Legacy of a Warrior: Dwight Birdwell

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Pushkin

It was late on a summer night, and Dwight Birdwell could sense something was wrong.

He was a specialist in the Army, in command of a tank, and that tank was parked alongside a main supply route near a little village in South Vietnam.

The year was 1968.

Dwight could hear a group of water buffaloes shuffling and grunting in a pen nearby.

He had grown up in the Oklahoma countryside and he knew that livestock wouldn't move at night unless something was disturbing them.

He knew in his bones that something was wrong.

He peered out of the turret of the tank using his starlight scope to cut through the blackness of the night.

Nothing.

But he couldn't shake the feeling.

He decided to go out and look.

He woke up the driver of his tank, a gentle guy named Bill Watts, and asked him to take his place at the turret.

And then Dwight headed out into the night.

He crossed the road, moving quietly through the brush, listening intently to see if he could hear whatever it was he felt.

He crept house to house in the village, shining his flashlight over families sleeping on bamboo platforms, finding nothing,

hearing nothing.

just the slow breathing of sleeping civilians and the sound of the insects in the night.

So Dwight turned to head back to the tank.

And at that very moment, three or four rocket-propelled grenades flashed by him, hissing as they went.

It was a sound that Dwight was horrifyingly familiar with.

Dwight watched as they hit his tank.

The tank's cache of ammunition was set off, fueling the explosion.

The noise of the blast rocked the little village.

Then he saw something bright, like a comet, fall from the tank.

It was Bill Watts.

He was on fire.

And Dwight Birdwell started running.

I'm J.R.

Martinez and this is Medal of Honor, Stories of Courage.

The Medal of Honor is the highest military decoration in the United States, awarded for gallantry and bravery in combat at the risk of life above and beyond the call of duty.

Each candidate must be approved all the way up the chain of command, from the supervisory officer in the field to the White House.

This show is about those heroes, what they did, what it meant.

and what their stories tell us about the nature of courage and sacrifice.

That moment, that night at the tank, changed the course of Dwight Birdwell's life.

It transformed him from a tough 20-year-old determined to fight into someone who could not look away from the terrible cost of war.

Someone who would ask God at that moment and for many years afterwards, why was I the one to survive?

Dwight's story is about a lot of things.

It's about the pride he feels in being part of the Cherokee Nation, a community with a remarkable history of military service.

It's about his extraordinary bravery in the battlefield, an episode that feels like it's straight out of a Rambo movie.

Dwight, it turns out, is a guy who put himself in harm's way over and over again.

Because that's where he felt he belonged.

But most of all, it's the story of a man coming to grips with the feeling of guilt that even the highest honor in the military could not absolve.

Dwight Birdwell never really knew his father.

His dad was an oil-filled worker of Cherokee descent.

a hard-drinking man who was in and out of jail a lot.

He pretty much disappeared from Dwight's life when he was little.

When Dwight was three, his mother met and married Ed Birdwell.

They settled in Oklahoma, in a town called Bell.

Here's Dwight remembering.

The community was about 90% Cherokee, maybe more.

It was a very, very rural area, an area of poverty.

It was a hard life.

But people may do.

I lived right on the creek, and every morning I remember a Cherokee lady coming down the creek.

In the evening she would come back and she would have a string of fish over her shoulder that she had caught to feed her family.

Dwight's stepdad was a farmer and his mother worked in the fields picking beans and strawberries.

Even though Dwight was a talented student, he was discouraged from even thinking about going to college.

The message from his high school counselor was, essentially, you're an Indian.

You won't amount to anything.

But Dwight was determined.

He decided to find his own way out by joining the military.

He knew the GI Bill would send him to school, and he liked the idea of service.

A lot of the Cherokee men in the community and area had served in World War II and served in Korea, and they emphasized that it was a Cherokee tradition to serve.

So

I did it out of a sense of duty to the country and out of a sense of obligation to Cherokee ancestors.

Dwight was 18, with deep set eyes and a crooked smile and dark hair parted on the side.

He was already fit for the Army, but not because he played football or basketball or wrestled.

Get this.

Because he worked chasing chickens six nights a week.

We left home about five or six in the evening and went to northwest Arkansas and caught chickens all night until daybreak.

