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Dear Doug Collins

Leslie H. Sabo Jr.: The Rifleman Who Crawled Toward the Bunker, and the File His Family Never Saw for 29 Years

Leslie Sabo was at the rear of his platoon when the ambush opened at Se San, and he could have stayed there. Instead he charged forward, threw himself over a wounded man as a grenade burst, and then — already wounded, then mortally wounded — crawled straight toward a machine-gun bunker and silenced it with a grenade, at the cost of his own life. His family was told he had been killed by a sniper while on guard duty. They did not know he had died a hero for twenty-nine years, because the recommendation that said so was never processed. This page is the documented record of what he did, what his institution told his family instead, and who found the file.

The service and the promise

Leslie Halasz Sabo Jr. was born in 1948 in Kufstein, Austria, to a Hungarian family fleeing the Soviet takeover after the Second World War. President Obama told the family’s story plainly: they boarded a boat for America, arrived at Ellis Island past the Statue of Liberty, and settled in the steel town of Ellwood City, Pennsylvania. His father, who had practiced law in Hungary, went to night school at forty-three and became an engineer. The family became citizens together when Leslie was a teenager, and, George recalled, his father taught his sons they had a duty to the country that had taken them in.

George called him goofy, a jokester who loved to bowl and shoot pool and never gave his parents any trouble. His company commander, Capt. Jim Waybright, remembered him with a maroon headband and dark glasses: “He might have come across as a little bit of a hippie, but when the bullets started flying, Leslie really came to task.” He graduated from Lincoln High School in 1966, attended Youngstown State University for a time, left school, and worked in a steel mill. He met Rose Mary Buccelli at a high school football game in 1967. When he was drafted in April 1969, Rose Mary begged him to ignore the notice; he refused, telling her his family had been torn apart by communism and he had an obligation to fight it. He trained at Fort Benning, married Rose Mary on September 13, 1969, took a honeymoon trip to New York City on leave in October, and deployed to Vietnam in November 1969 as a rifleman in Company B, 3rd Battalion, 506th Infantry, 101st Airborne Division — Bravo Company, the Currahees.

The promise made to a man like Leslie Sabo is specific: if you do not come home, we will tell the people who loved you the truth about how you died, and we will honor what you did. Sabo kept his half in a clearing in Cambodia, in full view of the men who survived because of him. What follows is how his institution handled its half: a wrong story delivered to a widow and two parents, a recommendation filed and never processed, and twenty-nine years in which the only people who knew the truth were the men who had been there.

What happened — May 10, 1970

What happened at Se San is established by Sabo’s official Medal of Honor citation. On May 10, 1970 — Mother’s Day that year, a date the survivors would remember the fight by — Sabo and his platoon were conducting a reconnaissance patrol in Se San, Cambodia, as part of a secret mission to stop North Vietnamese forces from using Cambodia as a staging ground for attacks into Vietnam, when they were ambushed from all sides by a large enemy force. President Obama, working from the accounts of the men who were there, put the odds at some fifty American soldiers nearly surrounded by some one hundred North Vietnamese fighters: “The enemy was everywhere — in bunkers, behind trees, up in the trees, shooting down.” The citation records what Sabo did next:

Obama added the detail the men who watched it carried for four decades: that Sabo held that last grenade as long as he could, “knowing it would take his own life, but knowing he could silence that bunker. And he did.” Waybright credited Sabo with saving that side of the perimeter and preventing the company from being overrun. The Army’s reporting counts the day’s cost: Sabo and seven other Americans were killed, another twenty-eight were wounded, and the division counted forty-nine enemy killed. The citation’s verdict is narrower and larger at once: “His indomitable courage and complete disregard for his own safety saved the lives of many of his platoon members.”

He was twenty-two years old. Before he shipped out, he had ordered flowers ahead — for his mother for Mother’s Day, and a dozen red roses for Rose Mary’s birthday. His mother’s flowers arrived the day he died. The roses arrived on the morning of his funeral; for one heart-pounding moment, Rose Mary thought there had been a terrible mistake and he must be alive. There had not been. There had, however, already been a mistake of another kind, and it would take twenty-nine years to surface.

What the institution did afterward

The Army told Sabo’s family a different death. Rose Mary learned on May 15, 1970 — after five days in which his letters simply stopped — first that he was missing in action, then that he had been killed by enemy fire on May 10. What the Army told his parents and his brother George, as the Army’s own magazine later reported it, was that Leslie “had been shot by a sniper while guarding an ammunition dump somewhere in Vietnam.” President Obama stated the same account: the Army told his parents, his brother, and “his bride of eight months” that he had been killed by a sniper while on guard duty. It was not a compressed version of the truth. It was a different place — Vietnam, not Cambodia — a different duty, and a different death, with the heroism, the ambush, and the recommendation all absent. His parents went to their graves without the true story; neither lived to see the medal day. For decades, as Obama put it, “they never knew that Les had died a hero.”

