The Most Dangerous Green Beret
December 30th, 1968. Somewhere in Laos, Robert Howard hits the ground. His platoon is surrounded before they take 10 steps. A claymore mine detonates. The blast takes his sight. His hearing both hands, his weapon disintegrates. He can’t see, can’t hear, can’t walk, can’t shoot. But he doesn’t stop for three and a half hours.
Blind and bleeding, he holds the line. This is the story of the most decorated American soldier since World War II. A man nominated for the Medal of Honor three times in 13 months. A man wounded 14 times who refused to die. Robert Lewis Howard and the secret war that tried to kill him. Robert Lewis Howard was born July 11th, 1939 in Opaikica, Alabama.
His father and four uncles were paratroopers in World War II. His father died in the war. So did several uncles. Howard grew up hauling cotton in the fields, working textile mills, building what he later called a mule tough constitution. On July 20th, 1956, one month after high school graduation, he enlisted in the United States Army.
17 years old, following ghosts, Howard completed airborne school at Fort Benning in 1959. He became a parachute rigger, a pathfinder, a professional infantryman with the 101st Airborne Division. His first tour in Vietnam came in 1965. conventional warfare, search and destroy missions with battalionsized sweeps through the jungle.
During that tour, he took a bullet to the face, a ricochet that required reconstructive surgery. While recovering in a field hospital, a special forces officer saw something in him, recruited him for the Green Berets. That decision changed everything. To understand what Howard did, you need to understand where he did it.
MV SOG Military Assistance Command Vietnam Studies and Observations Group. The name was a cover. This wasn’t a study group. It was a joint unconventional warfare task force that reported directly to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Their mission crossber operations into Laos and Cambodia. The Ho Chi Min Trail ran through both countries, neutral nations.
The US couldn’t legally invade them with conventional forces, but SOG could go in. Small teams, sterile uniforms with no identifying marks, non-standard weapons, plausible deniability. Howard was assigned to command and control central headquartered in Koumb. CCC was responsible for the triber region, the most heavily defended sector of the Ho Chi Min Trail.
SOG operations came in two types. Reconnaissance teams, two to three Americans, four to six indigenous troops. Intelligence gathering. Stealth was survival. hatchet forces, platoon-sized elements, 20 to 40 men, direct action, raids, ambushes, rescue missions. Howard led hatchet forces. The force ratios were staggering.
SOG teams were routinely outnumbered 50 to1, sometimes 100 to1. Survival depended on superior violence of action. Hit so hard in the opening seconds that the enemy was stunned. then escape or call in air support. The worst part was the politics. If you were captured in Laos, the US government would deny you existed. No official rescue, no acknowledgement.
You operated in the denied areas, and if you died there, your family might never know where or why. This was the world Robert Howard chose repeatedly. Five tours of duty, 54 months of combat, more time in contact with the enemy than almost any American soldier in the war. November 21st, 1967. Sergeant Firstclass Howard leads a hatchet force into the border region.
The mission, locate and destroy an NVA cache site. The insertion is cold, quiet. Then they find it, a massive bunker complex. Before they can initiate the assault, the jungle explodes. A reinforced NVA battalion 10 times their size. The lead element is pinned down. Casualties mount immediately. Howard sees the problem.
A sniper in the canopy. Precision fire freezing his unit’s movement. He moves to a vantage point. exposed. Every NVA soldier is shooting at him. He engages the sniper, kills him. The suppression breaks. The primary threat remains. A fortified machine gun bunker. Howard charges it. As he approaches, a second gun opens fire from the flank. Crossfire.
He crawls forward, silences the second gun with a fragmentation grenade. NVA reinforcements remmanand the first bunker. Howard retrieves a light anti-tank weapon from a fallen soldier. Stands up amid the hail of bullets, fires the rocket. The bunker disintegrates. A grenade explodes near him. His uniform sleeve catches fire.
A round hits his chest plate. Blunt force trauma. Can’t breathe. He’s on fire and suffocating. He keeps crawling. reaches his wounded radio man, drags him to cover, takes the radio. Howard calls in air strikes, A1 Skyraiders, Napalm and high explosives 20 m from his own position.
Danger close doesn’t begin to describe it. The earth shakes, the jungle burns, the NVA assault waves shatter. Howard’s actions met every criterion for the Medal of Honor. His chain of command nominated him, but the mission was in Laos. The US couldn’t officially acknowledge ground combat there. Awarding the Medal of Honor required a public citation.
With the location, that would constitute a diplomatic admission. The award was downgraded to the Distinguished Service Cross. Politics over valor. November 1968, it happens again. Howard’s hatchet force is sent to relieve a besieged recon team. The insertion helicopters approach the landing zone. Intense anti-aircraft fire.
The helicopter can’t land without being destroyed. Howard leaps from the hovering aircraft, hits the ground, immediately provides suppressive fire. His troops dismount, reach the woodline. The fighting continues for 9 days. 9 days. Howard is wounded by shrapnel on day three. FI and shoulder grenade blast. He keeps fighting.
On November 19th, an army medevac helicopter attempts to extract casualties. Heavy machine gun fire strikes the aircraft. It crashes in open terrain, catches fire. The crew is trapped. Howard sees it. Despite his wounds, despite the enemy fire sweeping the open ground, he sprints 150 m to the burning wreckage, forces the cockpit door open, drags the injured pilot to safety.
moments before the fuel tanks explode. Once again, nominated for the Medal of Honor. 9 days of sustained combat, multiple wounds, heroic rescue under fire, once again downgraded. Silverstar, third highest award for valor because the battle was in Laos. December 30th, 1968. Private First Class Robert Sheran is missing.
