in
the movie The Green Berets, which he was an airborne
instructor for Green Berets, so that was probably a pretty
easy role for him.
Speaker 3 (41:09):
To play type casting.
Speaker 1 (41:10):
Yeah exactly. I don't want to get pigeonholed, you know,
into these roles. They did a parade for him in
New York City in nineteen eighty six. They gave him
the key to the city, and in nineteen ninety two
he retired after thirty six years of service. He was
a full bird colonel at the time, and then after
his retirement he did a lot of great work with
veterans and he also worked at the National Medal of
(41:32):
Honor Museum in Arlington, Texas. He's a living exhibit, yes exactly,
and he knew a lot of the people that in
the video I saw he was doing a little tour
of the museum, and he's like, I trained this guy,
I worked with this guy. I knew this guy. It's
just he is American military history. He had four kids,
five grandchildren, and despite suffering fourteen wounds in Vietnam, he
(41:56):
lives to the age of seventy and dies of pancreatic camp,
which sucks. Is unrelated to all of the bullets and
gunshots that he that he receives. Yeah, he passed away
in February of twenty ten.
Speaker 2 (42:08):
But Robert L.
Speaker 1 (42:10):
Howard for being the most decorated American soldier of Vietnam,
we don't Nobody really talks about him.
Speaker 2 (42:16):
There's not a bunch of movies about him.
Speaker 1 (42:18):
He's not a household name like Sergeant York would be
or Audie Murphy, but great.
Speaker 2 (42:22):
American war heroes.
Speaker 1 (42:24):
So yeah, I thought, really awesome, badass story that I'm
very happy I finally get to tell.
Speaker 3 (42:30):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (42:30):
Well, I hope you guys enjoyed that. And I think
that's all we have for today and we will We
will see you in the next on the next episode.
Thanks so much as always for listening, and we'll see
you then, see.
Speaker 3 (42:42):
You badass of the Week is an iHeartRadio podcast produced
by High five Content. Executive producers are Andrew Jacobs, Me,
Pat Larish, and my co host Ben Thompson. Writing is
by me and Ben. Story editing is by Ian Jacobs,
Brandon Phibbs, and Ally Lamer. Mixing and music and sound
(43:06):
design is by Jude Brewer. Consulting by Michael May. Special
thanks to Noel Brown at iHeart Badass of the Week
is based on the website Badass Ofthweek dot com, where
you can read all sorts of stories about other badasses.
If you want to reach out with questions ideas, you
(43:26):
can email us at Badass podcast at Badass oftheweek dot com.
If you like the podcast, subscribe, follow, listen, and tell
your friends and your enemies if you want as We'll
be back next week with another one. For more podcasts
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