The recommendation existed. Sabo’s leaders recommended him for the Medal of Honor after the fight, and Obama credited his buddy George Koziol — wounded himself — with first drafting, from his hospital bed, the citation eventually read at the White House. Then, in Obama’s words, “the paperwork was never processed.” No source in the record explains where the packet sat, who was supposed to process it, or why it was not processed. It simply stopped — in 1970 — and no one in the institution that had written the wrong story to his family ever went back to check it against the one his comrades had filed.

The case survived because a stranger would not leave it in a box. Around Memorial Day 1999 — twenty-nine years after Se San — Alton “Tony” Mabb, a 101st Airborne veteran writing for Screaming Eagle, the division association’s magazine, was researching at the National Archives when an archivist brought him a box of Medal of Honor material. Inside was Sabo’s file: the nomination, maps of the battle, “quite a bit of paperwork,” as Mabb told the Army. He knew the recipients from that period, and Sabo was not among them. Mabb asked the Archives for copies, confirmed Sabo’s records through the Freedom of Information Act, and began a three-year search for the Se San survivors. In March 2002, he took the paperwork to his congresswoman, Corrine Brown. Rose Mary, in the same period, posted a message on VirtualWall.org and heard back from one of Leslie’s battle buddies; little by little, through Bravo Company, she learned the truth. “I said, ‘My Leslie?’” she recalled. “If you knew my husband, he was a clown, always joking around… I was overwhelmed with pride.”

Even found, the case moved at institutional speed. Secretary of the Army Francis J. Harvey re-endorsed the nomination in May 2006. Because the statutory time limit had long since run, it took an act of Congress: the waiver was carried in the National Defense Authorization Act for 2008. Mabb’s own verdict is on the Army’s record, left here as his attribution: “I just want everyone to know the system does work. We can make change, and what is forgotten can be found. Justice can be done.”

Where it stands now

On May 16, 2012, in the East Room of the White House, President Barack Obama presented the Medal of Honor posthumously to Specialist Four Leslie H. Sabo Jr., placing it in the hands of his widow, Rose Mary Sabo-Brown. His brother George stood with her, along with more than a hundred family and friends and the men of Bravo Company, whom Obama asked to stand and accept the nation’s gratitude. The action was forty-two years and six days in the past. Obama closed the arithmetic this page exists to record: “Today, four decades after Leslie’s sacrifice, we can set the record straight.” Rose Mary’s measure of the day was quieter: “A piece of metal won’t bring back my husband. But my heart beams with pride for Leslie because he’s finally getting what’s due to him… Along with Leslie, please don’t forget the seven other men who lost their lives that fateful day in 1970.” The next day, May 17, 2012, Sabo was inducted into the Pentagon’s Hall of Heroes, where Gen. Raymond T. Odierno said, “He gave his life so that his brothers, who had fought side-by-side with him, could live.”

The medal account is closed. Sabo received, forty-two years late, exactly the honor his comrades had asked for in 1970. But notice what closed it. The fight took one afternoon. The medal took a wounded comrade’s hospital-bed draft, a file unprocessed for twenty-nine years, a fellow veteran who happened to ask the Archives for a box of Medal of Honor material in 1999 and spent years pushing what he found, a congresswoman’s intervention, a Secretary’s re-endorsement, an act of Congress, and a president’s signature. The other account — where the packet was between 1970 and 1999, and why his family was told a sniper on guard duty instead of the truth — remains open in full. No official accounting of those twenty-nine years has ever been produced. The medal was finally delivered. The explanation never was.

The ledger

Sabo is this section’s “finally accounted — after his death, and after his parents’ deaths” exhibit: the medal delivered, the explanation never produced. His fight for the medal is finished. The institution’s account for losing it, and for the story it told his family instead, is not.

What has been done

What has not been done

What is being sought

The record, on video

No camera was rolling at Se San in 1970 — the fight survives in a citation and the memories of the men Sabo saved. What the record has instead is the ceremony, the Army’s portrait, and his brother’s voice. Four films:

The ceremony. The White House film of May 16, 2012: President Obama presents the medal Sabo was first recommended for in 1970, tells the story of the file Tony Mabb found, and asks Bravo Company to stand. (The Obama White House.)

The ceremony, from the Army. The Army's film of the East Room presentation — Obama's remarks and the reading of the citation, forty-two years after Se San. (U.S. Army video.)

The Army's portrait. The Army's feature on who Sabo was and how he came to receive the medal — his commander on the day he became a hero, his brother on the family, and the veteran who discovered his story. (U.S. Army video.)

His brother's voice. George Sabo tells the family's history — Hungary, Ellis Island, Ellwood City — in the Army's interview recorded days before the ceremony. (The U.S. Army.)

Sources

Further record

Part of Betrayed, Not Forgotten — this site's accounting for the service members and veterans their own institutions failed. Videos are embedded from their publishers; nothing here is re-hosted.