You'd go in and catch the chickens, then you would run outside and you would climb up onto a flatbed truck and load the chickens, run back down and go get another batch of them all night long.

That's a random detail, but I love it.

I'm just not sure I've ever heard of a nighttime chicken catcher before.

What even is that?

Anyways, back to Dwight in the Army.

When he enlisted, he asked to be sent straight to Vietnam.

This was spring of 1966, and the war was just warming up.

Even though Dwight tested so well that he could have gone to officer training at West Point, he chose combat instead.

I felt like that was my duty, my mission, to

go where I was most needed and I felt like I was most needed in Vietnam.

Of course, I

didn't necessarily want to die, but if that was my destiny, that would be my destiny.

In September of 1967, Dwight landed at Tun San Nhut Airport, outside of Saigon.

He remembers marveling at how beautiful and green the countryside looked from the plane.

And he remembers seeing a line of body bags on the side of the runway.

and thinking, this is it?

I'm here.

Dwight was assigned to Troop C, 3rd Squadron, 4th Cavalry, 25th Infantry Division, which we're going to refer to the way that he did as the 3 4 Cav.

It was tasked with securing Highway 1, the main supply route running northwest from Saigon to the Cambodian border.

Dwight was well liked, and for once, his intelligence was recognized.

He was given a spot doing radio repair, but he didn't like the relative safety of the rear echelon.

He He wanted to fight.

And before long, he joined a tank crew as a gunner.

He knew exactly how dangerous it would be.

If you go on a tank, you've got an iron coffin.

It's just a matter of time.

Dwight was convinced that the U.S.

was right to be in Vietnam.

He saw the bodies of town officials assassinated by the National Liberation Front.

He knew how brave they must have been to stand up for their values.

But he saw dead Viet Cong guerrillas too.

They were young, about his age.

And Dwight looked at them and thought, they aren't evil.

They're just as idealistic as I am.

But as 1967 turned to 1968, Dwight and his platoon began to stumble across well-hidden bunkers, caches of weapons, signs of movement, of change.

And then, The early morning of January 31st, it happened.

A coordinated attack throughout South Vietnam, it would be known as the Tet Offensive.

Here's a news report describing the situation in 1968.

It all amounts to the most ambitious series of communist attacks yet mounted, spreading violence into at least 10 provincial capitals, plus American air bases and civilian installations stretching the entire length of the country.

The order came down to Dwight and the three-quarter cap to get to Tan Sanut Airport.

It was the most active active airbase in the country.

They said there is a squad of VC breaking into the wire at Ton Sanut.

The three-quarter Cav was so confident that we sent two platoons down.

There were only about 60 of us that went down in those two platoons.

They thought they would only be fighting a ragged handful of Viet Com.

They'd outpowered and outgunned that kind of enemy force before.

So the men got into their tanks and went.

But what awaited wasn't a skirmish,

it was an ambush.

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And Florian, the reckless yet charming scoundrel from said audiobook.

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The tanks of the three-quarter calf barreled down Highway 1 toward the Tanzanoot airfield.

The second platoon was at the lead.

Third platoon, Twipe's platoon, followed behind.

Their tracks kicked up dust as they rumbled forward through the early morning hours.

The sky grew lighter and overcast gray.

The trip down was abnormally quiet.

The convoy passed no civilian traffic on the road, and the nearby houses seemed to be deserted.

It was almost peaceful.

Then the lead tank reached the airport, and a wall of fire erupted from a hamlet along the side of the road.

Chaos.

They let us go right into the middle and then cut loose.

And within a very short period of time, a couple minutes, the lead platoon was pretty much wiped out.

It wasn't a scrappy group of Viet Cong that was waiting.

It was the North Vietnamese army.

And they now surrounded the convoy on three sides.

The sky was suddenly filled with eerie green lights falling towards the American tanks.

They were tracers, which the North Vietnamese used to see where their fire was going.

There's all these green tracers coming out and all these rockets coming in.

Boom, boom, boom, boom.

And I'm thinking, what in the world's going on?

