Thomas Happer Taylor

Thomas Happer Taylor (born 1934) is a highly decorated veteran of the United States Army, a military historian, an author of seven books, and a champion triathlete. He served in Vietnam following in the footsteps of his father General Maxwell D. Taylor.

Thomas H. Taylor was born 1934, in Kickapoo County, Kansas, the second son of Lydia Happer and Maxwell Davenport Taylor. Soon after his birth the family moved to Tokyo, where his father, a fluent Japanese linguist, was military attaché. During World War II, while his father served in North Africa, Taylor and his siblings lived in Fort Bragg, NC, and Arlington, VA, where Mrs. Taylor worked for the Office of Price Administration (OPA) doling out gasoline ration cards. After attending high school in Berlin following the Berlin Blockade, Taylor returned to the U.S. He then matriculated to West Point from which he graduated in 1960. General Taylor once remarked about his son's undergraduate education: "He did something at the Academy that I could never do. He made the choir."

After a period in the Special Forces and in the infantry, Taylor volunteered for service in Vietnam, but was not permitted to begin his tour of duty there until his father Maxwell Taylor completed his service as Ambassador to Vietnam.

He arrived in Vietnam as a captain in July 1965, joining the First Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division, (the "Screaming Eagles") which his father had commanded in World War II. Captain Taylor's first assignment was as an intelligence officer of his brigade. His commander had felt that his special forces training as a guerrilla fighter would be an advantage in combatting guerrillas, and this proved to be true. In September 1965 Taylor participated in the first encounter between a U.S. battalion and a Viet Cong main force battalion. Two company commanders were casualties in that battle, and Taylor inherited B Company, 2nd Battalion, 502nd Parachute Infantry Regiment, called "Strike Force." Although "parachute" was in the group's name, the soldiers used helicopters exclusively. Taylor was awarded a Silver Star, two Bronze Stars for valor and the Purple Heart, the latter involving a wound that ended his command of B Company.

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