WASHINGTON (May 15, 2012) — Rose Mary Sabo-Brown vividly remembers May 15, 1970, as the worst day of her life. It was the day she learned that her new husband, Spc. 4 Leslie H. Sabo Jr. of the 101st Airborne Division, wasn’t coming home from Vietnam.
He was missing in action, the Army told her, explaining that they didn’t know anything else yet. But Rose Mary knew. She knew in her heart he was dead.
“I felt it,” she said, adding that she had already known something was wrong. “I didn’t get a letter that whole week. From May 10 on I didn’t get a letter. I said, ‘Something happened. Something happened. He’s not writing.’ He was already dead.”
After an agonizing five days, the Army confirmed it: Leslie had been killed by enemy fire, May 10.
The Army told his parents and his brother George that Leslie had been shot by a sniper while guarding an ammunition dump somewhere in Vietnam.
Rose Mary and the Sabo family mourned. They went to his funeral and tried to pick up the pieces of their shattered lives, never knowing that there was more to the story — never knowing that Leslie had actually been killed in Cambodia, or that he had died a hero, or that his commanders had recommended him for the Medal of Honor.
Leslie wasn’t even born a citizen of the country he died for. At the end of World War II, fleeing the Soviet army and communism, his parents and his brother had escaped from their native Hungary to Austria, where Leslie was born in 1948.
“My dad kept waiting for the Russians to leave Hungary and wound up understanding that they weren’t leaving,” George remembered. When he and Leslie were 6 and 2, respectively, the family packed up and immigrated to the United States, where their father, who had practiced law in Hungary, went to night school at the age of 43 and became an engineer.
The family patriarch upheld a strict moral code and stressed discipline and patriotism. He was proud to be a newly minted American citizen (although he insisted they speak Hungarian at home), and he taught his sons that they had a duty to their adopted country.
Leslie was goofy, a jokester, and loved to bowl and shoot pool. He was also a good kid, his brother remembered. “He just never gave my parents any trouble. He always did the right thing. Not that he was a saint, but he just never got into any kind of real trouble. He always listened to my parents, even in his teenage years, which is a tough time for boys. He never really caused any problems, never had a car accident, never got traffic tickets.”
Rose Mary had fallen in love with Leslie the day she met him at a high school football game. She was a senior and he had just graduated. She knew she was “going to be with him for the rest of … my life as soon as I met him. I don’t know. Something clicked for both of us.”
Leslie showed up to meet her parents dressed in a long black trench coat and tattered jeans, and her father asked where she found him, but he soon won them over as well.
After about a year and a half of college at Youngstown State University in Ohio, Leslie left school, uncertain what he wanted to do in life. Unfortunately, that meant the university was required to send his name to the selective service board. He was drafted less than six months later, almost certainly headed for Vietnam.
Rose Mary, then his fiancée, begged him to ignore the draft notice, but Leslie refused. He explained that his family had fled communism and it was his duty to stand against it, to fight for the country that had given them so much. He understood, more than many Americans, the reasons behind the war and had talked about it with his brother many times.
“I felt and understood the rationale at that time portrayed by our politicians, that you have to stop the communists somewhere in Asia,” George recalled. “So I was not anti-Vietnam in the intellectual sense, but when it came down to my brother going to Vietnam, I wasn’t good with it. But … at that time, in our minds, the right thing was to serve your country, and if you have to go to Vietnam, you go to Vietnam and God will take care of you. That’s kind of the way he and I both felt.
“We were all very, very nervous about him going to Vietnam, but he seemed to accept the fact that that’s what he was supposed to do. … We were also very proud of him.”
Besides, Leslie quickly decided that he actually liked the Army, his brother said, noting that “even as a (private first class), he liked the discipline, he liked the camaraderie.”
The only problem was that Leslie was supposed to get married Sept. 13, 1969 — right in the middle of his advanced individual training. The Army let him go home for his wedding, but he had to return the next day, and couldn’t take his new bride on a honeymoon until he received 30 days of leave in October. They went to New York City, a trip Rose Mary said is still her happiest memory, and they had a month to be newlyweds, to live as husband and wife.
She missed him terribly after he deployed, writing him two or three letters a day about normal life. “I would write and tell him ‘I did this today and I did that. I had to go to work.’ I’d hear a song that reminded me of him and I’d write some of the words to the song in there.”
While Leslie was almost as faithful a letter writer, writing letters to Rose Mary every other day and his family about once a week, he didn’t want to worry them. So he was upbeat, never talking about combat or missions, never mentioning the primitive conditions he was enduring out in the field. Instead, Rose Mary remembered, “He talked about his buddies and how close they all became.”
Her father wouldn’t let her watch most of the stories about Vietnam on the evening news, but a close family friend had been killed in action, so she knew how bad it was — Leslie’s letters were her lifeline. She would actually sit outside and wait for the mailman.
