Vietnam pilot third from Chattanooga post to wear Medal of Honor

The highly maneuverable, heavily armed AH-1 Cobra attack helicopter made its combat debut in Vietnam, boasting a lethal combination of miniguns, rockets and missiles.

With room for only two crew members, the Cobra wasn’t meant to extract troops, but Army 1st Lt. Larry Taylor pulled it off the night of June 18, 1968. Responding to a call for air support from a long-range patrol (LRP) team surrounded by North Vietnamese troops, the pilot and his wingman held off the enemy for more than a half hour before learning a rescue plan with a UH-1 “Huey” had been canceled. Low on fuel and out of ammunition, Taylor decided he’d get the four men out on his gunship – something never attempted. Landing under heavy fire, he gave them just enough time to grab onto the Cobra’s rocket pods and skids, then flew them to safety. 

On Tuesday, President Joe Biden awarded the Medal of Honor to Taylor in a ceremony at the White House, 55 years after the pilot jeopardized his own life to save his fellow soldiers from certain death. Taylor is the 33rd Tennessean to receive the nation’s highest military award for valor, and the third from American Legion Post 14 in Chattanooga.

“I just did what common sense told me to do, and it worked out,” said Taylor, 81, who left the Army in 1970 with the rank of captain. 

On Sept. 11, Taylor will be honored with a Patriot Day and “Welcome Home” parade, organized by the Charles H. Coolidge National Medal of Honor Heritage Center, Hamilton County, the city of Chattanooga and the Chattanooga Area Veterans Council. The parade will include a flyover of Vietnam-era Cobra and modern-day Apache helicopters, and Taylor will lead as grand marshal with the Army’s 1st Infantry Division Mounted Color Guard and Band.

The Chattanooga American Legion post has been home to three Medal of Honor recipients: Army medic Desmond Doss, who rescued 75 wounded men at Okinawa; Charles Coolidge, who led a group of inexperienced and outnumbered soldiers in a standoff against German forces in 1944; and now, Taylor.

“We’re tickled to death,” said Carl Levi, a retired Tennessee Army National Guard brigadier general and former Post 14 commander. “I’m proud to have known them all and called them friend.”

Taylor’s Medal of Honor presentation concludes a six-year effort led by Dave Hill, 75, the LRP team’s last living member, to upgrade the Silver Star award the pilot received for his actions. In 2017, Hill wrote to then-Sen. Bob Corker, requesting help. A long back-and-forth of correspondence with Army Human Resources Command followed, with Hill eventually succeeding in tracking down Taylor’s co-pilot, Chief Warrant Officer J.O. Ratliff, for a second witness statement. Once the Army Board for Correction of Military Records was satisfied it had “new, substantive, and relevant information” not known to Taylor’s command at the time of its award decision, its recommendation for an upgrade went to the Pentagon for approval.

“Nothing happened fast during this process, nor should it have,” said Hill, a member of the Nevada American Legion. “This is a high honor, and the Army’s very particular about who gets it.”

On July 7, Biden called to congratulate Taylor, who insisted – as he has, repeatedly – that he was just caught doing his job. 

“I told him, ‘Now, Mr. President, I thought you had to do something specific and extraordinary to receive the Medal of Honor,’ and he said, ‘I’ve read your 201 file. Believe me, you qualify.’” 

A graduate of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Taylor was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Army Reserve in 1966. He completed the armor officers basic course at Fort Knox, Ky., before deciding he’d rather fly. Taylor trained as a helicopter pilot at Fort Wolters, Texas, and Fort Rucker, Ala., where he qualified as an aviator in 1967. He was assigned to one of the Army’s first Cobra companies in Vietnam.

Serving with D Troop, 1st Squadron, 4th Cavalry, 1st Infantry Division, Taylor flew over 2,000 combat missions in UH-1 and Cobra helicopters. He was engaged by enemy fire 340 times and forced down five times. According to the Army, Taylor was awarded more than 50 combat decorations, including 43 Air Medals, a Bronze Star and two Distinguished Flying Crosses. 

As Cobra pilots, “we were on scramble status 24 hours a day,” he said. “You’d refuel, rearm, go find a shady spot and maybe sleep for 30 minutes. The horn would go off and there you’d go again. I never flew a mission in my underdrawers and flip-flops, but I was pretty close.”

Taylor needed just two minutes to be in the air and en route – including the night he flew to support Hill’s team near the hamlet of Ap Go Cong, northeast of Saigon. 

While on a reconnaissance mission, the four soldiers – team leader Bob Elsner, assistant team leader Hill, grenadier Bill Cohn and radioman Gerald Patty of F Company, 52nd Infantry (LRP), 1st Infantry Division, call sign “Wildcat 2” – had inadvertently walked into a North Vietnamese Army (NVA) staging area. Using their night vision scope, they saw the closest enemy troops were just 50 meters away, and that they were surrounded. “It doesn’t look like we can get out of here,” Elsner said. “We’re going to have a fight.”

Moving to a corner of the rice paddy, the team radioed for gunship support and emergency helicopter extraction. Soon, they saw the running lights of two Cobras a klick or two to the north, heading their way.

