Robert Howard enlisted in Alabama in 1956 and spent fifty-four months in combat in Vietnam — more than four years of a war that broke men in twelve. He served with the 101st Airborne, then with the 5th Special Forces Group, and finally with MACV-SOG: the Studies and Observations Group, the cover name for the cross-border reconnaissance teams that operated in Laos and Cambodia where American forces were not supposed to be.
He was nominated for the Medal of Honor three times in thirteen months. The first two were downgraded to a Distinguished Service Cross and a Silver Star — not because the actions were smaller, but because the citations would have had to say where they happened.
The third stuck. On 30 December 1968 he was a platoon sergeant on a mission to find a missing American in Cambodia when the company walked into a battalion-sized force. Howard was blown off his feet by a mine or a grenade, his weapon destroyed and his hands mangled, and he woke to find his lieutenant lying wounded in the open and a North Vietnamese soldier walking the line with a flamethrower. He could not hold a rifle, so he used a pistol; he could not walk, so he crawled, dragging the lieutenant to cover. For three and a half hours he directed his platoon's defence and the air strikes around it from the ground, refusing extraction until every other man was aboard.
In total he was wounded fourteen times in those fifty-four months and holds eight Purple Hearts. Along with the Medal of Honor he was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, a Silver Star and four Bronze Stars — a combination that has led more than one historian to call him the most decorated American serviceman of the modern era.
He stayed in the Army for thirty-six years and retired a colonel. Afterwards he spent his time visiting wounded soldiers in hospitals, and went to Iraq and Afghanistan repeatedly in his sixties to do the same for the new generation. He died of pancreatic cancer in 2009 and lies at Arlington.
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