Military Units
The Space Force structure is unique. While it is a separate and distinct branch of the armed services, it is organized under the Department of the Air Force. Its mission is to secure our Nation’s interests in, from and to space.
An Army UH-60M Black Hawk helicopter takes off after extracting Peruvian air force special operators during a training mission as part of Resolute Sentinel 2024 in Lima, Peru, June 11, 2024. Resolute Sentinel is a multinational training exercise that aims to enhance regional security and interoperability among forces from Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, Chile, Brazil, France and the United States.
Army Col. Charles Patrick Murray Jr. spent three decades serving his country, but his most notable contribution came toward the beginning of his career. During the waning days of World War II in Europe, Murray took out dozens of enemy soldiers while trying to establish a position for his platoon along a French valley. He received the Medal of Honor for his fearless actions and leadership.
Murray was born Sept. 26, 1921, in Baltimore, Maryland, to Charles and Florence Murray. He had two younger brothers, William and Donald, and he went by the nickname Chuck.
When Murray was still a baby, his parents moved to Wilmington, North Carolina. He was a member of the Boy Scouts as a child and achieved the prestigious rank of Eagle Scout in 1934.
After Murray graduated from Wilmington’s New Hanover High School in 1938, he spent three years studying at the University of North Carolina before being drafted into the Army in September 1942. After a few months of training, he was sent to officer candidate school and was commissioned as a second lieutenant in 1943.
In August 1944, Murray was deployed to England to join the 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Battalion, 30th Infantry Regiment. A few weeks after D-Day, the division landed in France and started their push east.
By December, Murray’s unit, Company C, had been tasked with securing a hill in Kaysersberg, France. During several days of fighting, the company was able to secure the hill, but several company officers were killed, allowing Murray to move up in the ranks to become company commander.
On Dec. 16, 1944, then-1st Lt. Murray accompanied one of his three platoons on a special mission into enemy territory to keep the Germans from getting in and out of a valley near the hill. In order to do so, they had to descend into the valley along a narrow trail.
During their descent, Murray saw about 200 Germans who were pouring deadly mortar, bazooka and machine gun fire into an American battalion on the crest of a ridge. The men on the ridge couldn’t see the enemy, which was hiding in a position on a sunken road, but Murray could see the enemy’s flank. He didn’t want to risk the lives of his small platoon against such a large force, so instead of engaging, he told his platoon to take cover.
Murray then crawled ahead of his troops to a small vantage point where he could see the enemy before radioing for artillery to bombard them, he said in a Library of Congress Veterans History Project interview. However, his coordinates were a bit off, and the artillery missed. When he went to adjust the range, his radio went dead.
Needing to adjust his options, Murray went back to where his platoon was waiting and grabbed some grenades and a launcher. He returned to where he could see the enemy and fired. The first few shots disclosed his position, so enemy troops aimed all their fire at him as he continued pummeling them with grenades until he ran out of ammunition.
Murray then went back to his platoon’s makeshift outpost, this time grabbing an automatic rifle and ammunition. He once more moved to his exposed position, firing burst after burst at the enemy. One account of the fight said that Murray fired about 2,000 rounds, with the help of two other soldiers who continued to toss him ammunition. He was also able to take out a truck that he later learned was carrying three German mortars.
Murray’s effort killed 20 enemy soldiers and wounded several others. When a U.S. mortar was brought in to help, he directed that fire, leading to about 50 more enemy casualties. The bombardment led to chaos in the enemy’s ranks, and they began to withdraw via a creek.
Calling on his platoon to follow, Murray raced down the small trail into the valley so he could take control of a bridge there and construct a roadblock. Along the way, Murray captured 10 Germans in foxholes. An eleventh pretended to surrender, but threw a grenade when Murray looked away for a second. Murray and several others were injured in the blast.
Instead of allowing his troops to fire on that enemy soldier, Murray took the man hostage. Bleeding profusely by then, Murray kept moving forward until he’d found the right spot for his men to set up the roadblock. Finally, he turned command of the company over to this executive officer before walking back up the steep hill to an aid station. His single-handed attack stopped the enemy in its tracks and enabled his unit to take the valley despite formidable odds.
Murray was hospitalized until after Christmas, when he grew anxious to get back to his troops.
