1Sgt. Robert L. Howard

Me and Pat discuss the most-decorated American soldier of the Vietnam War, First Sergeant Robert L. 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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Episode Transcript:

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 zip through the dark brush around him from every direction, the pops and cracks of AK-47 snapping from unseen positions lit only by the moon and the occasional red-orange burst of explosives. The Green Beret Sergeant has already been shot several times, and is so wounded he can barely walk. His hands, riddled with shrapnel from a claymore mine, function just well enough for him to squeeze the trigger on his rifle to return fire on an enemy that closes in on him from every direction

Of the 37 men that had deployed on this mission with him, only six are left. They aren't certain of how many North Vietnamese are approaching, but they estimate the number in the hundreds.

Bleeding, exhausted, and running low on ammunition, Sergeant Howard gets on the radio with command. He requests an airstrike. When they ask for the coordinates, he gives them his current position.

He 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.

Ben [00:00:00] Hello and welcome back to the Badass of the Week podcast. My name is Ben Thompson, and I'm here, as always with my co-host, Dr. Pat LaRoche. Pat, how's it going today?

Pat [00:01:54] It's going okay. How are you? I'm doing.

Ben [00:01:56] Okay. I'm doing okay. I've got my get my assortment of beverages here that I like to have when I'm when I'm recording.

Pat [00:02:04] What is your libation of choice?

Ben [00:02:06] 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 whiskey sodas. So I eat a little bit of of liquid courage to to get on here and try to record and to to, you know, perform. I guess that's a thing that I 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 that's good. What do you what do you drink when we when we do.

Pat [00:02:41] These kind of along the same lines, you know, a little bit of liquid courage, something to take the edge off. I've got a Guinness 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 my mug here, I've got Earl Gray 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.

Ben [00:03:11] Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's not too far from what I'm doing here. We've got a drink and a got a caffeine and a and an alcohol. That's not so bad. There's this distiller called Jefferson Jefferson Reserve, and they make a they make bourbon, but they make it in kind of the older style, the way that, like, you know, all those founding fathers were big, you know, whiskey makers. George Washington, I think 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.

Pat [00:03:47] Yeah. Yeah.

Ben [00:03:50] 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 in the future. And it's nice and I enjoy it. Yeah. Today I'm going to 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 had survived crazy battles and, you know, great hero who charge to this bunker with machine guns and he kill 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. Robert L Howard. He's not to be confused with Robert E Howard, who's the dude that wrote. CONAN But if the shoe fits, it fits.

Pat [00:04:38] So, Ben BEN do you mean the dude who wrote CONAN O'Brien or the dude who wrote CONAN the Barbarian?

Ben [00:04:44] Robert E Howard wrote CONAN the Barbarian.

Pat [00:04:47] Just keeping it straight.

Ben [00:04:48] Robert 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 Columbia, a little bit of Columbia. And he he is like, pretty funny. I heard him. I heard him talk a little bit and he and he's got a bit of a sense of humor to him, as I imagine most battle hardened soldiers might. So he's the most decorated soldier of Vietnam, of 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 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 there, 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 13 month period. He trained Randall Gordon, who was the Medal of Honor winner, who who was one of the Delta Force snipers that his story is famous from Black Hawk Down, one of those two Delta Force guys that was defending one of the crash sites, Black Hawk Down, during the Battle of Mogadishu. And he also appeared in a couple of John Wayne movies because why not? So let's get into it. Greatest American war hero of Vietnam. 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 Louis Howard. He was born July 11th, 1939, in Opa-Locka, Alabama. He was only two years old when his father was drafted to fight in World War One. In 1941, 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.

Pat [00:06:46] Oh, wow. Yeah, well, that's rough.