Dwight's tank was at the very front of his platoon as the lead platoon exploded his tank pulled in right behind them one of Dwight's friends Franklin Cuff was in the lead platoon he and other veterans who knew Dwight spoke about their experiences in a documentary made by Oseo Voices of the Cherokee People

Frank remembers seeing Dwight's tank rattle into place Man, this ain't good.

We gotta do something.

And that's when 3rd platoon come pulling up and there's Dwight, like a knight in shining armor.

Almost instantly, Dwight's tank commander was hit, a bloody hole where his left eye had been.

Dwight got down and lifted his commander out of the tank under heavy fire and put him in the ditch that ran just along the side of the road.

The injured GIs from the lead platoon were gathering there as well.

And then Dwight returned to his tank and took command.

Every vehicle ahead of him had been put out of action, and there was no way to retreat.

There were too many wounded that would be left behind.

I can remember the bullets swang by my head.

You know, just think, boy, that's an unpleasant sound.

But I kept going.

He started firing back.

He didn't have time to feel any fear.

There was no place for it.

He used the tank's cannon.

He used the tank's machine gun.

His head and torso were exposed to enemy fire, but somehow the bullets didn't find him.

In the meantime, more survivors from the lead platoon were making their way to Dwight's position.

The ditch beside his tank was the only spot with any kind of relative safety.

Even though the enemy was advancing close on Dwight's left, He couldn't fire the tank's cannon in that direction because he would hit those wounded GIs.

So instead, he got up on that tank, took aim with his machine gun, and opened fire.

David Young was one of those soldiers taking cover in the ditch that day.

If it hadn't been for these high-powered rounds going over my head the other way, I wouldn't be here today.

Dwight was fully exposed to enemy fire.

Bullets whizzed by close enough to blow the communication device off of his tanker helmet.

But still,

he didn't get hit.

What was going through my mind was to keep fighting until I went down.

If I went down, I wasn't going to stop.

Part of his helmet was shot off.

He could no longer provide battlefield updates to his commanders.

He couldn't get any guidance either.

All he could do was shoot.

and drive the enemy back until

used up all my ammunition.

There was a helicopter directly above him.

It was the three-quarter Cavs commander, Lieutenant Colonel Glenn Otis.

He was circling the action leading from the sky.

All of the men in the three-quarter Cav adored Otis.

He was a brilliant leader, fair and brave, ready to be as much a part of the action as his men were.

And then...

Otis's helicopter took a direct hit.

It was about to crash, and it was heading straight for Dwight's position.

I'm watching the helicopter come down, thinking, this is not real.

The helicopter hit the ground, bounced hard, and came to a stop, the skids mashing down the barbed wire fence that ran alongside of the airport.

Otis and his crew got out and ran from the helicopter as fast as they could in case it caught fire.

Dwight watched them scramble away.

And then he thought, that helicopter has something that I need.

He hopped down from the tank and raced to the chopper, cutting his legs on the concertina wire.

Dwight made it to the chopper, pulled two machine guns out.

He passed one to a friend, got the other back on top of his tank, and opened fire.

He wasn't slowing down at all.

He just kept doing the job.

He kept going,

protecting those wounded men in the ditch next to him, holding off the enemy, and then, inevitably, he was hit.

I just remember a big flash and

a lot of blood coming out of my head and

down my face and my chest and what have you.

He had shrapnel wounds.

He was bleeding badly.

But Dwight wasn't worried about that.

He didn't feel like he was particularly injured.

He was worried about his gun.

And, of course, that M60 was in two pieces.

I'm looking at my gun.

It's like a toy, you know, it's torn in hat.

What am I going to do?

Now, he only had the sidearm in his holster.

It would have to be enough.

There was shooting all around him, and the enemy was still on every side.

He was bleeding from his head.

He was majorly outnumbered, but he hadn't lost his resolve.

So I just felt like I'm going to fight as long as I can.

I wasn't going to say die until I was dead.

Dwight got off the tank and went down to the ditch where the other soldiers were.

He rallied three of them to advance to the front of the column of tanks to set up a defensive position.

It was a crazy move.

Four guys trying to hold off a ton of enemy fighters.

But to Dwight, it was the only move.

The only way to keep the enemy enemy from coming over the top and getting to the wounded GIs.