“I found that the wounded troops recovering were being sent to units up north to replace soldiers that had been wounded or captured in the [Battle of the] Bulge area,” he told the VHP. “I didn’t want to go to some unit up north. I wanted to go back to my division.”
So, Murray found a uniform that fit him and hitched a ride on an ambulance to where the 3rd ID was based. He then caught a ride on a ration truck to the 30th Infantry’s aid station before walking toward the hill where he’d last left his men.
“I was a little concerned because there were Germans in the area and I had no pistol,” Murray said. After a while, a Jeep came by and gave him a ride to the battalion command post. He then made his way back to his company’s position, which they held until replacements took over on New Year’s Day 1945.
Murray continued to command Company C for the rest of the war. They became the first Allied unit to enter Munich on April 30, 1945, and continued to push on into Salzburg, Austria, on May 5, two days before fighting ended in Europe.
Murray said he’d learned that February that he had been recommended for the Medal of Honor, but he didn’t think it was going to happen because he was never sent to the rear of his division, which was tradition for Medal of Honor nominees during the war to keep them safe. The young lieutenant said he didn’t know the award was actually going to happen until his wife, Anne, sent him a newspaper clipping that mentioned the medal in June.
During a ceremony at the Salzburg airport on July 5, 1945, Murray received the nation’s highest honor for valor from Army Lt. Gen. Geoffrey Keyes, II Corps’ commanding general.
When Murray returned home after the war, he took some time to finishing his studies at UNC, earning a bachelor’s degree in June of 1946. That September, he returned to active duty. At some point, he also received a master’s degree in international affairs from George Washington University. He and his wife went on to have three children, Charles III, Brian and Cynthia.
Murray made a career out of the Army, serving in various command posts over the following decades, including during the Vietnam War — a war in which both of his sons also served. He retired as a colonel in 1973 after 30 years of service.
His family settled down in Columbia, South Carolina, where Murray then worked for a decade as a senior planner for the state’s Corrections Department. He was known as a humble man who, in his later years, worked tirelessly to promote veterans’ issues and educate students about service to their country.
Murray died peacefully at his home on Aug. 12, 2011, after suffering from congestive heart failure, his family said. He was weeks away from his 90th birthday. The retired colonel is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
In Murray’s honor, two schools were named for him — a middle school in Wilmington and an elementary school at Fort Stewart, Georgia.
This article is part of a weekly series called “Medal of Honor Monday” in which we highlight one of the more than 3,500 Medal of Honor recipients who have received the U.S. military’s highest medal for valor.
Dentistry isn’t the first thing that pops into one’s mind when it comes to sailor and submariner readiness. But having to be taken via medevac off a vessel in the far-flung Pacific Ocean because of an abscessed tooth wouldn’t be the best way for a sailor to get on their commander’s good side.
The Navy’s Dental Corps is made up of about 1,300 active-duty and reserve dentists who are experts in 15 specialties. Their work is necessary to ensure sailors can spend months at a time on deployment without having overt issues that might temporarily derail a mission.
Nowhere is that more evident than at Naval Hospital Bremerton, Washington, and its three health clinics, where personnel delivered dental care to over 12,300 active-duty beneficiaries in 2023, including soldiers and airmen from Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Tacoma, Washington.
“Our mission is readiness, which means we keep sailors and warfighters ready to go … on a moment’s notice,” said Navy Cmdr. Doug Steffy, an oral and maxillofacial radiologist assigned to Navy Medical Readiness Training Command Bremerton. “The goal is to get them to where they will not need any dental services for at least 12 months.”
Steffy is one of only 11 oral and maxillofacial radiologists in the entire Navy — there are even fewer in the Air Force and Army — so he spends a lot of his time reading advanced digital imaging for Bremerton and its clinics, as well as other commands.
“I get scans for the whole Pacific Northwest. It doesn’t matter whether they’re Army, Navy or Air Force,” he said.
Bremerton’s clinics, which Steffy commands, treat only active-duty service members, many of whom are submariners between the ages of 18-24. All of the patients are classified into four groups:
“Our goal is to get everyone to Class 1,” Steffy said.
Within the military, Class 4 is a rarity. Unlike civilians who like to avoid the dentist, service members don’t get that choice.
“We can force you to come,” Steffy said. “You can’t go out to sea unless we say you’re ready.”