Ben [00:06:48] So Five Brothers is kind of saving Private Ryan deal, right? Like the five brothers go and one comes back. Yeah. Robert Howard, he goes by 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 1956, he enlists in the Army at age 17, 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 80% 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 the family serve. 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 cut. What if you told if you saw a picture of this guy in civilian clothes, you'd say, this guy is probably a Green Beret, which he was. He's got this commanding voice with this pretty thick Alabama accent. But when he talks, it sounds like a drill instructor when this guy talks. There's there's video on YouTube of him 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 of command. So he makes it up to sergeant pretty quickly. So he enlists in 1956 and in 1956. There's not a ton happening in the Korean War's over. World War Two is over. And Vietnam hasn't begun yet. So when Vietnam starts, he's among the first waves to go over. He goes over in 1967. So he's already a nine year veteran. He's an experienced soldier. He's a sergeant in 101st 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 C-130 aircraft. But in the old days, you got on a boat and it was a 17 day voyage across the Pacific on a troop ship that was loaded up to double capacity. And to listen to Bob 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 it's packed so full of people that you have to everybody had to stand up to eat because there wasn't place for everybody to sit in the cafeteria or the mess hall.

Pat [00:09:25] Wow.

Ben [00:09:25] Or the galley, I guess it's called a galley on a ship.

Pat [00:09:28] Yeah, Galley.

Ben [00:09:29] 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.

Pat [00:09:35] Do you think they did that deliberately? Just like to get the troops ready and raring to go.

Ben [00:09:40] Just. Just make this ship so miserable that you really just run off the boat? It even if there's a machine guns waiting for you.

Pat [00:09:49] What's facing him there? Like, for real? Like, we're joking about machine guns, but what's actually facing him?

Ben [00:09:54] Well, there was a chance that they were for real going to do that, right? It's like he goes over on a big ship, but then he transfers to a landing craft. I mean, think D-Day, right? And he is being deployed to, like, help like form a beachhead in South Vietnam. So they were preparing to be coming out into combat like basically Omaha Beach style. It didn't happen. 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 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 feel 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 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 is 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 they establish this beachhead and they create this kind of camp out on the on the beach. Had a little base there to help establish the American presence here. 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 fire base. But what happens is, you know, the North Vietnamese weren't waiting for them on the beach, but they did launch a counterattack 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 like within the first couple of nights that Bob Howard is in charge and 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 job and he falls backwards into a pit with a dead body next to him.

Pat [00:11:41] Oh, yeah.

Ben [00:11:42] And he's so wounded that he can't move. He can barely, like, function. So he lays there for 3 hours next to this dead body before someone finally finds him and gives him medical attention. So that's a rough awakening. That's that's a rough introduction to the Vietnam War for Sergeant Howard here also. So it's the first of the 14 wounds that Howard will receive in Vietnam. And it leaves him with this really bad ass looking scar, honestly, like he's got this pretty solid, like cheek scar from where he got shot through the jaw by an AK 47. And you know that that carries some weight. I think it definitely it definitely adds a level when you look at pictures of this guy, he wears his bad ass on the outside, you know? Yeah. So he goes to the hospital and he's recovering. And while he's in the hospital, he decides he wants to volunteer for the Special Forces. Of course he does. Right. So he goes, he goes to the Special Forces, and when he gets out, of course, he's tough enough to pass the the training he gets. He gets put into the fifth Special Forces Group, and he's part of a group that trains South Vietnamese recon units, a long range recon patrol, which is hard work. Right? You're scouting the enemy positions. You are going out into unmapped areas and drawing the map of where the bad guys are. And 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 in the middle of nowhere. So that's kind of what this guy is training people to do as part of this, as part of this unit. Later on in 1967, he's a he's a team leader for Four Recon and he is part of this group called I don't know if there a way to pronounce this acronym. Give it a.

Pat [00:13:17] Try.

Ben [00:13:18] Yeah, I'm going to try it. I would say Mack v SOG, Military Assistance Command. Vietnam Studies and Observations group, which sounds very innocuous. It sounds like.

Pat [00:13:28] A bunch of people doing data entry at desks or something.

Ben [00:13:31] Right. Yeah, exactly. It sounds like it sounds like three dudes in ties with, like Buddy Holly glasses.

Pat [00:13:38] Slide rules. Sorry.

Ben [00:13:39] Yes. Slide rules. And and, you know, sitting at these computers, typing up and looking at pictures of things, but.

Pat [00:13:49] But maybe with a very, very large mainframe somewhere in the building.

Ben [00:13:53] Yes, exactly. Exactly.

