Obituaries
Capt. Larry Taylor, Medal of Honor recipient, dies at 81
Staff and wire reports
January 30, 2024
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)
(Tribune News Service) — Larry Taylor, who received the Medal of Honor in September for his daring 1968 helicopter rescue during the Vietnam War, died Sunday at his home in Tennessee, according to a news release from the Congressional Medal of Honor Society.
Taylor, a retired Army captain and Chattanooga native, was 81. A cause of death was not released.
Taylor served in Vietnam from August 1967 to August 1968. He flew more than 2,000 combat missions in the UH-1 and Cobra helicopters with the 1st Squadron, 4th Cavalry, 1st Infantry Division. He concluded his military service in 1971 as a captain in the 2nd Armored Cavalry in what was West Germany at the time.
As a first lieutenant, Taylor led a rescue mission in 1968 to save a small group of soldiers trapped in a rice field by enemy troops.
“I was doing my job. I knew that if I did not go down and get them, they would not make it,” Taylor said in August.
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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)
Taylor got a call on the radio about a four-man unit in trouble. He and another pilot each took a Cobra helicopter and went out looking for the team. Taylor wasn’t certain he would be able to find them because it was such a dark night, he said. But using radio equipment and direction finders, Taylor was able to spot them.
Taylor instructed the four soldiers to mark their location with flares. Using the flares as a reference point, Taylor and his wingman strafed the North Vietnamese positions with multi-barreled rotary machine guns and rockets. They attacked the enemy troops for nearly 30 minutes, 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 unit’s 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.
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.
President Joe Biden presented Taylor the medal — the military’s highest honor — at the White House on Sept. 5.
“When duty called, Larry did everything he [could]. Because of that, he ended up saving four families for generations to come,” Biden said during Taylor’s Medal of Honor ceremony in September. “That’s valor. That is our nation at its very best.”
Taylor’s remains will be buried at the Chattanooga National Military Cemetery, near those of other Chattanooga-area recipients Charles Coolidge and Desmond Doss, retired Army Gen. Burwell “B. B.” Bell, who worked on the petition to get Taylor the medal, said in a news release.
“Larry’s mission on this earth is now over and he is forever safe and indeed home in God’s forever attack helicopter base camp,” Bell said.
Contributing: Stars and Stripes reporter Matthew Adams; the Chattanooga Times Free Press.