That requirement to be seen has helped discover some serious issues early on, Steffy said, such as tumors that patients couldn’t feel growing.
“We’ve had multiple cases of patients coming in and us identifying an abnormal area of their head and neck, their bone, and then doing biopsy follow-up work and catching a truly malignant lesion, cutting it out and solving the problem,” Steffy said. “If they were to wait a few more years, who knows.”
The Navy Medical Readiness Training Command clinics in the Pacific Northwest are able to do great work thanks to advanced digital technology, including computer-aided drilling and milling machines that can print dentures, implants and other dental objects. Root canal and crown procedures, for example, are completed much faster using the tech, and they save a significant amount of money.
“[For a crown], it used to take 10 to 14 days — you’d come in, get the procedure done, we would put a temporary [crown] on you and send you away. You’d come back in about two weeks, and we would cement a final product,” Steffy said. “Now, they can come and be gone in two hours with the final product.”
One notion Steffy would like to dispel: The care provided by active-duty Navy dentists is somehow substandard to that of civilian dentists.
“All of us are trained the exact same way every private practice dentist in the whole world is trained,” said Steffy, who went to dental school at UCLA and did his residency at the University of Texas, San Antonio. “There is no military dental school. … The difference is I’m not trying to sell you a treatment. I’m just telling you what you’re going to get.”
Military dentists keep up with private practice standards and meet the advancements in technology that are found in schools and institutions.
“I’m not licensed by the Navy. I’m licensed by the state of Washington, so I have to maintain the exact same standard as every dentist in the state,” Steffy said. “We’re also subject to the same disciplinary problems. … Actually, we’re probably held more accountable than private practice because we have peer review, which means every month, some other dentist has to evaluate five of my procedures and say, ‘Yes, these are up to the standard of care.'”
Steffy, who’s a married Marine Corps veteran with three children, said his family loves the experiences that come with moving duty stations every few years. But he knows he’s in the minority when it comes to military dentists. He said most who enlist get out after their four-year obligation, so finding capable dentists who are willing to stay in the service is always a priority.
“They’re always looking to move talent up through the ranks and retain good clinicians and people to fill top leadership roles,” he said. “I would encourage people to not be afraid to consider military service, as far as health care goes.”
Steffy said private practice has its downsides, including feelings of isolation and having to maintain a business on one’s own. In the military, however, there are plenty of peer professionals to reach out to for help, advice or to learn a new skill.
“I have direct access to a surgeon, to radiologists, to comprehensive dentists who’ve been doing this for 20 years and we’re not competing with each other for patients or money,” he said.
Another benefit — he’s learned valuable lessons in leadership.
“Mentoring all these different people ages 18-55 and helping us all accomplish our goals together has been rewarding for me,” he said.
As a seven-time American League batting champion and 18-time All-Star for the Minnesota Twins (1967-1978) and the California Angels (1979-1985), Rod Carew is considered a baseball legend.
He also served as a combat engineer for six years in the Marine Corps Reserve, enlisting in 1966.
Combat engineers are proficient at building bridges, demolitions, route clearance and other tasks.
In October 2011, Carew was the guest of honor at a “Character and Courage” celebration in Cooperstown, New York, the location of the National Baseball Hall of Fame, where he was inducted in 1991.
“When I joined the Marine Corps, it was a life-changing event for me because I learned about discipline. When I first came up to the big leagues in 1967, I was a little bit of a hothead. But after two weeks of war games every summer, I realized that baseball was not do-or-die. That kind of discipline made me the player I became,” he said at the celebration.
Following the celebration, Carew traveled to Syracuse, New York, to visit patients at the Syracuse Vet Center, which is run by the Department of Veterans Affairs.
With a career total of 92 home runs and a batting average of .328, Carew cemented his baseball legacy. In 1969, he stole home base seven times, one away from Ty Cobb’s record of eight.
Carew also coached the Angels from 1992 to 1999 and then coached the Milwaukee Brewers from 2000 to 2001.
In the summer of 1977, Carew appeared on the cover of Time magazine with the caption: “Baseball’s Best Hitter.”
In 2004, Panama’s National Stadium was renamed Rod Carew National Stadium. Carew was born in the Panama Canal Zone Oct. 1, 1945.
On Aug. 23, 2024, Carew became a U.S. citizen.