Taylor and his wingman, Capt. Roger Trickler, put a “steel curtain” around the team, making low-level attack runs and keeping them from being overrun. During the battle, the two gunships fired 152 rockets and nearly 16,000 machine-rounds at enemy positions. 

“They just blew the hell out of everything around us,” Hill said. “Every time the enemy moved, they got rockets and minigun fire.”

Told by division senior officers that the team had been trained to “escape and evade,” Taylor did a quick recon and saw that their only viable E&E route was littered with ambush sites. 

“If they’d have gone north, they’d have been captured,” he said. “If they’d have gone south, they’d have drowned in the river. They were carrying Prick-25 radios. How many people do you know who can swim with a 25-pound weight around their neck?”

So Taylor improvised. He directed Trickler to fire his remaining minigun rounds along the team’s western flank and return to base camp; he fired his own remaining rounds along their eastern flank and switched on his landing lights to draw the enemy’s attention. Finally able to break out of the encirclement, the four soldiers bolted to a new extraction point Taylor had designated.

The gunship was on the ground for just 10 seconds. Elsner and Patty hugged the starboard-side landing skid; Hill and Cohn jumped up on the rocket pods.

“We were riding backwards, like Aladdin on his magic carpet,” Hill says.

Taylor flew the men to a water treatment plant in friendly territory, where they clambered off to catch a glimpse of their savior – a helmeted head on the other side of a cockpit.

“We got in front of his ship, pulled off a salute, and he was gone,” Hill said.

Thirty years passed before Hill actually met Taylor, at a 1st Infantry Division Long Range Patrol-Ranger reunion in Branson, Mo. “It was great to finally see him and express our gratitude,” he said. “He’s been to at least half our reunions since 1999. He’s become part of us.”

Had Taylor not taken the action he did, he and his teammates would certainly be dead, Hill said. Down to their last magazines, they had only their KA-BAR knives to defend themselves. In fact, they learned later that an additional NVA company had been headed to Ap Go Cong to bolster the unit attacking the LRP team.

Moreover, Taylor put himself in grave danger. His helicopter took 16 bullet strikes, and he expended all his ammo and nearly all his fuel to give the team time to find a way out. When that failed, he scrapped procedure and became their way out.

“He’s always had a kind of ‘aw shucks’ attitude about it, but what he did was above and beyond the call of duty, and certainly at the risk of his own life,” Hill said.

It surprised Hill to find out that Taylor’s command hadn’t nominated him for the Medal of Honor. After the war, the story of the pilot’s unorthodox rescue spread, making its way into books, newspapers and even Army Ranger School curriculum. Support grew for upgrading Taylor’s Silver Star.

Popular demand, however, isn’t a factor in Medal of Honor recommendations. And rarely will a military board be convinced that the chain of command made an error.

That’s what retired four-star Army Gen. B.B. Bell said when asked to join the team trying to get Taylor the Medal of Honor.

“I’ve dealt with dozens of awards for heroism in my leadership role in the Army, and my first thought was, ‘I’ve heard this before,’” said Bell, who serves as chairman of the National Medal of Honor Heritage Center’s advisory board and is a member of Chattanooga Post 14. “The zeal to ensure proper recognition of every veteran who served and performed a valorous act can sometimes lead to a desire to elevate awards to perhaps a higher level than the evidence would suggest. So I kind of pushed back on these guys for a while. Then I got a call from Dave Hill. No longer was it a secondhand story.”

Knowing the Army needed information that was not available to Taylor’s chain of command in 1968, Bell began looking at the larger picture: the chaos and intense combat of the Tet Offensive, the stationing of Taylor’s and Hill’s units, and – crucially – the death of the Big Red One’s commander in a helicopter crash three months after Taylor’s actions. As division commander, he would have been the one to recommend Taylor for the Medal of Honor.

What clinched it was the realization that Hill and his teammates were never interviewed about their rescue. 

“The Army never questioned the truth of the stories, but it assumed all along those stories were documented,” Bell said. “They weren’t. It was a matter ultimately of not ferreting out so much new information but writing it down properly, certifying it was true and correct, and showing how it could not possibly have been available to the chain of command.”

Hill calls Bell “the spark plug we needed,” but Bell gives full credit to Hill for refusing to give up until the man who saved his life – and the lives of his teammates – was properly recognized.

Chris Dooley, a retired Air Force colonel and commander of Chattanooga Post 14, has long supported the push to award Taylor the Medal of Honor. He met him 10 years ago, through the Military Officers Association of America, and describes Taylor as someone “who makes sure everybody has a chance to contribute and is taken care of as a member of his group. He’s very generous that way.

“It’s a great honor for Post 14 to now have three Medal of Honor recipients, but I think Larry is also a reflection of the Chattanooga community and the patriotic spirit we have here in this area.”

Having met Taylor many times, Bell said he’s “a normal guy from East Tennessee who went off and served his country and got caught up in something that’s important to warriors,” which is brotherhood. 

“He couldn’t go back to base camp knowing he hadn’t done everything he could to try to save those men. It’s either go in and die with them by landing or fly away and turn your back on them. The answer was easy for Larry. He put his life on the line, went in, and saved their lives. God knows how he got away with it.”