Pat [00:13:55] I look at these letters and I'm calculating plays in Scrabble, honestly.

Ben [00:14:02] I mean, Mac v SOG is probably pretty solid Scrabble word, I'd imagine. So he is in the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam Studies and Observations group, which, like we said, sounds innocuous, but it is actually like front line Green Beret reconnaissance stuff sort of thing. He was training the South Vietnamese for 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 Minh Trail.

Pat [00:14:35] Search and destroy. Also look for missing personnel.

Ben [00:14:38] Yes. Yeah.

Pat [00:14:39] As part of their portfolio. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. He's fucking shit up on the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

Ben [00:14:43] Yes, Fucking shit up on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. That's kind of his job is to create chaos in Laos. Chaos in Laos?

Pat [00:14:49] No chaos in. Carlson laughs. Yeah, No, but we're not at war with Laos, right? No.

Ben [00:14:56] 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 Howard 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 effective at reinforcing the Vietcong in the south. He could bring weapons into the guerrillas that were 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. Right.

Pat [00:15:38] Or the supply line is.

Ben [00:15:40] Right, Exactly. Cambodia was we're looking at the Khmer Rouge. We're looking at Pol Pot. Right. And he's got strong ties to China, which the Vietnamese had strong ties to the Soviet Union, were backing a lot of their stuff. And the Chinese, we didn't really want to involve them if we could help it. So we we didn't want to make the Cambodians mad because that brings China into it. There's a whole thing with this, 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, 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 Chi Minh Trail. And that's where one of the first actions that he becomes famous for happens. It's on November 12th of 1967. 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 canopy jungle was so difficult to operate in and there's a lot of we're using a lot more helicopters than aircraft to deploy to deploy soldiers. So he is very famously like insanely brave.

Pat [00:17:12] You don't say.

Ben [00:17:13] 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 short period of time, he's only there with with 30, 30 dudes. Right. He's got 30 guys with him. He's a sergeant. He's pretty He's a first sergeant, I believe, at this point. So he's a little bit more what are the more senior sergeants? And they drop into this area and the Vietnamese, the North Vietnamese are waiting for them. The Americans are outnumbered probably 10 to 1.

Pat [00:17:53] So we're talking like 300 dudes.

Ben [00:17:55] We're talking to around 300 guys. We're talking a battalion which at.

Pat [00:17:58] Least.

Ben [00:17:58] Anywhere between 308 hundred guys.

Pat [00:18:01] Yeah.

Ben [00:18:02] So that's what the reconnaissance is there for, is to kind of figure out what we're looking at. And and when they landed, they realize they were very seriously outnumbered. And this was this is be a problem. But because of the jungle and because the insertion and extraction is very difficult, sometimes these people would 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 the initial ambush. And over the course of the next week, they are doing their reconnaissance mission, trying to scout enemy positions and there 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. He's ambushed three separate times. And on all three times, he kind of rallies his guys to to fight off the attacks and drive back the enemy and then gets them out of there before the enemy can regroup and come back at him. 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 their morale, starting to break. He's 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 team is going to come. They're going to send a rescue helicopter to pull these guys out of here because they're surrounded. They're in big trouble. 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 and 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. This just not super encouraging. So go to Sergeant Howard do She sprints 150 yards across an open field through AK 47 machine gun fire to pull the pilot and the crew members out of the burning helicopter before it explodes. Wow. Then drags them back to his position, yet gets them a weapon and is like, okay, you're here, you're here, you're here. We're going to have to hold this position until the next helicopter shows up.

Pat [00:20:08] Wow.

Ben [00:20:10] 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 on to the extraction helicopters until every other guy on his team is is on board. So he's the last guy out and he was the first guy in. And for all of these actions combined to 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 counterattack, 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 awarding Medal of Honor is to.

Pat [00:20:54] Oh, for stuff in.

Ben [00:20:55] Battles that happened in Cambodia. Yeah, which it's possible that's where this was. So they give him the Silver Star, which is which is the third highest award.

Pat [00:21:04] Still no slouch.