“I’ve always said the U.S. is home, and this is one way to repay this country for what it has done for me. Being able to play baseball gave me the kind of life that I had and that I have today. I’m grateful for the way I was treated, the way people looked up to me and the appreciation of the people I played in front of, wherever I went,” Carew told the Los Angeles Times following his naturalization ceremony.
Carew, 79, lives in Anaheim Hills, California, with his second wife Rhonda and her two children Cheyenne and Devon.
John B. Goodenough, a former soldier, was awarded the Nobel Prize for helping create the lithium-ion battery, used today in a plethora of civilian and military systems, including vehicles, cellphones and laptops.
Their advantages include high-energy output, light weight and long lifespan.
So important are these batteries to the military that the Defense Department published the “Lithium Battery Strategy 2023-2030,” which outlines supply chain security measures of these vital components.
Research for the lithium-ion battery was started by Michael Stanley Whittingham in the late 1970s. Goodenough improved on it in the 1980s and Akira Yoshino made further refinements to the point where it could be produced commercially in 1991. For their achievements, the three shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in chemistry.
The Air Force Office of Scientific Research helped to fund Goodenough’s research.
Besides developing lithium-ion batteries, Goodenough was also on the team tasked with improving memory capabilities in early computers that resulted in the first random-access memory used in today’s computers.
During World War II, Goodenough joined the Army Air Force, training as a meteorologist in Grand Rapids, Michigan. “The Army training, mostly by civilians, was efficient and quite professional,” he wrote in his 2019 Nobel Prize autobiographical sketch.
Upon being commissioned a second lieutenant in the autumn of 1943, he was posted at an air base in Houlton, Maine, a few miles south of a more active air base in Presque Isle, where fighter planes were dispatched to England.
“After two weeks, I found myself in charge of the weather station in Houlton. In those days we drew our own maps and made our own forecasts; there was no satellite and no computer-aided forecast from Washington,” he wrote.
In the summer of 1944, he was sent to Stephenville on the west coast of Newfoundland. Stephenville was the jumping-off base for the cargo B54s flying to either the Azores or directly to England.
These planes also stopped in Stephenville on their way home to Washington, D.C. The B54s had a longer range than the fighter planes. The tactical bombers were dispatched from Gander on the east side of the island.
“Although almost all my forecasts were reasonably accurate, including a clearing of Eisenhower from Stephenville that landed him safely in Paris within six minutes of his estimated time of arrival, a forecast could be dangerously wrong,” he wrote, referring to Army Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, supreme commander, Allied Expeditionary Force.
“As D-day approached, we tried to predict from the weather when the allies would storm the beaches of France. Eisenhower and our forces had bad luck with the strength of the cold front behind which they attacked. We followed closely the battle of the hedge rows and the final breakout across France,” he wrote.
“One December day, civilian pilots flying the B54s were congratulating themselves that they were going to make it home for Christmas. When I refused to clear them for the trip to Newfoundland because a strong headwind from there to the Azores would prevent them from reaching their destination, they set out anyway. Six hours later they were back on base; the headwinds were so strong they had barely cleared the islands,” he wrote.
Goodenough had attained the rank of captain when he was discharged at the end of the war.
Born to American parents in Jena, Germany, on July 25, 1922, Goodenough married Irene Wiseman in 1951. She died in 2016, and he died at age 100, June 25, 2023, in Austin, Texas. They had no children.
The Medal of Honor was created during the Civil War, a conflict that divided the nation and led to the distribution of 1,525 of the new medals to service members for their heroism. Nine of those medals were bestowed upon some of the gunship USS Agawam’s crew members, whose brave actions kickstarted the First Battle of Fort Fisher, in North Carolina.
For most of the Civil War, Fort Fisher saw very little combat, but that changed in late 1864 when the Union wanted to capture the last port the Confederacy held on the Atlantic Ocean.
The first part of the Union plan involved several sailors serving aboard the Agawam. The Agawam itself was undergoing repairs, so its crew was temporarily assigned to take over the USS Louisiana. Their goal: to pack the old steam ship with tons of explosives and use it as a bomb. Union naval leaders planned to blow it up in a move they thought would level part of the fort or at least dislodge its guns.
