The NIGHTMARES of Combat Medics In Vietnam

On the 8th of November 1965, 400 paratroopers of the First Battalion Airborne, 5003rd Infantry, 173rd Airborne Brigade, walked into an ambush by,200 Vietkong in war zone D.

49 Americans were killed.

The battalion medic, Specialist Five Lawrence Joel, 37 years old, father of two, was shot twice.

He treated 13 wounded men after his second wound, sealed a collapsing lung with a plastic bag, and worked casualties for 24 hours straight.

His MOS classified him as non-combat personnel.

He received the Medal of Honor, the first awarded to a medic in the Vietnam War.

He was also the first living black American to receive it since 1898.

His job description said he was not a combatant.

The 49 dead paratroopers around him said otherwise.

The combat medic’s job in Vietnam required him to do the one thing every other soldier was trained never to do.

Stand up and run toward gunfire.

In ambush conditions under triple canopy with Vietkong positions dug in on three sides and hugging tactics designed to keep Americans inside their own artillery danger close.

The medic was the most visible moving target on the battlefield.

He ran upright.

He carried a shoulder bag everyone recognized.

He moved toward screaming.

The pipeline that produced him was 10 weeks long.

The advanced individual training course at Fort Sam Houston, Texas.

The shake and bake taught injection, spinting, litter carries, and field hygiene.

Trainees practiced IVs on each other with saline.

They watched training films.

Ben Sherman, an army medic and conscientious objector, arrived in country and was sent straight to the morg tent.

New medics get the morg tent first, they told him.

It’ll pop your cherry.

Nothing at Fort Sam Houston prepared a 20-year-old for sucking chest wounds in monsoon rain.

Nothing prepared him for abdominal evisceration under fire, or for the moment he realized the man he was bandaging had stopped breathing while he worked.

On the 20th of March 1967, Specialist four Charles Hagamister, 20 years old, three months into his tour, was the medic for a platoon of Alpha Company, first of the fifth cavalry, First Cavalry Division Air Mobile.

At nightfall, his platoon moved through a graveyard outside Tan Village, Bendin Province.

They were hit from three sides by entrenched NVA.

The platoon leader took a round to the head.

Men went down in the first seconds.

Hagammeister was kneeling over the wounded lieutenant bandaging a head wound in the dark when a sniper opened on him at close range.

That image, a kid with 10 weeks of medical training, three months in country on his knees in a graveyard with fire pouring in from three directions, was the combat medic’s Vietnam in a single frame.

The training that made Hagammeister was the same training that made every dock in Vietnam.

Eight weeks of basic then 10 weeks at Fort Sam Houston.

The graduates were 18 to 22.

Their weapon system was the M3 medical instrument and supply case, a rubberized canvas trifold, three zipper compartments, shoulder slung.

Inside field dressings, curlex and ace bandages, heists, scissors, tourniquets, airway tubes, morphine ceretses, single-use quarter grain, serum albammen with IV sets and sutures.

That bag was everything standing between a wounded man and death.

And it ran out.

The total load told the rest of the story.

Water, batteries, rations, personal kit, ammunition for the M1911.45 caliber pistol he was issued or the M16 he carried illegally, and often extra mortar rounds or M60 belts to lighten teammates.

North of 60 lb through jungle that never dried.

By 1965, medics across the army had stopped wearing the Red Cross brasard, stopped painting the cross on their helmets, changed their aid bags to look generic.

A former Air Force medic put it plainly, “You were given the choice of wearing the medical red cross or not wearing it.

I chose not to wear it because it would make me a likely target.”

The men whose job was to save lives had to disguise the fact that saving lives was their job.

A rifleman’s purpose was to kill the enemy and stay alive.

A medic’s purpose was to run toward the place where men were dying, unarmed, upright, carrying 60 lbs and keep them breathing long enough for a helicopter that might not come.

On the 8th of November 1965, Specialist 5 Lawrence Joel walked that arithmetic into war zone D.

Joel was the battalion medic for the First Battalion Airborne, 5003rd Infantry, 173rd Airborne Brigade.

