ONE
"Run Towards
Your Problems"
The preteen boy was panting heavily as he reached the porch of his family's modest, whitewashed wood-frame house. Sitting atop a hill inside the little town of Opelika, Alabama, the Howard home was accessed by a single road that led back into town to the school campus.
Bob Howard was relieved. For five straight days, he had successfully evaded several older boys-the school bullies-who lived downhill from his family. Bob's family was dirt-poor, and good things rarely came to him. But he was proudly sporting a new pair of tennis shoes. The shoes were not brand-new, but they were new to him. The bullies had taunted him at school, promising that he wouldn't be keeping them for long.
As grade school let out each day, Bob decided his only chance to avoid a fight was to utilize his speed. He was physically fit, and running was something that had always come naturally to him. As he neared the neighboring homes of the boys, Bob broke into a full sprint. He was only lightly sweating as he outraced them up the hill and reached his home. Once again, he had dodged the older boys.
The boys shouted jeers and went on their way as Bob reached the porch. He was surprised when his Granny Callie appeared from around the corner of the house. Only later did he learn that she had been secretly spying on him each day as he ran up the hill away from the bigger boys.
Callie Elizabeth Bowen Nichols, a petite woman in her early fifties, was a tough-as-nails, no-nonsense person. With Bob's parents struggling to make ends meet and with several small children in the Howard home, she had long been a big help for the family. Callie's husband, Virgil, had passed away in 1938, leaving her with two children to raise. In 1939, when Callie's daughter, Martha, gave birth to her first child, Callie was still raising her own seven-year-old son, Virgil Wesley Nichols. Once Virgil was old enough to strike out on his own, Callie devoted her time to helping her daughter raise her own large family in Opelika. Her grandson Robert, known as "Bob," was the oldest, followed by his sister Betty Jean ("Jeannie") and younger brother Charlie, who was known as "Bo." Three other Howard children-Frances, Judith, and Steve-were still too young for grade school, and Martha was pregnant again. Martha's husband, Charlie, was rarely home to assist with the kids.
Callie helped tend to the little ones and instilled values and morals in the older Howard kids. Bob Howard would always remember his Granny Callie as a devout Christian; she was one of the few positive role models young Bob and his eldest sister, Jeannie, had. She taught the two children how to read from the Bible and empowered Bob with the drive to make something of himself. The Howard kids respected their Granny Callie. So it was no small matter when she grabbed young Bob by his ear.
"Boy, what have you been running from?" she said.
Between gasps for breath, Bob began relating his story. Callie waved him quiet with her hand. She was not a fan of fighting, but she knew that her grandson would not be able to avoid conflict through the rest of the school year.
Granny Callie stared into his bright blue eyes. "I'd better never catch you running from something ever again," she said. "If you're going to run, you best run towards your problems, not away!"
"Yes, ma'am," he said.
Her succinct advice would stick with Bob Howard through the rest of his life.
The following day, Bob tied up his new shoes and headed off to school. That afternoon on the way home, he steeled his nerves as he approached the homes of the older boys. When he was confronted by the Opelika bullies, he looked them straight in the eyes. He did not run up the hill.
Granny Callie wasn't sure what to say at first when her grandson arrived home. His clothes were dirty and torn and he was sweaty. His face, arms, and fists had scratches and bruises. Young Bob didn't offer many details on how well he had stood his ground. He merely smiled and pointed at his feet.
He was still wearing his new sneakers.
Robert Lewis Howard was born on July 11, 1939, in Opelika, Alabama. His parents were young and struggled to make ends meet in their little community. Opelika, the county seat of Lee County, was located a hundred miles southwest of Atlanta and only twenty minutes from the Georgia border. Opelika was chartered as a town in 1854; its population in 1939 was just greater than six thousand souls.