Late on Dec. 23, 1864, to prevent detection by the enemy, the Louisiana was towed into shallow waters by another vessel, the USS Wilderness. It steamed to within about 200 yards of the beach in front of Fort Fisher.
Once it was in place, the crew lit an elaborate fuse-and-clockwork system and then built fires in the propeller shaft, according to Fort Fisher’s historical website. The commander threw down an anchor with a short scope to make sure the ship got as close to the beach as possible. The men then abandoned the Louisiana and were pulled in a smaller ship to the Wilderness, which sailed about 12 miles from shore, where the rest of the fleet was located.
Unfortunately, an undertow and offshore breeze pulled the Louisiana off its course, according to Fort Fisher’s website. So, when the ship exploded less than two hours after it was abandoned, it caused no damage to the fort.
Fires could still be seen burning there the next day, but the fort’s walls were still standing. The only thing the explosion did was alert the Confederate service members of an imminent attack, which led to a battle that the Union eventually retreated from.
While the Louisiana mission proved to be a complete failure, the nine men who volunteered for it earned the Medal of Honor for their bravery. Those men are:
Of the nine men, only two — Rice and Conlan — were born in the U.S, and all were between the ages of 23 and 31.
All of the recipients received the newly minted Medal of Honor on May 12, 1865, while aboard the renovated Agawam off the coast of New Bern, Connecticut.
Meanwhile, Fort Fisher eventually fell. The Second Battle of Fort Fisher in mid-January 1865 was won by the Union, effectively cutting the Confederacy off from all global trade and supplies. The Civil War ended three months later.
This article is part of a weekly series called “Medal of Honor Monday,” in which we highlight one of the more than 3,500 Medal of Honor recipients who have received the U.S. military’s highest medal for valor.
In 1967, W. Jason Morgan proposed that Earth’s surface consists of rigid plates that move relative to each other, floating on the mantle, which is the layer below the crust. It was a radical idea at the time that later became known as the theory of plate tectonics. His theory was later bolstered by GPS, which can precisely measure plate movements.
Plate tectonics helps explain how mountains, earthquakes, volcanoes and more are formed by the movement of rigid plates floating on Earth’s mantle.
His second great achievement came in 1971 with the publication of his hot spot theory, which describes how plumes of magma from the mantle cause the formation of volcanoes, which may or may not be located on plate boundaries. The theory explains how the Yellowstone National Park hot spot formed in Wyoming, as well as how many islands were formed, including the Hawaiian island chain.
Morgan also served as an officer in the Navy from 1957 to 1959 after graduating from Georgia Institute of Technology on a Navy ROTC scholarship.
During his naval service, he taught nuclear physics and navigation to submariners at the Nuclear Power School in New London, Connecticut. He said the work prepared him to take an interest in physics and geoscience.
NPS is currently located in Goose Creek, South Carolina. According to the Navy, its nuclear program is widely acknowledged as having the most demanding academic program in the U.S. military. Topics include nuclear physics, nuclear reactor technology, metallurgy, thermodynamics and chemistry.
Morgan was born in Savannah, Georgia, on Oct. 10, 1935, to William Jason Morgan, who also went by Jason, and Maxie Ponita “Nita” Morgan. Morgan’s father served in the Army during World War I in France, working as a blacksmith.
On July 31, 2023, Morgan died at age 87 in Natick, Massachusetts. He is survived by his son Jason Morgan, a geophysicist, and his daughter Michèle Morgan, as well as a number of grandchildren.
Army Col. Robert Lewis Howard was a legend for his service in the Special Forces during the Vietnam War. Having deployed there five times, he’s the most decorated soldier to have served in the conflict and is the only soldier to have been nominated three times for the Medal of Honor.
Howard was born July 11, 1939, in Opelika, Alabama, to Charles and Martha Howard. His father was drafted into World War II when he was very young, and his mother worked in a textile mill to aid in the war effort, so he and his sister were largely raised by their grandmother for the first several years of his life.
Howard’s father and one of his uncles were paratroopers in the famed 101st Airborne Division, so he grew up hearing their stories, which inspired him to serve. On July 20, 1956, the 17-year-old enlisted in the Army a month after graduating high school.
For several years, Howard worked his way up the ranks and even earned an associate degree in business administration from the University of Maryland in 1962.
