Heroes Behind Headlines

Former Florida police investigator James Byrd-Williams, Sr. recounts the story of his son's murder in 2020. 44-year-old Michael Williams was an African-American man living in the mostly White college town of Grinnell, Iowa, to be near his ex-wife and kids. Occurring just weeks after the George Floyd incident, Michael Williams’ body was found strangled and burned in a ditch outside of town. Three people were later convicted.

J.B. expresses his frustration with the thoroughness of the investigation and the fact that officials and the NAACP—eager to avoid any media attention of the type recently seen in Minneapolis—denied it was a hate crime, and avoided the word 'lynching' in describing the homicide. UK newspaper The Guardian asked, “When is a lynching a lynching?”
 
 
 

Heroes Behind Headlines
Executive Producer Ralph Pezzullo
Produced & Engineered by Mike Dawson
Music provided by ExtremeMusic.com

Becky Ellis was one of her father’s eight children by four wives, and the chaos of her childhood, dominated by a haunted and difficult father, marked her and all her siblings. As a child, she suffered through her father’s paranoia about Nazis attacking them; trips to the dentist without anesthesia; and other irrational behaviors.

Only at age 89, when Becky was a grown wife and mother, did her father Staff Sgt. Louis K. Boswell finally share his wartime recollections as part of the legendary ‘Timberwolves’ – the nickname for the 104th infantry division. The ‘Timberwolves’ were deployed in northwestern Europe and saw almost 200 straight days of brutal fighting through France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and western Germany, including participating in the Battle of the Bulge. The group saw an extreme level of casualties, and Becky’s father described how he survived and how it felt when he returned stateside, with what was then an undiagnosed case of severe PTSD.

This compelling account is a glimpse inside military families who must welcome home a traumatized parent. Personally liberated by finally solving the mystery of her father, Becky shared her story in her book, “Little Avalanches,” and continues to work with military families coping with PTSD.

Heroes Behind Headlines
Executive Producer Ralph Pezzullo
Produced & Engineered by Mike Dawson
Music provided by ExtremeMusic.com

Admiral Robert Stiles Harward, Jr. grew up in a Navy family, living overseas, and eventually joined up himself as a means to pay for college. Adm. Harward ultimately went on to an amazing career and leading the U.S. Navy Seals, and the Naval Special Warfare Group Task Force KBAR. He explains his amazingly positive view of the world and philosophy of team collaboration and information sharing, which he calls "The Gouge," with our host and in his book of the same name.


Heroes Behind Headlines
Executive Producer Ralph Pezzullo
Produced & Engineered by Mike Dawson
Music provided by ExtremeMusic.com

Did you miss it? One of the most popular episodes we ever released from Season One is back for an encore listen:

Russian and Chinese-backed rebels were making deadly headway in Oman during its Civil War of the early 1970s. In support of the Western-allied Sultan, the British Army secretly deployed nine operators from its most elite unit, the SAS. HBH is honored to have our guest, Pete Winner, with a special appearance by Sekonaia ‘Tak’ Takevisi, two of the nine SAS heroes who took on over 400 Omani rebels at the Battle of Mirbat.

At stake on July 19th 1972 was more than just a single battle for a small town on the Gulf of Oman. Due to Mirbat’s geographic significance, had the SAS fallen the communist rebels would have taken hold of the region – and controlled the global shipping routs for Middle Eastern oil.

Statues of individual soldiers are rare, but due to his heroism at the Battle of MIrbat, there are not one but two statues of Sergeant Talaiasi Labalaba. One unveiled in 2009 at the SAS headquarters in Herefordshire, and another in 2018 by Harry and Megan, Duke and Duchess of Sussex, in Fiji - which at the time of Labalaba’s enlistment was still a British colony.

Pete Winner is the author of his bestselling memoir "SOLDIER, I," which he wrote with Michael Kennedy.

