Teddy, Jr. is the son of Major General Teddy Hollis Sanford, Sr. (see above) and like his father, Teddy Jr., is a retired Army officer (Lieutenant Colonel in Teddy, Jr.’s case), having served in Vietnam.  
He is a past president of the Endicott-Endecott Family Association, now named the John Endecott Family Association.  His descent from Governor John Endecott is as follows:

Army family
Teddy’s father was a WWII hero and he remembers “We were all living in Pawnee, Oklahoma and my first memories were of my mother reading letters written by my dad from Europe during the Second World War.” 

       

Teddy has the distinction of being the first child born to a member of the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division.  Because his dad elected to stay in the Army after WWII, Teddy grew up on Army bases at Fort Hood, Texas; El Paso, Texas; Fort Leavenworth, Kansas; Fort Bragg, North Carolina; Sapporo, Tokyo, Sendai, and Beppu, all in Japan; Fort Monroe, Virginia; and Fort Shafter, Hawaii.

While at Fort Shafter, he attended the University of Hawaii and joined the ROTC.  After Summer Camp at Fort Lewis, Washington, he was allowed to apply for a commission in the Regular Army after graduating a year later and entered the Army as a Second Lieutenant in 1964.

Fort Hood
Teddy’s first assignment was in the 2nd Armored Division, as a tank platoon leader at Fort Hood in Killeen, Texas, but he was soon moved up to lead the battalion reconnaissance platoon.  He remembers “… the war clouds of Vietnam were just over the horizon. We all knew that we would be going there in the near future.”

 

“My first tour in Vietnam can be described as short, brutal, and bloody,” Teddy says.  In 1966, he served as a reconnaissance platoon leader for the 1st Squadron, 9th Cavalry Regiment, of the 1st Air Cavalry Division.  It was the first air cavalry squadron in the world, and the first to see combat.   

 

One of his early assignments, though, was providing security for graves registration teams to remove bodies of U.S. troops killed in action – “I felt much better after we got away from that area.”

 

During his tour, Teddy fought in 17 engagements and made a number of helicopter-borne assaults, all in four months,  “and then it was over. Wounded on 5 May 1966, I was evacuated to the Army Hospital at Camp Zama, Japan.  I spent a month there before being returned to the United States.” 

Detail of first Vietnam tour

       

During Operation Masher/White Wing, which began in late January 1966, Teddy was involved in several patrols to try to drive off the enemy who were firing on U.S. helicopters, “but they simply withdrew into the mountains.”

 

On February 1, while making an airmobile assault, his 13-man reconnaissance patrol was ambushed by a much larger enemy force and several of his men were killed, but they held on until relief forces landed.

 

The firefight continued, however, and a U.S. 105 mm artillery round “landed short” in the middle of his formation and blasted Teddy to the ground, causing him to be out of action for the next three days with a minor concussion. 

 

When he returned to the unit, he participated in an ambush of the enemy, killing 10-15 of them. 

 

On February 15, he participated in a helicopter landing to help a platoon under fire by the enemy.  After landing, Teddy’s platoon came under heavy fire and lost more men killed and wounded. During the night his and another platoon beat off sporadic enemy attacks. This effectively ended his combat during Operation Masher/White Wing. 

 

A week later, while his unit was providing convoy escorts to engineer and supply units, there were frequent small fire fights, but U.S. air dominance prevented major enemy attacks and, while he had several men wounded, none of them were killed. 

 

Soon thereafter, while cutting away brush to reopen an old French road from Dak To the tri-border area where Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos meet, a landmine did serious damage to Teddy’s infantry vehicle, blowing the troops on board free, and causing serious injuries to the driver’s legs. 

 

Three weeks after that, while eating dinner in an engineers’ mess hall, 

the camp’s pet tiger wondered through the door and sat in the corner and eyed them throughout the course of the meal.  “It is difficult to eat when you are being looked at like you might be dessert.”

 

Toward the end of April, Teddy’s unit was part of operation “Davy Crockett,” and fought a daylong series of skirmishes with small numbers of enemy troops. 

 

 On May 4, they conducted a major attack against enemy troops entrenched in a village.   His platoon came under “friendly fire,” but luckily no one was hit.  
 

On May 5, his and other units attacked a company of Vietnamese mechanized infantry.   Teddy’s platoon quickly came under mortar fire and an 82 mm mortar round landed near him killing several men and wounding Teddy –– “my combat days were over.”  

 

After four months of combat, he was then evacuated to a military hospital in Japan, was there for several weeks, and then returned to the United States.   He then had three years of stateside duty including command of a tank company, before again returning to Vietnam in 1969.

 

Second tour in Vietnam 

 This time Teddy completed a twelve-month tour, serving on the Intelligence Staff of General Creighton Abrams at the Headquarters of the U.S. Military Assistance Command – Vietnam (USMACV). 

 

Teddy found this to be “a fascinating assignment and I was present when all of the strategic decisions regarding President Nixon’s Vietnamization plan were formulated.” 