Howard was sent on his first deployment to Vietnam with the 101st, his father’s former unit, in 1965. After being injured in battle, he was recruited to the Special Forces, which he did missions for until his yearlong deployment was finished, and he returned home for Special Forces training. Howard earned the Ranger tab and eventually become a Green Beret.
Howard returned to Vietnam four more times, mostly doing Special Forces work with the top-secret Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, Studies and Observations Group, which ran cross-border operations in Laos, Cambodia and North Vietnam.
On Dec. 30, 1968, Howard, then a sergeant first class, was in charge of a platoon made up of Americans and Vietnamese soldiers who were on a mission to rescue another team of soldiers who were missing in enemy-controlled territory in Laos.
Once a helicopter inserted the platoon at its specified landing zone, the team moved out, only to quickly be attacked by a much larger enemy force. During the initial firefight, Howard was wounded and his weapon was destroyed.
“My hands were all blown up and burned,” Howard said in a 2003 Library of Congress Veterans History Project interview. “And I couldn’t stand up.”
Howard couldn’t walk, but when he saw his platoon leader, 1st Lt. James Jerson, lying seriously wounded in an exposed area, he didn’t hesitate to crawl through a hail of gunfire to get him. As he was trying to help Jerson, an enemy bullet hit one of Howard’s pouches, which detonated several magazines of ammunition and blew him several feet away.
After a few minutes, Howard realized he wasn’t too injured, so, with the help of a fellow sergeant, he continued his mission to drag Jerson back toward the platoon, which was in disarray because of the attack. Howard then rallied the remaining men into a more organized defense.
“I said, ‘We’re going to establish a perimeter right here, and we’re going to fight or die,'” Howard said of what he told the men who remained.
He said he had the platoon put out strobe lights to identify where they were and call in air support, which arrived to help suppress the enemy around them so the team could make it through the night.
“There was a tributary running off a creek …. and so [the enemy] had to come across that little tributary to get to our position and fight,” Howard said, explaining that the waterway helped them to better defend their hastily made position.
For the next few hours, Howard ignored his own wounds and crawled from position to position, helping the wounded and encouraging the other members of the platoon to keep fighting. With the help of air support, they successfully repulsed several enemy attacks and were finally in sufficient control enough to allow a quick landing of rescue helicopters before sunrise.
Howard personally made sure all the men, dead and alive, were loaded onto the helicopters before he got into one himself to leave the bullet-swept landing zone. Sadly, Jerson, who Howard fought hard to save, died on the ride to safety.
“That hurt me worse than being shot up, seeing that lieutenant die,” Howard told the Veterans History Project.
According to Army Special Operations Command, only six of the 37 platoon members survived the battle. If it weren’t for Howard’s bravery, it’s likely no one would have come home.
Howard was evacuated to a field hospital for recovery. He said that’s where he learned that he’d been recommended for the Medal of Honor.
“In a way, I felt bad because I didn’t feel that I was worthy of the Medal of Honor for that action because I was not successful in doing what the colonel had directed me to do, and that was to find the team that had been surrounded and captured or killed by the enemy,” Howard told the Veterans History Project. He said he later learned some of those men survived and were taken as prisoners of war.
Howard remained in Vietnam and, in December 1969, commissioned as an officer after receiving a direct appointment from the rank of master sergeant to first lieutenant. He’d reached the rank of captain by February 1971 when he learned he was finally being sent home from Vietnam to receive the Medal of Honor.
In late February 1971, Howard was flown to Washington, D.C., where his wife, Tina, and two daughters, Melissa and Denicia, joined him. On March 2, President Richard M. Nixon presented him with the nation’s highest honor for valor during a White House ceremony.
“When I received that honor, I felt that I was sharing it with members of my family that had sacrificed their lives in the Second World War,” Howard said, referring to three of his uncles who died in the conflict. “I try to always maintain the dignity and the honor of having it bestowed upon me.”
Howard’s five tours in Vietnam totaled 55 months in combat, which led to him being wounded 14 times. Between 1968 and 1969, during a 13-month period, Howard was recommended for the Medal of Honor two other times. Those recommendations, however, were downgraded. Instead, he received the Distinguished Service Cross and the Silver Star — the second- and third-highest military awards, respectively. Howard earned eight Purple Hearts during his career, along with numerous other honors. According to Army Special Operations Command, he is the most decorated soldier to have served in Vietnam.