Mark Paul’s outrageous adventure,“The Greatest Gambling Story Ever Told,"  is the hilarious story of two buddies who won't give up on their stroke of luck. While the horse is the real hero of the story—a filly who broke the odds when she won the Kentucky Derby out of sheer heart. Mark and his friend Dino determine to try, along with a third gambling buddy, to go collect their winnings of over a million dollars from a racetrack in Tijuana owned by a cartel... 


Heroes Behind Headlines
Executive Producer Ralph Pezzullo
Produced & Engineered by Mike Dawson
Music provided by ExtremeMusic.com

David Crow had a childhood like no other—with a mentally troubled mother and a criminally sociopathic father who raised his kids on a Navajo reservation, despite not actually being Native-American. David describes how his father tried to train him to be his criminal accomplice, until as an adult David broke away and ultimately built a successful life as a lobbyist in Washington, D.C. 

David's book, “The Pale-Faced Lie,” describes the scrapes and adventures he experienced.

Heroes Behind Headlines
Executive Producer Ralph Pezzullo
Produced & Engineered by Mike Dawson
Music provided by ExtremeMusic.com

Bobbie Myers served for years as a Florida policeman, de-stressing from his first responder experiences by living at the beach and surfing. Suddenly, after dramatically saving a drowning boy, his PTSD was triggered. He sought help and found a unique way to heal himself—repairing the headstones and tending the gravesites of fallen heroes, soldiers, and others whose resting places had fallen into disrepair and whose remarkable lives had been forgotten to the mists of time.

Now he devotes a portion of his life every year to travel across the country, visiting different graveyards and cemeteries to help maintain these resting places. Bobby shares stories of discovered heroes via social media at “Our Heroes' Headstones.” 


Heroes Behind Headlines
Executive Producer Ralph Pezzullo
Produced & Engineered by Mike Dawson
Music provided by ExtremeMusic.com

When he started playing video game “Red Dead Redemption 2”, (which has sold over 64 million copies) Professor Tore Olsson from the University of Tennessee was inspired to use the game's setting in the American West to inspire his students and provoke a conversation about the real history of this romanticized era. And his curriculum has been a wild success.

Tore explains how even though the game isn’t perfectly historically accurate, it does raise themes and ideas that are critical to a real understanding of a critical period in American history.

Heroes Behind Headlines
Executive Producer Ralph Pezzullo
Produced & Engineered by Mike Dawson
Music provided by ExtremeMusic.com

Previous HBH guests, private security contractors Dean and Alana Stott are back—this time reporting on their work last October, after the terrorist attacks in Israel. Charged with helping Americans and others get their loved ones home,  Dean describes arriving in Israel for the first time ever, and how they navigated operating on the ground in a country in crisis—solving for airline cancellations and price-gouging, and making local friends quickly to identify possible land routes out of Israel for fleeing foreigners. 

Heroes Behind Headlines
Executive Producer Ralph Pezzullo
Produced & Engineered by Mike Dawson
Music provided by ExtremeMusic.com

Three lives collide and transform in wartime: The Japanese fighter pilot, Mitsuo Fuchida, who led the attack on Pearl Harbor; the U.S. pilot Jake DeShazer, who bombed Tokyo in retaliation and became a Japanese POW; and Peggy Covell, an American woman who felt compelled to help the Japanese-Americans interned in the U.S., despite her missionary family having been murdered by the Japanese military.

Though the two men never met Peggy, her generosity of spirit inspired both of them, and they ultimately became lifelong friends both publicly decrying the morality of war. DeShazer went on to write a book about his experience as a POW who befriended his jailer, and his unexpected love for the Japanese people—which became a bestseller in that country. Fuchida also wrote two memoirs, “For That One Day” and “From Pearl Harbor to Calvary.” Martin Bennett shares this unbelievable true story, as detailed in his book, “Wounded Tiger.”

Heroes Behind Headlines
Executive Producer Ralph Pezzullo
Produced & Engineered by Mike Dawson
Music provided by ExtremeMusic.com