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"'You can never tell anyone. Ever.' at's what I was told," says Williams, who turned 100 last year. He will soon be traveling from his home in Escondido to Washington, D.C., to receive the Medal of Honor, the military's highest award, given to those who distinguish themselves "through conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of life above and beyond the call of duty." Williams never even told his wife or Navy pilot brother about the incident until the records from the Korean War were officially declassified in 2002. "My brother didn't learn about it until later. We were at Miramar, talking with a Marine brigadier general. Somebody there was aware of [the dogfight] and asked me to talk about it, so I said okay. My brother was in the group and that was the first he heard of it," Williams says with a laugh. When asked what his wife said when she first heard, he smiles and replies, "'Oh, Royce.'" Although Williams' heroics were erased from U.S. records, they were documented in Soviet archives, and after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, word of his exploits began to leak out. It was Soviet records that confirmed six of the seven MiGs Williams encountered never returned to base. "at's what triggered it all," Williams says, referring to the campaign waged over the last three decades by those who have known what he did that day to award him the Medal of Honor. Williams served in the Navy for a total of 37 years, retiring as a captain in 1980. e official records from that time stated that he shot down one enemy plane and damaged another, neither of which were identified as Soviet. In January 2023, Williams received the Navy Cross, from then- Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro, and this past December, Congress passed the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act, which removed any time constraints in considering Williams for this highest of military honors. "...luckily, I got into the clouds and we lost sight of each other. My next thought was how bad off am I. Am I going to have to jump out of this airplane? Even in my immersion suit I would last maybe 20 minutes. So I stayed with it; flew instruments. I was thinking I might have to jump at any moment, but that didn't happen. I just let on down until I was underneath the clouds, but then I see this ring of ships. e task force was in general quarters, expecting attack from the MiGs. eir guns were free, meaning they could shoot at any unidentified airplane. I was unidentified and they shot at me. But my commanding officer was just taking off. He saw what was going on and called off the destroyers. [Still,] I didn't have the ability to maneuver over and come back and align with the ship … I never heard of this before, but the captain turned the ship to line up with me. I came in under landing signal officer control, caught the number three wire, and it was pretty much normal from that point." Williams with U.S. Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro after receiving the Navy Cross in January 2023 @ranchandcoast RANCH & COAST MAGAZINE FEBRUARY 2026 37 Two F9 Panthers over Korea