Ben [00:21:05] Yeah. Yeah. Star is a big award, right? It's a it's a big medal. It's the third highest medal you can get for bravery in combat. But that's what. 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.

Pat [00:21:22] This guy is like he's the quintessential badass.

Ben [00:21:25] 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 on to 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 12th, 1967, lasted about a week, so he gets extracted in November 19, 1967. Next time he is cited for bravery, 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 21st, 1968, Sergeant Howard is attached to a joint South Vietnamese and U.S. force that's recording enemy positions along the Laotian border. I mean, like I said, the document trail runs through Laos. You could get on a high ground that's probably in Vietnam and look down at them and recon without being in too much trouble. So he was doing that.

Pat [00:22:16] And yeah, sure you can. Sure. He was in Vietnam. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, anyway, I'm interrupting.

Ben [00:22:23] He is recounting 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 in to aid Viet Cong forces in the south. It's 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 a year and a half now. They've been fighting. They've seen tons of combat. His guys are as good as they get, Right. 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 sides. 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 see that he shoots somewhere between 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. But then there's a bunker around the edge that has a heavy machine gun on it, and it opens up machine gunfire everywhere. There's a couple of positions there. They're all firing at the Americans and the South Vietnamese. They have to take cover. Well, one of the machinegun 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 on his back. He gets up, he's bleeding out of his forehead. He might have been unconscious for an indeterminate period of time while he was laying on his back. He doesn't remember, but he gets up. He sees this machine gun that's firing at the rest of his guys. And there's a sniper up in the tree that shooting at them. And so Sergeant Howard, with gunshot wound to the head, decides I'm going to keep going by myself. All the rest of my my men have taken cover somewhere else, but I'm not quite sure where they are. So he decides he's going to going to 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 on that bunker using his radio. This guys just like one man army, right?

Pat [00:24:44] Yes.

Ben [00:24:46] And the airstrike comes in close up that other bunker that he saw. He goes over there to make sure everybody inside of its dead. They're not all dead. 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. He had to go finish the job himself. If you want a job done right.

Pat [00:25:15] Do it yourself.

Ben [00:25:16] Got to do it yourself. Apparently. I wish. 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 down by a third enemy machine gun position from a heavy bunker. He then gets a a portable anti-tank weapon and uses that to destroy that third bunker.

Pat [00:25:45] Let's just let that sink in. Okay?

Ben [00:25:46] 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 up three hardened enemy machine gun positions. He has singlehandedly 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 in Laos. So he might not have technically is supposed to have been there in the first place. Here 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. No. This is the thing that he's the most famous for. None of this is his Medal of Honor action. Hasn't happened yet.

Pat [00:26:29] Wait. There's more.

Ben [00:26:30] There's more. And we're going to get to it right after this. Okay, we are back and we are talking about Sergeant Robert Howard, the most decorated American war hero of the Vietnam War. We have already followed him from Tuscaloosa, Alabama, to the shores of Vietnam. He's been shot in the face. He's been shot in the head. He's been badly wounded. He's received a Silver Star for pulling some guys out of a burning helicopter. He's received the Distinguished Service Cross for destroying three enemy machinegun bunkers with grenades, a pistol, a rifle and an anti-tank weapon. But now we're going to get to the thing that he's most known for, which is none of those other things I mentioned. So we are in December of 1968, which is only a month after that distinguished service cross action that we had just talked about. He's a first sergeant and is operating in the Centum region. I'm sure my Vietnamese pronunciation is very poor there. So there was another group from the Special Forces that are Mac v SOG that was out there operating along the border, and one of the American soldiers had been captured, believed captured. He was wounded. And 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 Sergeant 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 40 or so Americans and South Vietnamese that are going in on this search and rescue mission. But they are going in against somewhere between three and 500 North Vietnamese are there waiting for them in ambush, in defensive positions with heavy weapons. And the second these guys hit the ground, they're under attack. He gets off on the landing zone. He's under attack from every direction. The helicopter gets shot down and he's kind of disoriented. The mission is 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 a fight. We got to get uphill. We got to get to the high ground. We've got to get out of this ambush. They're waiting for us to trap. And he is taking the lead. He's running first, of course, as he does. It's him in this lieutenant who was the commanding officer of the unit. And they're going up through the forest. 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. Howard believes that it was a Claymore mine, which is a big explosive that's full of like pellets, like thick babies and a bunch of babies attached to an explosive that it blows up and it just sprays babies out towards you.