One guy was a non-Indian from Bar Harbor, Maine.

And I got two Native Americans from Port Gamble, Washington.

He was actually a medic, Oliver Jones.

And then there was an Ottawa from Michigan.

And we went down the ditch, took up a position to hold off the North Vietnamese.

And we were pretty low on ammunition.

And it looked like that it was almost over with.

They huddled in front of the convoy's lead tank below a big tree that stood alone by the road.

When they peeked over to the edge of the ditch, they could see hundreds of enemy soldiers.

They were massively outnumbered.

Dwight looked over at the airfield where he arrived in Vietnam less than a year before, where he'd seen those green body bags.

It was an eerie feeling at that point because we were right on the runway and these large airliners, Eastern, Pan Am, World Airways, were sitting out there just ready to take off.

Those airplanes were filled with people getting out of Vietnam, escaping from the war, going home to safety.

Here we were about to die looking at those big planes and just was very, very strange feeling.

Dwight and the other soldiers threw grenades at the enemy.

Machine gun rounds hit the tree above their heads, showering them with leaves and branches.

And then they heard the rumble of vehicles.

Troop B of the cavalry was coming to help.

Even with his life on the line, Dwight saw some humor in that.

You know, in the movies, the cab is always saving non-Indians from Indians.

And here's these three Indians being saved.

That wasn't a movie script, the cab saving the Indians.

Helicopters flew low over the open fields.

Dwight remembers them laying down a smokescreen to conceal the arrival of Troop B.

Then, the air filled with the sound of American tanks taking out the enemy positions.

The wounded GI started getting loaded onto medevac helicopters.

Dwight was ordered to board one too.

Remember, he was bleeding from his head.

He got on it all right, but then he just slid across and out the other side of the chopper and returned to the fight.

I had to get back into battle.

I could still go.

He helped the other men, those wounded guys in the ditch, loading them onto helicopters, getting them to safety.

And then finally,

he was forced to get help himself.

I was put on a...

Chinook helicopter and it was full of bodies.

That helicopter felt like an airborne morgue, but it could have been so much worse.

He saved many, many, many lives that day.

You just can't believe what he did that day.

It's hard for me to believe it, and I saw it.

The Army agreed with Frank.

Dwight received a silver star for his actions that day.

He was, by all accounts, a bona fide hero.

He knew that his survival was nothing short of a miracle.

But the thought of the people he couldn't save nagged at him.

And then,

several months later, on a creepily quiet night, it all caught up with him.

After Teth, the war in Vietnam changed.

The enemy suddenly seemed to be everywhere.

Morale among the American troops was terrible.

Their focus went from winning the war, whatever that might mean, to just surviving and getting home.

Dwight had been a true believer, but he began to feel dragged down and depressed.

All the same, he still had his unique capacity to keep pushing forward.

And even when he wavered, he took his commitment to service seriously, which meant that his fight of a lifetime kept happening.

Here's his friend, Ted Bagley, who served with him speaking on that OCO documentary.

We talk about Tan Newt and the things he did, but he did that the whole time we were in Vietnam.

It wasn't a one-time affair.

That's what people don't understand.

Dwight received another Silver Star in July of 68 for going back into an enemy-occupied village to rescue stranded American troops.

Nobody had wanted that assignment, but Dwight volunteered for it.

Not once,

but twice.

Over and over again.

Dwight put his life on the line and survived.

Bertie had at least 10 tots of news.

He became commander of a tank and was particularly close with two of the soldiers that served with him, Bill Watts and Harold Donnelly.

Harold and Dwight were best friends, pretty much inseparable, and Dwight looked up to Bill.

Bill Watts was very tender guy, very compassionate, Had a view of life that took me years to get to.

Which brings us to that night by the road in that little village.

The one I told you about at the start of the episode.

A stifling hot July night in 1968.

Dwight's platoon was set up along the roadside.

The water buffaloes moved in their pen as Dwight peered out into the darkness to figure out what he was sensing.

What felt wrong.

I got Bill up and I put him in a turret.

I said, you take over.

I'm going to go out there and do some recon.

So I went out searching for North Vietnamese and I couldn't find anything.

