Vietnam veteran Larry Taylor tries to hold back tears as President Joe Biden places the Medal of Honor around his neck during a ceremony at the White House on Tuesday, Sept. 5, 2023. (Carlos Bongioanni/Stars and Stripes)
WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden recalled Tuesday what Larry Taylor told him in July when the president called to tell him he would receive the Medal of Honor.
“His response was, ‘I thought you had to do something significant to receive the medal.’ Larry, you sure as hell did something,” Biden told the audience gathered in the East Room of the White House.
Taylor, now 81, was an Army helicopter pilot during the Vietnam War and led a mission in 1968 to save a small group of soldiers trapped in a rice field by enemy fire.
“I was doing my job. I knew that if I did not go down and get them, they would not make it,” Taylor told reporters last week.
David Hill, now 75, was a sergeant with the Army Rangers serving as part of a four-man reconnaissance patrol on June 18, 1968. He said if it weren’t for Taylor’s actions that day, he and the three other men would not have survived.
“Hell, we were dead,” Hill said. “The fortunes of war had turned against us that night.”
Hill’s unit was on a night mission near a village northeast of Saigon when they were surrounded in a rice paddy by a North Vietnamese force of nearly 100 soldiers. The patrol leader could see using a starlight scope that enemy troops were closing in on three sides. But they thought the Vietnamese troops had not surrounded them yet and that they could escape back in the direction that they entered the paddy.
They tried to make it back to a tree line but found they had been cut off, Hill said.
“We were in a Custer-like situation,” he said.
Taylor, who was a first lieutenant at the time, heard of the soldiers’ plight on a radio call. He and another pilot each flew a Cobra helicopter and went looking for the team. Taylor wasn’t certain he would be able to find them because it was such a dark night. But using radio equipment and direction finders, Taylor was able to locate them.
President Joe Biden adjusts the Medal of Honor he just placed around his neck of Vietnam veteran Larry Taylor during a ceremony at the White House on Tuesday, Sept. 5, 2023. (Carlos Bongioanni/Stars and Stripes)
Taylor said the first problem with rescuing the soldiers was poor visibility.
“It’s difficult to support you because I can’t see you and I can’t see the bad guys. I’m afraid if I start throwing some rockets out here, I’m going to kill one of you all,” he recalled telling them over the radio.
Taylor instructed the four soldiers to mark their location with flares, even though they could also pinpoint their location to the North Vietnamese. Using the flares as a reference point, Taylor and his wingman strafed the North Vietnamese positions with multi-barreled rotary machine guns and rockets.
For nearly 30 minutes, the two American helicopters attacked the enemy troops, expending all their rockets and nearly 16,000 machine-gun rounds.
At that point, Taylor directed the other helicopter pilot to fire his remaining machine gun rounds along the eastern flank of the American patrol and then return to base camp. Taylor fired his own remaining rounds along the western flank, using his Cobra’s landing lights to draw the enemy’s attention while the U.S. soldiers moved southeast toward a nearby extraction point that Taylor had designated.
“We were finally able to make a breakout because he directed us to the very weakest portion of the enemy envelopment,” Hill said.
There wasn’t time or room in the helicopter for the four soldiers to get inside the two-seat Cobra. When Taylor moved the helicopter into a close position, the soldiers grabbed onto the rocket-pods and skids.
“They beat on the side of the ship twice, which meant haul ass. And we did,” Taylor said.
Hill, who is the last surviving member of the reconnaissance team, and Taylor became friends following the rescue.
Taylor served in Vietnam from August 1967 to August 1968. With the 1st Squadron, 4th Cavalry, 1st Infantry Division, he flew more than 2,000 combat missions in the UH-1 and Cobra helicopters. He concluded his military service in 1971 as a captain in the 2nd Armored Cavalry in what was West Germany at the time.
Taylor was awarded 61 combat decorations, including the Silver Star, 43 Air Medals, a Bronze Star and two Distinguished Flying Crosses. He also received the Republic of Vietnam Gallantry Cross with the Bronze Star.
Hill started a 7½-year process serving as Taylor’s nominator to get his Silver Star upgraded to the Medal of Honor. He and a couple of his fellow Army Rangers believed the Army and Taylor’s commanders at the time had failed in not getting him the highest military honor.
After two failed attempts with the Army, retired four-star Army Gen. B.B. Bell started working with Hill and the team in 2021.
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Then-1st Lt. Larry Taylor sitting in a UH-1 “Huey” helicopter in an undated photo. After completing flight training, Taylor was assigned to one of the Army’s first Cobra helicopter companies in Vietnam where he served from August 1967 to August 1968. (Larry Taylor and the Coolidge National Medal of Honor Heritage Center)
Bell, who serves as chairman of the National Advisory Board for the Coolidge National Medal of Honor Heritage Center in Chattanooga, Tenn., dealt with the awards process many times during his 29-year career in the military. However, Bell was not sure how much help he would be on Taylor’s case.
“I told him straight up, ‘Dave, I want you to know that this is very improbable … because the chain of command made their decision in 1968. They had all the information,’” he said.
Bell said Hill stopped him in mid-sentence. “Sir, they didn’t have any of this information,” is what Bell recalls being told.
Bell said he was picking himself off the floor when he learned this. The men on the ground involved in the incident were all Army Rangers. Due to the intense combat at the time and the inability to get off the base, the 4th Calvary chain of command was not able to make it to where the Army Rangers were stationed. What the command used were radio reports and a “tertiary back brief” from Taylor and his co-pilot to figure out what happened, Bell said.
“Of course, pilots always talk down their own exploits. They always do,” Bell said. “It was clearly heroic, but it was [the] Silver Star. They had none of Dave Hill’s, or the other patrol members, information. Due to the chaos on the battlefield … the war just kept marching on.”
Bell and Hill worked together to prepare the third submission to appeal the decision to the Army Board for Correction of Military Records, or ABCMR. Bell said it took the ABCMR six months to review the matter and approved upgrading the Silver Star to the Medal of Honor.
Taylor, who lives in Signal Mountain, Tenn., said he is proud to receive the Medal of Honor. But he also said he is most proud that he followed the military motto that he had requested for his Medal of Honor challenge coins that recipients design — “leave no man behind.”
As Biden’s speech began to wind down, Taylor started to tear up as the president mentioned the sacrifice he made in order to save those men.
“When duty called, Larry did everything he [could]. Because of that, he ended up saving four families for generations to come,” Biden said. “That’s valor. That is our nation at its very best.”