The letters stopped when he left for Cambodia with the rest of Company B, 3rd Battalion, 506th Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division. The “Currahees” were attached to the 4th Infantry Division for a secret mission: Stop North Vietnamese units from using Cambodia as a staging point to attack American and South Vietnamese troops. But on May 10, 1970, the unit walked into a devastating ambush near the Se San River in eastern Cambodia.
In the ensuing bloodbath, Leslie shielded a comrade from a grenade and continued fighting despite his injuries, helping cover his fellow Soldiers’ evacuation before he was killed.
The news of his death was devastating.
“We took it badly,” George remembered. Leslie’s death was especially hard on their mother, who had already lost a 1-year-old son to World War II bombings. “Now she loses another son in another war 35 years later. So it was really hard on her. My father … took it extremely hard. … Because the war was all around Hungary in the 40s, he understood the horror of war, and then to lose a son … it (shook) my dad pretty hard.”
Rose Mary admitted that although she remarried (and eventually divorced), she was never truly happy again. “I never stopped loving him. Sometimes it feels like yesterday I lost him, but I’ll never forget him and I’m very proud of him,” she said, as her emotions overcame her.
Her brother, who was already in the Army and was close friends with Leslie, made things worse when he volunteered for duty in Vietnam, in part to avenge his friend’s death, so Rose Mary worried she would lose her brother, too.
Leslie’s funeral, which Rose Mary barely remembers, was the day before her birthday, and that morning she had a special delivery: a dozen red roses from her husband. For a brief, heart-pounding moment, she thought there had been a horrible mistake. If he was sending her flowers, he must be alive.
“I looked at my escort,” Rose Mary remembered, “and threw the flowers at him. I felt bad after I did that, and I said, ‘You’ve got a lot of explaining to do.'” Leslie, however, had ordered the flowers (and Mother’s Day corsages for both of their mothers) months earlier, before he deployed. “That’s the way he was. He was very thoughtful, very kind, very loving.”
She never forgot her true love, and 32 years later, armed with a new computer, Rose Mary went looking for more information. She posted a message on VirtualWall.org, and got a reply from one of Leslie’s battle buddies three months later. He put her in touch with others from their unit, and little by little, she learned the truth about her husband’s death.
“I said, ‘My Leslie?’ Because if you knew my husband, he was a clown,” she explained, “always joking around and as skinny as can be, and he was even skinnier in Vietnam. I’m going ‘My Leslie? Are you sure you’ve got the right person?’ Because the Leslie I knew would give his life to anybody. He would. He would give you the shirt off his back … but the Leslie I knew was (also) a clown, always joking around. I never pictured him to be like that. I was overwhelmed with pride. I said, ‘Wow. That’s awesome.'”
“Understanding my brother, I’m not surprised,” George said, explaining that Sabo’s discipline, love for his country and for his fellow Soldiers meant that when he had to choose between running and staying safe and standing and fighting, he fought. “He was the least selfish, (least) self-centered person I’ve ever known. He was always thinking about other people. … So his ability to overcome fear … (and) stand (his) ground and try to fight to keep the rest of the guys safe doesn’t surprise me.”
They were at once proud and overwhelmed, sad and angry. They should have known of Leslie’s sacrifice long ago, Rose Mary said, and the Army should never have lost his Medal of Honor recommendation. “I didn’t know who to be upset with. … I was mad, but I’m glad it’s happening now. The (anger) is gone.”
Learning that Leslie would finally receive the Medal of Honor in a May 16 White House ceremony was thrilling. “It was a very emotional day,” Rose Mary said of the day President Barack Obama called her and told her the good news. “A very, very emotional day. I couldn’t even sleep that night. And when I woke up the next morning … I went, ‘Now wait a minute, did I dream this? Is it really real?’ I just couldn’t believe it happened. I’m very, very happy about it. It’s sad and happy. It feels wonderful.
“I couldn’t be more proud of him,” she continued. “As the days go on, I keep thinking, ‘It’s coming, it’s coming.’ I can’t wait. I cry myself to sleep at night. Every day I look at his picture and I go, ‘You’re finally getting what’s due you.'”
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WASHINGTON — It’s the rarest and most prestigious military honor, made rarer still by a 42-year delay attributed to lost paperwork.
But on Wednesday, Army Spc. Leslie H. Sabo Jr. finally was recognized for an act of wartime heroism that took his life at age 22 as he saved comrades when his platoon was ambushed in Cambodia during the Vietnam War.
“Along with Les, seven other soldiers gave their lives that day,” President Barack Obama said as he presented the Medal of Honor to Sabo’s widow, Rose Mary Sabo-Brown. “And those who came home took on one last mission — and that was to make sure America would honor their fallen brothers. They had no idea how hard it would be or how long it would take.”