Robert's father, Charlie C. Howard, had been born in Lee County in 1920 to Barney Howard and Nettie Brown. One of seven kids, Charlie was raised in a poor farming family who rode out the Great Depression in Alabama. During World War II, Charlie and his three brothers-Barney, Palmer, and Homer-each enlisted or were drafted into the U.S. Army and fought for their country. All returned home, although Palmer Howard was wounded in action in the Mediterranean Theater in the spring of 1944. Charlie married Martha Nichols, who gave birth to their first son, Robert Lewis Howard, before she reached the age of fifteen.
By the time Charlie Howard enlisted in the Army in 1944, he and Martha had two more children, Betty Jean and Charles Howard Jr. Their marriage would eventually produce seven kids. During the war, Martha Howard helped provide for her growing family by working at a local textile mill. Oldest son Robert and some of his siblings helped work the farm and pick cotton in their youth while attending grade school in Opelika.
Charlie Howard was a hard-drinking, unpleasant man after he returned from the war. He became a taxi driver for a local company where others from his family worked. His long work hours and bouts with alcohol left little time for raising his kids.
As Bob reached his teen years, school was far from the most important thing in his life. He was powerfully built and athletic and involved in football and other sports, but he had a larger purpose-to escape from Opelika, blaze his own trails, and avoid ending up like his father.
Bob remembered that when he was a young boy, people delivered government-assistance milk and cheese to his home. Although the family was dirt-poor, he was impressed that his Granny Callie always managed to help provide for the Howard boys who had gone off to war. She would pack one-gallon syrup cans full of homemade cookies to ship overseas.
Callie instilled a strong sense of patriotism in her grandchildren. "She taught me in a simple old way to appreciate my country and the love of our country," Bob later recalled.
"Every time you see the American flag, you see freedom, liberty, and Almighty God," she told her grandson. This belief would remain with Bob Howard throughout his life. Another was "Never have hate in your heart."
During high school, Bob worked for the same taxi company as his father. He served as a "taxicab starter" and as a dispatcher, sending out cabbies for patrons who had requested a ride. The thirty dollars per month he earned was enough to convince him that he did not need to finish high school. Like many other teenage boys in prewar America, he quit school to help provide for his family. But by 1956, Bob returned to school long enough to earn his high-school-equivalency diploma.
When Howard turned seventeen on July 11, 1956, he already had a plan for his escape from Opelika. The U.S. Army base at Fort Benning, Georgia, near Columbus was only a forty-five-minute drive from Opelika. As a little boy, he had seen young paratroopers marching past his home. Standing by the roadside, Bob had marveled at their khaki uniforms and the glider patches some wore on their hats and shoulders.
As he approached his seventeenth birthday, he had become convinced of a new purpose.
I'd like to be a paratrooper, he thought. I want to jump out of airplanes.
TWO
Airborne
Charlie Howard was furious. His oldest son, Bob, had just earned his high-school-equivalency diploma in June 1956. But one evening in July, Bob returned home and announced to his father that he had met with an Army recruiter and was interested in enlisting. Since he was only seventeen, he would need a parent's approval-and his father didn't approve. Charlie wished for his son to take a regular job and avoid the hell of war that he had endured.
Charlie's hot temper flared, and he stormed down to the recruiter's office to berate him for more than an hour. Once Charlie cooled down a few days later, Bob was able to change his father's mind. He enlisted on July 20, 1956, a little more than a week after his birthday.
Bob Howard's Basic Army training commenced at Fort Jackson, South Carolina. Originally created in 1917 as Camp Jackson when the U.S. entered World War I, the facility was reactivated for World War II as one of the country's largest training bases. Howard learned further skills at the Advanced Individual Training (AIT) school at Fort Gordon, Georgia. Powerfully built, Bob did not find Basic to be overly challenging.
"I was in good shape, physically," he recalled. "It was a lot of harassment, hollering and screaming, and making you do push-ups and physical things. I enjoyed firing the weapons. It was not difficult." The hardest part for Howard was seeing fellow recruits who were not in shape struggle with the physical demands and the mental challenges. For him, the most rewarding part of his months of training was coaching the weaker ones in his platoon. "I kinda catered to the underprivileged," he remembered.
