When I saved as an RTF, made a change and resaved and RTF, it STILL retained Heading Styles. So I tried ODT and that worked.

Also, there are some Macro Packages out there like Payne, Softwise (now called Innova), Legal MacPac, LegalBar, etc. that have a button that quickly converts all styles to direct formatting.

I *thought* that there was a feature in Word that would strip the styles, just like it can strip other metadata in a document. I looked but can't find it. So without a purchased macro package, I don't think Word has anything to do it natively. Microsoft Fail.