Editor’s note: April 30, 2025, marks the 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon and the end of the Vietnam War. In commemoration, Military Times is highlighting stories about the Vietnam War.
The Vietnam War was marked by an exhausting combination of major operations and small-unit actions. The South Vietnamese communists were well practiced in the latter, but when soldiers of the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) began making their way down the Ho Chi Minh Trail in growing numbers, they brought with them more conventional techniques. Consequently, American troops fighting in “The ‘Nam” had to be ready for Viet Cong guerrilla ambushes or light infantry tactics as practiced by the PAVN — or sometimes both at once, since each enemy force learned from the other.
One consistent doctrine among the communists was the importance of eliminating the enemy’s officers and senior noncommissioned officers. What they did not reckon on, however, was the flexibility with which U.S. Army and Marine personnel replaced their leaders under fire, regardless of rank. One of the more exceptional examples was Sgt. 1st Class Matthew Leonard.
Born in Eutaw, Alabama on Nov. 26, 1926, Leonard attended the racially segregated Avondale School up to 8th grade, followed by the Ullman School in Birmingham. While at Avondale, he met Lois Coates, his future wife, who in an interview with the Birmingham Real-Time News, remembered him “always walking the halls in his Boy Scout uniform.” On the side, he worked at a drugstore, making $15 a week to help his mother pay the bills.
Upon reaching 11th grade in 1947, Leonard joined the U.S. Army and served during the Korean War from 1950 to 1951. After returning stateside, he married Lois and they had five children.
Leonard advanced through the ranks to make master sergeant while stationed in Germany between 1956 and 1957. While there, however, he was demoted to sergeant first class for fighting with another soldier who had addressed him with a racially offensive epithet.
“He never got that stripe back,” Lois said in an interview with Hero Cards.
Returning to the U.S., Leonard was serving as a drill sergeant at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, nearing retirement from the Army, with thoughts of starting his own business and doing a lot of fishing. First, though, he requested a combat deployment to Vietnam.
“He didn’t have to go,” Lois Leonard recalled. “I said: ‘You’re crazy. You ought not to do it.’”
Leonard, however, said that drilling so many boys barely older than his sons to ship out for hazardous duty overseas made him feel a need to apply his years of training to help get them through.
“They need experienced soldiers over there,” Lois Leonard recalled her husband telling her.
On Aug. 31, 1966, Leonard was assigned to 3rd Platoon, Company B, 1st Battalion, 16th Regiment, 1st Infantry Division — famously known as “The Big Red One.” On Feb. 22, 1967, his Company B, under Capt. Donald S. Ulm, was participating in Operation Junction City, an offensive aimed at trapping the already bloodied Viet Cong 9th Division.
On Feb. 28, Leonard’s platoon was conducting a series of 500-meter sweeps through heavy foliage, advancing in a cloverleaf pattern through heavy vegetation near Prek Klok in Tay Ninh Province. The platoon had only advanced 1,000 meters when it came under fire from small arms, automatic weapons, grenades and 60mm mortars.
Among the first Americans picked out and shot by the ambushers were the platoon leader and other key personnel, leaving it to Sgt. Leonard, as the highest ranker still standing, to apply all he’d learned as a drill sergeant to the men he now commanded.
The 3rd Platoon faced the 2nd Battalion, 101st Regiment, PAVN, which had recently come down and attached itself to the 9th Division — not VC guerrillas, but North Vietnamese regulars. They were out on a convoy ambush along Route 4 when they and 3rd Platoon literally ran into each other.
After first contact, PAVN forces tried to assault the U.S. troops, but Leonard quickly evaluated the situation, rallied the troops and drove back the enemy, at least for the time being.
Making the most of a momentary pause in the fight, he directed the redistribution of ammunition and established a perimeter to deal with the next enemy move. As he did, he noticed a wounded soldier beyond the perimeter and was dragging him back inside when an enemy sniper round shattered his left hand. In spite of this, he refused medical attention until all other wounded were taken care of.
During their next attack, PAVN forces set up a machine gun in a good location to sweep the 3rd Platoon’s entire perimeter. The platoon gunner set up an M60 squad machine gun to counter it, but it malfunctioned. Leonard crawled up to help clear it, but the NVA gun crew spotted it and mowed down the M60 team and everyone in its vicinity. In spite of his own wounds, Leonard rose, charged at the enemy position and wiped out its crew. He then propped himself behind a tree and engaged the enemy until he succumbed to his wounds.
After four and a half hours of fighting, PAVN forces disengaged, retreating like its division toward the border of nominally neutral Cambodia, while Operation Junction City proceeded on. The relative skirmish, dubbed the Battle of Prek Klok I (there would be a second) cost B Company 25 men killed and 28 wounded. They found 167 dead NVA in the area, along with 40 captured weapons.
Numerous American survivors subsequently testified that they would probably not have made it through the ordeal had it not been for the leadership of their makeshift commander.
Leonard was 37 years old when he died — just six months shy of retirement from the Army. On Dec. 19, 1968, Lois Leonard received her late husband’s Medal of Honor from Army Secretary Stanley Rogers Resor at the Pentagon, making him the first Black 1st Division soldier to be awarded the medal. Initially buried at Shadow Lawn Cemetery, Leonard was later reinterred in a better-kept resting place at Fort Mitchell National Cemetery, Fort Mitchell, Alabama.
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