Standing six feet tall and weighing 170 pounds, he was by nature a gentle man with a warrior's heart. Years later, some would say he resembled the actor Clint Eastwood, with his sardonic smile, chiseled features, and blue eyes. His stern look was often enough to turn away a challenger, but those who knew Bob well understood that he would give all to protect another in need.
During his Basic training, Howard became friends with Stephen Day from Spokane, Washington; the twenty-one-year-old had been drafted around the time that Bob volunteered to go into the Army. During one of their liberties, Howard took his buddy Steve back to Opelika with him to visit his family. He introduced his friend to his younger sister Jeannie, and the two soon became an item They later married and would live together for thirty-one years until Steve passed away in 1990. Although Howard and his brother-in-law Steve would not spend time together in combat, they would remain very close friends throughout their military careers.
At Fort Gordon, Howard found that weapons and ammunition were somewhat scarce during the Cold War era. During drills, he was often issued only a wooden weapon. For firing practice, Bob and his squad mates were given the semiautomatic M1 Garand rifle, which had been used since before World War II. "They gave us only three rounds of ammunition to zero our rifles," Howard recalled. "The ones that had good weapons and could qualify with two rounds, we passed the ammunition to guys that couldn't qualify with three rounds." The Garand would be replaced in March 1958 by the selective-fire M14.
Howard endured rough treatment throughout Basic. But thanks to the morals instilled in him about the military and patriotism, Bob never argued with his sergeants, even when called on to pick up trash and cigarette butts around the base, mow grass, or pull KP duty. He never complained, even when the first boots he was issued were too large for him and his first uniform was untailored. He learned to improvise and overcome every challenge.
The Army offered three square meals a day, a far cry from his years as a poor boy in Opelika, when hot meals were not taken for granted. Upon graduation from AIT in 1957, Private Howard was assigned to Fort Hood, Texas, near Killeen. Located about halfway between Waco and Austin, Fort Hood initially comprised more than a hundred fifty-eight thousand acres and could billet more than eighty-eight thousand officers and men.
By 1954, the U.S. Army III Corps had made Fort Hood its headquarters, where officers supervised the training of combat units. (During Bob Howard's time at the base, perhaps the most famous trainee to come through was one Elvis Aaron Presley, already a rock and roll and movie star before being drafted.) Howard spent 1958 and 1959 alternately engaged as a powerman, an automobile maintenance helper, and a power generator operator with the 53rd Signal Battalion and later with the 54th Signal Company. Although this work was not a combat military occupation specialty (MOS), Bob's previous experience with the taxi company helped guide his early assignments. He soon rose in rank from private to private first class up to specialist fourth class (pay grade E-4).
But there his progress would stall for several years. His enthusiasm waned, and his dream of becoming a paratrooper did not materialize. Finally, one of his sergeants advised him sternly, "You're going to get kicked out if you don't show that you can be mature." Bob wanted to be promoted, so he decided it was high time to lay off having fun and drinking too much and become a family man.
One young lady whom he had met at the local dance hall had caught his eye. Her name was Tina LaRuth Dickenson, a twenty-one-year-old brunette. Tall, slender, and attractive, she pronounced her first name "Tie-nah." Bob learned that she was a local girl who lived in nearby Temple, Texas, where she had been raised by her parents, Rufus and Emma Mae "Molly" Holley Dickenson. Like Bob, she had not yet found the right person, but she seemed ready for a change in her life.
Bob explained his desire to change his ways and become serious. "I need to marry somebody," he said. "You want out?"
Although his proposal was blunt, Tina saw a future with Bob Howard and agreed that they should get married. Their wedding in Bell County on March 21, 1959, was simple, but their union was solid. Bob moved from the bunkhouse to married quarters at Fort Hood, and the change seemed to motivate him.
When his initial enlistment expired, Bob traveled to Montgomery, Alabama, in early April 1959 after his honeymoon and reenlisted in the U.S. Army for six more years. He listed his job occupation as "professional soldier," and he was now more committed than ever to provide for his wife and future family.
Copyright © 2024 by Stephen L. Moore. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