Bravo Company comrade George Koziol, who since died of cancer, nominated Sabo, of Ellwood City, for a Medal of Honor not long after that harrowing day, but the paperwork was lost until 1999. That’s when another veteran, Alton “Tony” Mabb, came across it while doing research in the National Archives in College Park, Md. He was looking for story ideas for his column in Screaming Eagle magazine, the official publication of the 101st Airborne Division, and asked to see records of Medal of Honor recipients.
“They came out with this box and there was quite a bit of material — 50 or 100 pages — on Leslie Sabo” including witnesses’ accounts of the May 1970 ambush that killed eight and wounded 28, Mr. Mabb recalled. Next, he checked Sabo’s military records to see if the medal ever was awarded, but the highest honor listed was a bronze star.
That’s when he took on Sabo’s case as a personal project, even though he had never met the man or even heard his name before.
Mr. Mabb, 62, reluctantly told his story in a telephone interview from his home in Jacksonville, Fla., where he works for the Internal Revenue Service as a tax law expert.
“I’ve had some uncomfortable conversations over the years [with members of Sabo’s company]. People were reliving their stuff, and it’s hard,” said Mr. Mabb, who served in Vietnam in 1970 and ’71.
Their stories weave together a harrowing tale of a badly wounded soldier crawling toward enemy lines to hurl grenades at his North Vietnamese attackers and then stepping back into the line of fire to help provide safe passage for fellow wounded Americans who were being airlifted.
Without the witnesses’ willingness to retell their stories, and without Mr. Mabb’s efforts to find them, Sabo’s family never would have known of his heroism.
Finding out “was all pretty shocking. When Leslie got killed, all they had told me was that he was killed by enemy fire, and that was all I knew,” Ms. Sabo-Brown said.
Mr. Obama described the attack this way: “Some 50 American soldiers were nearly surrounded by some 100 North Vietnamese fighters. … Les was in the rear — and he could have stayed there. But those fighters were unloading on his brothers, so Les charged forward and took several of those fighters out.”
“An enemy grenade landed near a wounded American. Les picked it up and threw it back. And as that grenade exploded, he shielded that soldier with his own body,” he continued.
“The enemy zeroed in with everything they had. But Les kept crawling, kept pulling himself along, closer to bunker, even as the bullets hit the ground all around him.
“And then, he grabbed a grenade and pulled the pin. It’s said he held that grenade and didn’t throw it until the last possible moment, knowing it would take his own life, but knowing he could silence that bunker. He saved his comrades who meant more to him than life.”
His comrades, including Bravo Company Capt. Jim Waybright, are grateful.
“His high energy and bravery in battle allowed us to keep part of our perimeter,” said Mr. Waybright, who attended Wednesday’s ceremony. “There would have been more lives lost. We were overpowered by a much larger force.”
Mr. Waybright said he is proud to see a company member recognized, but any celebration over the military achievement is outweighed, even all these years later, by loss.
“When somebody’s killed, it affects another 100 people — relatives, friends,” he said. “People really suffered. Parents are never the same, brothers and sisters are never the same and, of course, wives.”
Mrs. Sabo-Brown can attest to that.
Now divorced from her second husband, she sometimes can’t help wondering how different life would be if her first love hadn’t been killed. It’s hard to imagine; after all, they were married only a month before he was deployed.
“I know it would have been wonderful. He was that kind of person. … He was the type of guy who’d give you the shirt off his back or the last penny in his pocket,” she said. “He was my hero before he became a hero.”
For her, Wednesday’s ceremony brought a flood of conflicting emotions.
“It brings back a lot of memories. I’m very, very emotional and I can’t stop crying,” she said. “But whatever it takes to honor him I’ll do for the rest of my life.”
It has been a long wait for a woman so impatient that decades ago she couldn’t wait for a formal marriage proposal. Instead, she coaxed her then boyfriend into giving her the engagement ring she knew was in his pocket as he drove to a restaurant where he planned to propose.
“I said, ‘I want to wear it now,’ and at a red light he put it on my finger and we kissed. It was a magic moment,” she said.
More than 42 years after she showed off that ring to her friends she’ll have something more impressive to show them, a Medal of Honor — or, rather, a replica; she plans to keep the real one in a safe.
She has already scheduled to show it off Saturday at a Veterans for American banquet in Beaver County and at the May 26 Pirates game, where she has been invited to throw the first pitch.
The Medal of Honor is awarded to members of the military who conspicuously demonstrate extraordinary gallantry while engaged in military action. Of the 2.1 million men who served in Vietnam, only 246 received it — 154 of them posthumously.
Since 1863, when the medal was made a permanent decoration, 3,468 have been awarded.