 

Compared to my first tour, this one was marked with dodging frequent missile attacks launched against Saigon and the occasional satchel charge delivered by terrorist elements from motorcycles.  Once, while staying in an old hotel a satchel charge was thrown through the front door and caused quite an explosion. I moved to a larger facility after that. 

 

One of the jobs that gave him particular satisfaction was marking target locations for B-52 bombers flying against the same enemy regiments he had previously fought against.

 

I remember the day that I left Vietnam for the last time. The invasion of Cambodia was underway, and Saigon was once again being shelled. A rocket round hit near the runway just as we were taking off and we all held our breath until we passed through the clouds and banked toward home. There were tears and loud cheers. We had survived. 

Back in the States

 

Back in the United States in 1970, Teddy was assigned to the Combat Developments Command Armor Agency where for over 3 years he helped write the requirements for a new tank that became the Abrams tank, the backbone of American power in the Gulf War of the early 1990s and later the key to combat success during Operation Iraqi Freedom. 

 

In 1973, Teddy was a student at the Army’s Command and General Staff College.  But ominously, “1973 was also the first year that I experienced health issues that would become serious in the years ahead.”  These, it would turn out later, were due in large measure to having been exposed to Agent Orange.

Agent Orange

In mid-1961, South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem asked the U.S. to conduct aerial herbicide spraying in his country. The goal was to defoliate rural and forested areas to deprive guerrillas of food and concealment and to clear sensitive areas such as around base perimeters.  It was similar to what the British had done in Malaya in the 1950s and in part because of this precedent, President Kennedy approved the request. 

 

 The result was that between 1962 -1971, in more than 6,500 missions, the U.S. sprayed nearly 20,000,000 gallons of various chemicals, largely Agent Orange, in Vietnam, eastern Laos, and parts of Cambodia.  Dow Chemical and Montsanto were the largest producers of Agent Orange.  It’s been estimated that as much of 20% of South Vietnam was sprayed at least once.  And unfortunately for Teddy, in 1966, “I was leading long-range reconnaissance patrols in the tri-border area of the Central Highlands and this was the most contaminated area for Agent Orange in the country.”

 

 It later became known that this spraying had two bad effects:

       *  Nearly all the food destroyed was not being produced for guerrillas, but instead for the local civilian population. This contributed to widespread famine, leaving hundreds of thousands of people malnourished or starving , all while we were trying to “win their hearts and minds.”

       *  Although the U.S. originally argued that Agent Orange was not a chemical or a biological weapon but only an herbicide and a defoliant, it turned out that because it contained dioxin, it did indeed cause serious health problems.  This determination came about after much controversy and lawsuits but today the Veterans Administration presumes that many health conditions veterans suffer are caused by exposure to Agent Orange and in addition, the Red Cross estimates that three million Vietnamese have been affected by its dioxin.

 

In 1974, Teddy went overseas for the third time. There he was the Executive Officer to the Chief of Operations for the United Nations Command, U. S. Forces Korea, and the Eighth Army.

 

Along the way, he met his future wife, Jeannie Hwang in Seoul.  “After gaining the approval of her family, not an easy task, and fighting our way through all the impediments to international marriages that existed at the time, we were married on 23 May 1975.”   They had two children, Teddy H. Sanford, III and Katherine Sarah Sanford who was adopted during a later tour in Korea in 1988. 

Return to U.S.

 

During the next four years, Teddy was based at Fort Knox, Kentucky, where he was involved with advanced a new night vision system that would allow the U.S. Army to “own the night.”  In 1979, he was transferred to Washington, D.C. for two years.

 

In February 1982 Teddy commenced a second tour in Korea, this time with the Military Advisory Group to the Republic of Korea (KMAG), which was charged with training the Republic of Korea (ROK) army basically in U. S. methods.

In the summer of 1984, Teddy’s second tour in Korea came to an end.  Furthermore, the development of heart problems signaled his Army career would also be coming to a end soon.  When asked where he’d like to go for his last assignment, he said Fort Knox again, and he went there to work at the U.S. Army Combat Developments Command. 

In November of 1985, Teddy appeared before an Army Medical Evaluation Board. As expected, they had him placed on the Permanent Disability Retired List.  His actual retirement day was 7 March 1986. 

During 22 years of active service, he was awarded the Legion of Merit, Bronze Star, Purple Heart, two Defense Meritorious Service Medals, two Army Meritorious Service Medals, two Joint Service Commendation Medals, and three Army Commendation Medals as well as the Gallantry Cross from the Republic of Vietnam.

Honeywell International Inc. is today a Fortune 100 company with a global workforce of approximately 110,000 workers, with 44,000 employed in the United States.  At the time it had significant interest at the Army’s Armor Center including $280 million in sales of tank ammunition annually. One of its major competitors had just hired a consultant to represent it at Fort Knox, so to compete, Honeywell hired Teddy.

 

He stayed with them until they spun off their defense business in 1990, at which time he was hired by the spin off and he stayed with that corporation, Alliant Techsystems, until he retired in 2009. He had been in this business for 23 years.

Sources:

1.    http://myrootsaredeep.blogspot.com/2010/04/hannah-endecott.html

2.    Autobiography written February 12, 2021, received by email on February 27, 2021. 

3.    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_Orange