And that's when he turned and saw the RPGs hit the tank and his friend Bill fall out of it on fire from head to toe.

Bill Watts came out of that tank in a ball of fire.

Just like in Tanzanute, Dwight didn't hesitate.

So I run back to the tank

and then get Bill.

But as I'm carrying him out, my friend Harold Donnelly says, Dwight, help me, help me.

I'm hurt.

I said, Harold, I'll be back and help you when I can.

You be a man.

You take that pain.

Being a man, taking that pain was the logic Dwight had learned over all those months in Vietnam.

But after he got Bill out of harm's way and went back for Harold, he saw what had become of his friend.

So I got back after I'd taken care of Bill, got Harold,

picked him up.

Harold was mangled.

His flesh was in pieces, strings,

pang.

And

I forever to this day feel bad about what I said to

Harold.

do I

just want to pause here and point something out

this recording was made more than 50 years after that terrible traumatic night and Dwight is still crying when he remembers the way he spoke to his friend

I think that tells you more than anything else who Dwight Birdwell is.

A day or so later, he went to see Bill in the hospital.

He was racked with guilt.

He kept thinking, It should have been me.

I should have been able to prevent this.

He was looking for his friend, not seeing him anywhere when I heard this voice.

And it was Bill.

Don't you recognize me?

I didn't recognize the burns he had

were fierce.

And I knew he was dying.

We talked for a bit

and

afterwards

went out, I sat down,

I just cried and cried and cried.

And then he noticed people next to him sitting in that same waiting area.

There's a Vietnamese family to my right, and they had a

young girl, probably six or seven years old, just

incredibly beautiful young lady, just so pretty.

And she was so happy.

Here is something Dwight hadn't seen for months.

Something beautiful and peaceful and warm.

An antidote to the pain of seeing his dying friend.

And then all of a sudden she turned her whole face to me and it was blown away on the right side of her face.

The side of her face was a mass of scar tissue.

Her eye was gone.

And I just thought to myself,

no more.

I can't take this anymore.

Dwight Birdwell, the truest of the true believers, the first to volunteer for action, the warrior.

was done with the war.

Just done.

He served the rest of his tour, and then he got out as fast as he could.

When his flight left Vietnam, Dwight looked out the window.

The green paradise that had greeted him when he'd flown in 16 months before was gone.

In its place was a landscape that looked like the surface of the moon, pockmarked with craters, burned and destroyed.

He wondered to himself,

what was it all for?

Bill died of his injuries.

Harold Donnelly survived, but with medical issues that would plague him the rest of his life.

He and Dwight stayed in touch until he died.

Dwight always felt that he had been bad luck for Harold.

Dwight took Bill's dog tags with him when he left Vietnam.

He carried it on his keychain for years

as a reminder,

maybe,

or a penance.

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With Supermobile, your performance, security, and coverage are supercharged.

With a network that adapts in real time, your business stays operating at peak capacity even in times of high demand.

With built-in security on the first nationwide 5G advanced network, you keep private data private for you, your team, your clients.

And with seamless coverage from the world's largest satellite-to-mobile constellation, your whole team can text and stay updated even when they're off the grid.

That's your business, Supercharged.

Learn more at supermobile.com.

Seamless coverage with compatible devices in most outdoor areas in the U.S.

where you can see the sky.

Best network based on analysis by UCLA of Speed Test Intelligence Data 1H 2025.

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Dwight's story doesn't end there, of course.

The Army gave him the ability to do the thing everyone said he couldn't do.

Go to college, become a lawyer.

He married a sweet girl named Virginia, who had also grown up poor in a Cherokee community near his.

They had two kids, a daughter and a son.

But none of it was easy for him.

When Dwight first returned home, he drank.

He had nightmares.

He carried those memories of Bill and Harold, of the other men and the civilians he couldn't save with him like a sack of stones.

And like so many veterans, he could not talk about the war at all.

The war haunted me for years, particularly the thought of why did I survive

and so many others

perished.

Then, late one night in 1979, as Dwight was drinking himself, as he puts it, to the bottom of a fifth of bourbon, he decided two things.

The first,

to stop drinking.

The second was to stop obsessing over the things he could have done differently in Vietnam.