Over the next two decades, Howard continued with his impressive career. He received a bachelor’s degree from Texas Christian University in 1973 before earning two master’s degrees from Central Michigan University in the early 1980s.
His years of airborne expertise were also put to good use when he took part in two John Wayne movies, making a parachute jump in the 1962 film “The Longest Day,” and as an airborne instructor in 1968’s “The Green Berets,” according to his Alabama Department of Veterans Affairs biography.
Howard eventually divorced, got remarried and had two more children, Roslyn and Robert Jr., the latter of whom went on to serve in the Army.
Howard retired on Sept. 30, 1992, after 36 years of service. For 14 years after that, he worked for the Department of Veterans Affairs. He also often spoke with students and troops about the importance of service and the fight for freedom. In the 2000s, he was inducted into the Ranger Hall of Fame and the Army Aviation Association of America Hall of Fame.
Howard spent his last few years living in San Antonio. He died on Dec. 23, 2009, at a hospice in Waco, Texas, after suffering from pancreatic cancer. Howard is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
Howard’s name is remembered in various ways throughout the Special Forces community. In 2013, the 5th Special Forces Group headquarters building at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, was named Howard Hall in his honor, and a plaque dedicating the Special Operations Command Korea campus to him was unveiled at Camp Humphreys, South Korea, in 2021.
An overpass along I-85 near Auburn University in Alabama was also named for Howard. In December 2024, a book about his life, “Beyond the Call of Duty: The Life of Colonel Robert Howard,” was published.
This article is part of a weekly series called “Medal of Honor Monday” in which we highlight one of the more than 3,500 Medal of Honor recipients who have received the U.S. military’s highest medal for valor.
From his hometown of Laurel, Maryland, to the forefront of space operations, Air Force Master Sgt. Keandrey Freeman is embarking on a new chapter in his military career as he transitions from his role as the senior enlisted leader of the National Space Defense Center’s Command, Control, Communications, and Computers/Cyber Directorate, to becoming a space operations officer.
Job Title:
Senior Enlisted Leader of NSDC, C4 + officer trainee
Hometown:
Laurel, Md.
Stationed:
Schriever Space Force Base, Colo.
Unit:
NSDC/Space Delta 15
Freeman joined the Air Force in 2012, inspired by a shared commitment to service with his sister, who enlisted just four weeks ahead of him. Their journey began together in basic military training, where Freeman quickly found his calling.
“My introduction to my first unit was, ‘My name is A1C Freeman and I’m going to be an officer one day,'” Freeman reflects.
Starting out as a cyber transport systems troop, Freeman’s career path has been anything but linear.
His extensive experience includes a significant tenure in the combat communications unit in Guam, where he honed his information technology skills, and later, he served five years with the National Reconnaissance Office at Aerospace Data Facility-East located within Fort Belvoir, Virginia.
Freeman then received his first involvement in a space-oriented mission set by directly supporting the Missile Warning Center at Cheyenne Mountain Space Force Station in Colorado Springs, Colo., currently one of five centers under U.S. Space Forces – Space. His role there at the Test Control Flight of the 21st Combat Support Squadron solidified his foundation in the space domain.
My team was able to overcome anything, and I continue to be proud of the great men and women I’ve had the opportunity to serve alongside.”
Freeman officially transitioned into the Space Force, Dec. 20, upon graduating from Officer Training School.
“I’m wearing the blue patches now, but I will officially be a guardian on the USSF birthday, which just happens to be my graduation date,” Freeman said, reflecting on this new identity prior to graduation.
“My selection to OTS comes from those who have supported me,” he continued. “My team was able to overcome anything, and I continue to be proud of the great men and women I’ve had the opportunity to serve alongside.”
In his current role at the NSDC, Freeman recognizes the mission’s critical importance.
“We will fight from above to support our brothers and sisters, and [we] will fight bravely to victory,” he states, highlighting the vital contributions space operations make to the joint fight. “The space and cyberspace domains enable all the rest.”
As Freeman steps into his role as a Space Force officer, he is poised to contribute to the ever-evolving landscape of military space operations.
Freeman credits his strong bonds with his wife Tiffani, their son and their dog Roxas as motivation in his career.
“She’s supportive of everything that I do, and I owe her the world,” Freeman says of his wife.