Pat [00:29:30] Oh, that sounds nasty.

Ben [00:29:32] Is probably not very fun to be blown up by a Claymore mine. I'm not going to lie.

Pat [00:29:36] Yeah.

Ben [00:29:36] He gets knocked down, he loses his weapons, he's blinded, and his hands are messed up. Oh, yuck. 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 of the explosion, but also from all the blood that's running down his face. He can't really work his hands and he can't feel his legs. He hears a sound and he smells something flammable liquids and fire. And he's hearing the sounds of gunfire happening all around him. 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 blow his hands up and you 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 bad as Vietnam War heroes. He pulls out a grenade and he pulls the pin on it.

Pat [00:30:52] Even though his hands are still messed up. Probably.

Ben [00:30:54] Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Barely can work, buddy, but he gets a grenade out. He makes eye contact with this flamethrower. A guy pulls the pin on the grenade, and you can hold a pin. Like, once you pull the pin on a grenade, you can hold it and it won't blow up. It's when you when you let go of it, like the timer starts. So he's holding the grenade. He's looking at this guy. He had that grenade and the flamethrower guy decided, I'm not going to mess with this. I'm not going to flame this guy and then get blown up by a grenade. So he leaves.

Pat [00:31:22] What happens to the grenade?

Ben [00:31:24] He throws it at the guy after the guy leaves.

Pat [00:31:26] Okay. Okay. You pull the pin. You've got to you know, you got to do something.

Ben [00:31:31] Yeah. He throws it at the guy. The guy walks away because this is the Robert Howard and that's how he rolls. Oh, 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 is hurt pretty bad. Not that Howard's not, but this lieutenant's also hurt pretty bad. And he's calling for a medic. That's not going to come. Howard is bleeding profusely. Very close to being dead. But he can't leave this guy there. He gets up and grabs this lieutenant, and he starts dragging him back down the hill. They were going to high ground. They're not going to make it. He doesn't have the strength to carry this guy uphill. But to hear how we're talking about it, this guy was like six four. So he's a big dude. It 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 the ambush, but they've formed this very, very small perimeter. He drags the lieutenant down there. There's the sergeant there in this 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 is paralyzed by fear, watching half dead. Robert Howard pull this wounded lieutenant down the hill. Howard looks at the sergeant and says, Give me a hand with this guy. Sergeant doesn't do anything. Howard says, Fine, 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 his pistol. It's a 45 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 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, which he does. 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 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 15 to 20 bullets. Go into his leg and his back and his side. Oh, and he goes down again. Of course, he's shot 15 times at the same time. And when he comes back to you again, it's been another indeterminate time gap. But he's 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.

Pat [00:34:10] And wasn't there a lieutenant involved somehow? Yes. Is lieutenant still in the picture?

Ben [00:34:14] So the lieutenant's nowhere to be seen and the medic is working on Howard. And Sergeant Howard's like, hey, is that lieutenant alive? And the medic says, Yeah, he's still alive, but I don't think he's going to make it. And Sergeant Howard says, You make him make it. You keep that lieutenant alive and. I mean, I got goose bumps when I heard him say that line. And in the video I was watching of him talking about this.

Pat [00:34:39] Yeah.

Ben [00:34:40] 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 alive person that you've got that's able to fight. I want to talk to him right now. And so the medic does 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. He's like, all right, here's what we're going to do. We're going to establish a perimeter. You're going here, you're going here, we're going to fight these guys or we're going to die trying because we're stuck here. Give me a radio. I need to talk to command. Give me air support for the next 4 hours. They are under constant attack. It was 37 guys. It gets down to two. Only about six survive this engagement. Then, like, it kind of all culminates in this big attack. Like it becomes nighttime. The North Vietnamese launch a huge attack on them. He's on the radio. He sets up 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. We need help. But he's listening on the radio and they can't get they can't get help in. They can't 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 napalm. Here's the coordinates. And the enemy starts to close in.