He was on a recon team that got ambushed, badly wounded, separated during extraction. SOG Doctrine demanded no man be left behind. Howard volunteers to lead the hatchet force. The mission, find Sheran and bring him home. The NVA anticipates the rescue attempt. They set a massive L-shaped ambush around Sheran’s last known location.
Howard’s platoon lands, moves off the landing zone. a claymore mine or a volley of grenades. The command element is decimated. The explosion destroys Howard’s weapon, takes his sight, his hearing. His hands are blown up and burned. Shrapnel riddles his legs. He can’t walk. He’s blind, deaf, weaponless.
Through the blur, Howard sees First Lieutenant James Jerson, his platoon leader, lining exposed, grievously wounded. Howard crawls toward him. He reaches Jerson, begins first aid. Then a round from an AK-47 strikes an ammunition pouch on Howard’s belt. The pouch contains 20 round magazines 5.56 mm. The bullet detonates the magazines.
The explosion blows Howard several feet away, shreds his lower body with brass and lead fragments. Most men would go into shock, bleed out. Howard later described his mental technique, turning fear into math, focusing entirely on the tactical problem, blocking out the pain. He crawls back to Jerson, drags him to the perimeter. The platoon is leaderless, on the verge of annihilation.
Howard moves from position to position, dragging himself through the mud. Can barely see, can barely hear. He encourages the indigenous troops, distributes ammunition, reorganizes the defense. He calls for Broken Arrow, the code for a unit in imminent danger of being overrun. It authorizes all available aircraft to divert to his support.
He directs air strikes on his own position, stripping away the attacking NVA infantry with Napal and high explosives. For 3 and 1/2 hours, Howard holds the perimeter, blind, bleeding, crawling through the fighting positions. The extraction helicopters finally break through. Howard refuses to leave. He supervises the loading of Jerson and the other wounded.
He’s the last man on the bird, firing a borrowed 45 caliber pistol to keep the enemy at bay as the helicopter lifts off. Lieutenant Jerson died of his wounds. Robert Sheridan was never found, but Howard’s actions saved the rest of the platoon. March 2nd, 1971, President Richard Nixon presents Robert L. Howard with the Medal of Honor.
The official citation lists the location as Republic of Vietnam, a fabrication necessary to protect the classification of the secret war. Howard later noted the citation contained inaccuracies. The witnesses who wrote it were the pilots above, not the men on the ground. The discrepancy between Howard’s 14 wounds and eight purple hearts is significant.
Army regulations award one purple heart per engagement, regardless of the number of distinct injuries. Shot three times in one firefight, one purple heart. Furthermore, within SOG, there was a culture of suppressing minor wounds, a through and through bullet wound to the limb, shrapnel embedded in muscle, injuries that would send conventional soldiers home.
SOG operators treated these with veterinary supplies or whiskey to avoid being medically grounded. Howard’s medical file was a road map of trauma. head wounds, facial reconstruction, torso trauma from rounds hitting his chest rig, multiple gunshot wounds to the legs and arms, hands burned and mangled by explosives. In the Medal of Honor action, medics estimated he’d lost nearly a third of his blood volume before extraction.
His ability to function with these injuries suggests a physiological anomaly, a high pain threshold, a psychological capability to dissociate from trauma during combat. Following the war, the army recognized Howard’s value. December 1969, he received a direct commission from master sergeant to first lieutenant. He spent the remainder of his career training the next generation, company commander in the second ranger battalion, commander of the mountain ranger training camp.
He emphasized the basics, physical fitness, marksmanship, the moral obligation of leadership. He told students, “You fight hard because someone has to.” Howard retired in 1992 as a colonel. His decorations, Medal of Honor, Distinguished Service Cross, Silver Star, four bronze stars for valor, eight Purple Hearts, four Legion of Merit Awards, the most decorated American soldier of the postworld war II era, a statistical designation, a testament to a career defined by sustained highintensity conflict. Robert Howard
died of pancreatic cancer on December 23rd, 2009. He was 70 years old. He maintained the stoicism of a warrior to the end. He was buried at Arlington National Cemetery, surrounded by the few surviving members of the SOG brotherhood. John Striker Meyer, a fellow SOG operator, called him the man the war couldn’t kill.
John Plaster in his book SOG the Secret Wars described Howard’s aggressive defense, the tactic of charging into an ambush to disrupt the enemy’s decision-making cycle. The Montineyard indigenous troops revered him. He treated them with respect, learned their languages, fought alongside them. His willingness to die for them ensured they would die for him.
three times nominated for the Medal of Honor in 13 months. Two downgraded because of politics because the missions were in countries the US wasn’t supposed to be fighting in. Robert Howard fought a secret war, often without official recognition, against an enemy who outnumbered him 100 to one. He was wounded 14 times, blinded, burned, shot repeatedly, and he kept crawling forward.
What drives a man to do this? Not once, but repeatedly for five tours of duty, 54 months of combat, more time in contact with the enemy than almost any American in Vietnam. Howard never glorified it. He simply said, “You fight hard because someone has to.” In the history of the Vietnam War, a conflict often defined by ambiguity and political failure, Robert Howard’s record stands as a monument to individual clarity and purpose.
He embodied the special forc’s motto, Deopresso Liber, to free the oppressed. He was the ultimate practitioner, a soldier who turned fear into math and pain into survival. The man the war couldn’t