I had a reckoning.

I came to the conclusion that there was Nothing I could do about the past.

I could just live for the future.

Right around that time, something else happened.

Dwight saw his old commander, Glenn Otis, again.

In Vietnam, he had told me a few days after Tong Sin Otis, he said, I'm going to recommend you for the Medal of Honor.

But nothing had ever come of it.

And now here was Otis, who had become a four-star general since the two had parted ways in Vietnam.

He asked me what happened to that Medal of Honor, and I told him he said, we're going to have to do something about that.

And I just felt like that, you know, it was just one of those things that would never happen.

The years kept going by.

In addition to his law practice, Dwight went to work for the Cherokee Nation, serving as one of three justices of the Supreme Court.

Eventually, he served two terms as Chief Justice of the Cherokee Nation.

It's a fitting role for a man who could so clearly see both sides of a conflict.

And all during that time and for long afterwards, General Otis worked to get Dwight his Medal of Honor for his brave stand at the airport that first day of the Tet Offensive.

I never wanted the Medal of Honor.

All I wanted was a fair consideration.

General Otis got me that fair consideration.

Finally, In May of 2022, more than five decades since that action at Tom's Newt, it happened.

I got a call from President Biden and he said, I'm going to award you the Medal of Honor.

And he talked to me very graciously for about 10 minutes.

Going into the conversation, he said,

this is a big deal.

And then somewhere else in the conversation on down the road, he said, this is a big deal.

It is a big deal.

But like so many men who have been awarded the medal, Dwight doesn't see it as something for him.

He sees it as something for all those other men who fought and didn't survive.

This medal is for the men who went down that day.

It's for the families of those who didn't make it.

It's for those who were critically injured and

later died or later led impaired lives.

I'm thankful for it.

I don't mean to say that I'm not thankful, but it's for those men, their families, for the 3-quarter CAV, and the 25th Infantry Division.

President Biden put the medal around Dwight's neck.

And that at long last,

at long last,

your story is being honored as it should have been always.

Some of Dwight's friends from the Cav were there at the ceremony.

So is his daughter, Stephanie.

who currently serves as the director of the Office of Tribal Government Relations at the Department of Veteran Affairs.

And I might note, Native American communities

serve in the United States Armed Forces at a higher percentage rate than any other cohort in America.

Dwight's daughter thinks she understands why that might be.

Native people as the original inhabitants to this land have an especially strong connection to the land we live on.

It is truly our homeland and that can be a powerful inspiration and source of motivation to serve.

When Dwight walked away from the war in Vietnam, Vietnam, he stopped doing one kind of service.

But he didn't stop serving.

He worked to help the Cherokee Nation, as persistent as he ever was on the battlefield.

I think his devotion to service must stem in part from the guilt that he still carries, even today, about the people he wasn't able to save.

But it also stems from his deep bedrock of faith.

He believes that when his time comes, he will stand before his God.

And maybe then,

finally, he will find the absolution that he can't give himself.

And then when I did go up for judgment, if I had the courage, I would ask God,

why did you let me live?

Did I fulfill your expectation?

The Medal of Honor, by definition, tells the world that Dwight Birdwell didn't just fulfill expectations.

He went far, far above and beyond them.

I can't imagine his maker will disagree.

Medal of Honor, Stories of Courage, is written by Meredith Rollins and produced by Meredith Rollins, Jess Shane, and Suzanne Gabber.

Our editor is Ben Nadaf Hoffrey.

Sound design and additional music by Jake Gorski.

Our executive producer is Constanza Gallardo.

Fact-checking by Arthur Gompertz.

Original music by Eric Phillips.

Special thanks to the Congressional Medal of Honor Society, the U.S.

Department of Veteran Affairs, and Cherokee Film Productions for sharing material from At Long Last, Dwight Birdwell's Medal of Honor from the docu series Osio, Voices of the Cherokee People.

We also want to hear from you, so send us your personal story of courage or highlight someone else's bravery.

Email us at medalofhonor at pushkin.fm.

You might hear your stories on future episodes of Medal of Honor or see them on our social channels at Pushkin Pods.

I'm your host, J.R.

Martinez.

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This is an iHeart podcast.