Pat [00:36:13] Wait a minute. When you say he says, give me napalm, etc.. Does he mean like he wants them to get the supplies to him?

Ben [00:36:19] No, he wants them to drop them on his general location. Ha! 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 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.

Pat [00:36:57] Of course he does.

Ben [00:36:58] He lives. He's one of the six guys that make it out of there. Well, 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. I don't know.

Pat [00:37:18] You can't answer every question.

Ben [00:37:19] I can, but I tried. He gets nominated for the Medal of Honor for this. Of course.

Pat [00:37:24] Does he get it this time?

Ben [00:37:25] 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 them. He gets shot in the foot and jumps into this 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 U.S. Army forces, all 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 them off. But I think we need to do this and we do this also. I've been shot in the foot, but I think I'm with him. But I'm fine. Like it's going to be okay. And Westmoreland's like, Oh. I was calling to let you know that you're receiving the Medal of Honor. And 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 1971, 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 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, they had all fought in the war. They'd all fought in World War Two. Yeah, 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 lot of them. Yeah, they all deserve it. They're all heroes. Yes. So the Vietnam War ends and Sergeant Howard is wounded 14 times over the course of 58 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 Merit, seven Army Commendation Medals, etc., etc., etc..

Pat [00:39:52] And a partridge in a pear tree.

Ben [00:39:53] 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 he wasn't eligible to be cited for it.

Pat [00:40:05] Yes. This is the tip of some iceberg. We don't know how big.

Ben [00:40:08] Yes, exactly. After the war, he stays in the Army. He becomes a company commander in the 75th Ranger Regiment. He does Special Forces training near Fort Bragg. He trained Randall Sugar, who, like I said at the beginning, was the Delta Force guy who got the Medal of Honor during Black Hawk Down, one of the Delta Force snipers who was trying to hold off the crash site of one of the Blackhawks. He also received two master's degrees.

Pat [00:40:33] What were they in? Were they in better theology? And I don't know some other subject.

Ben [00:40:37] Bad ass ology 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 peers into John Wayne movies. He does a parachute jump in the Longest Day, which must have been pretty cool because his his father and his uncles all did parachute jumps during Normandy.

Pat [00:40:59] Yeah. Yeah.

Ben [00:41:00] 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 to play.

Pat [00:41:09] Typecasting?

Ben [00:41:10] Yeah, exactly. You don't want to get pigeonholed, you know, into these roles. They did a parade for him in New York City in 1986. They gave him the key to the city. And in 1992, he retired after 36 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 Honor Museum in Arlington, Texas.

Pat [00:41:34] He's a living exhibit.

Ben [00:41:35] Yes, exactly. And he knew a lot of the people that he in the video I saw, he was doing a little tour of the of the museum. And he's like, I train this guy. I worked with this guy. I knew this guy. I think just he is American military history.

Pat [00:41:49] Yeah.

Ben [00:41:49] He had four kids, five grandchildren. And despite suffering 14 wounds in Vietnam, he lived to the age of 70 and dies of pancreatic cancer, which is unrelated to all of the bullets and gunshots that he that he receives. Yeah, he passed away in February of 2010. But Robert l Howard, for being the most decorated American soldier of Vietnam. We don't nobody really talks about him. There's not a bunch of movies about him. He's not a household name like Sergeant York would be or Audie Murphy. But yeah, great American war heroes. So. Yeah, but really awesome, badass story that I'm very happy I finally get to to tell. Yeah, well, I hope you guys enjoyed that. And I think that's all we have for today. And we will, uh, we will see you on the next, on the next episode. Thanks so much as always for listening. And we'll see you then.

Pat: Badass of the Week is an iHeart radio podcast produced by High Five Content. Executive producers are Andrew Jacobs, Pat Larash, and Ben Thompson. Writing is by Pat and Ben. Story editing is by Ian Jacobs, Brandon Fibbs and Ali Lemer. Mixing and music and Sound 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 BadassoftheWeek.com, where you can read all sorts of stories about other badasses. If you want to reach out with questions or ideas, you can email us at badasspodcast@badassoftheweek.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.