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Army Sgt. Robert M. Patterson, Medal of Honor recipient.
Episode 2777 of the Vietnam Veteran News Podcast will feature a story about Army Command Sgt. Maj. Robert M. Patterson and his Congressional Medal of Honor award. The featured story comes from The U.S. Department of Defense website and was titled: Medal of Honor Monday: Army Command Sgt. Maj. Robert M. Patterson. It was submitted by Katie Lange, a writer for the DOD.
Lang, in her story, reported that for a lot of military heroes, actions taken in battle are carried out without thinking, and they’re sometimes hazy afterward due to the fog of war. For Army Command Sgt. Maj. Robert Martin Patterson, the actions that earned him the Medal of Honor during a firefight in Vietnam had to be reiterated to him because he couldn’t remember most of it.
She further reported that Patterson was born in Carpenter, North Carolina, and raised in nearby Fayetteville, near Fort Bragg. He had four sisters and an older brother. The family was poor, so at an early age, Patterson helped as best he could by working on the family’s tobacco farm, where he said he plowed fields using a mule because they didn’t have tractors.
During his last year of high school in 1966, Patterson dropped out to join the Army. He was initially placed with the 82nd Airborne Division before being transferred to the 101st Airborne Division’s 17th Cavalry Regiment in August 1967 in preparation for a tour in Vietnam. The unit deployed that December.
“The platoon sergeant being shot is the last thing I remember. Everything else is just a blank blur,” Patterson said in his 2003 Library of Congress interview. “The next thing I knew, it was 5 o’clock that afternoon, and I was in a 500-pound-bomb crater.”
Listen to episode 2777 and discover more about Army Command Sgt. Maj. Robert M. Patterson and his Congressional Medal of Honor award honors.