400 paratroopers air assaulting into triple canopy 17 mi north of Benua.

He was 37 years old.

Korean War veteran, father of two from Winston Salem, North Carolina.

The lead squad hit an ambush by 1200 Vietkong of the 271st regiment.

Nearly every man in the point element was killed or wounded in the first burst.

Joel took a round in the right calf.

He bandaged himself, self-administered morphine, and kept moving.

A second round hit his right thigh.

He went down.

He got up.

When his medical supplies ran out, he tore a plastic bag open and sealed it over the sucking chest wound of a paratrooper whose lung was collapsing.

An improvised chest seal made from nothing in the dirt under fire.

Specialist for Randy Iikoff ran ahead of Joel, laying down covering fire so the unarmed medic could work.

That arrangement, someone else fighting so the medic could keep saving, would be tested to its absolute limit 5 years later at a special forces camp 3 miles from the Le Oceanian border.

That story is coming.

Joel worked casualties for 24 hours.

49 American paratroopers died around him.

He finally collapsed and was evacuated to hospitals in Saigon and Tokyo.

What Hagamister did in that graveyard answered the question the war kept asking every medic.

What do you do when treating the wounded isn’t enough to save them?

He picked up the lieutenant’s rifle, killed the sniper, killed three NVA soldiers silhouetted against a burning hooch, silenced a machine gun position.

Then he ran through fire to a neighboring platoon, brought reinforcements forward, positioned them, and went back to treating wounded until the perimeter was secure.

He was 20 years old.

“More fire than I had ever seen in my life was coming in,” Hagammeister said later.

We were surrounded right away.

Your reaction to stuff like that.

You do what you’re trained to do.

Hagammeister didn’t just save wounded.

He understood that the wounded would die unless the tactical situation changed.

So, he changed it.

A medic who picked up a rifle and cleared the killing zone so he could go back to being a medic.

President Johnson presented his Medal of Honor at the Pentagon on the 14th of May, 1968.

Private First Class Thomas Bennett never picked up a rifle.

He wouldn’t.

Bennett, 21, from Morgantown, West Virginia, was a deeply religious Southern Baptist and a conscientious objector who registered as willing to serve.

He became a medic with Bravo Company, first of the 14th Infantry, the Golden Dragons, Fourth Infantry Division.

On the 9th of February 1969, at Chupa in Pu Province, his platoon walked into a three-day fight.

On the 9th and 10th, Bennett repeatedly ran into fire to pull wounded back.

His sergeant started Silverstar paperwork that first night.

On the 11th, the third day, a wounded man lay cut off by sniper fire across an open lane the company believed impossible to cross.

Bennett crossed it.

He was killed in the open.

Sergeant McB wrote afterward, “Nothing stops him.”

He said he wasn’t afraid at all, that he was trained to be a medic and that was his job.

He said the Lord would protect him and if he dies, it’s God’s will.

Theostumous Medal of Honor was presented to his parents on what would have been Tom Bennett’s 23rd birthday.

He was the second conscientious objector in American history to receive it after Desmond Doss.

Then came Dax Sang.

On the 1st of April 1970, Sergeant Gary Burchch, 22, Special Forces Medic, Detachment B24, Company B, Fifth Special Forces Group, woke to three NVA regiments hitting Camp Dax Sang at dawn.

12 Americans, 400 Montana yard strikers, 2300 civilian dependents, 3 m from the La Oceanian border, a 122 mm rocket fragment struck by Kirch’s spine.

He was paralyzed from the waist down.

He ordered his Montana medical assistants, Deo and Fair, to carry him one shoulder each.

For the rest of that day, they ran him from casualty to casualty under mortar and rocket fire that never stopped.

He was hit a second time by shrapnel while carrying a wounded American officer.

A third time while giving mouthto-mouth to a Montenard fighter, a fourth time shot in the stomach.

Then Deo threw his body over by Kirch as an RPG exploded at close range.

Deo was killed, shielding the medic who was shielding everyone else.

Joel needed Iikov to lay down fire so he could work.

Burchch needed Deo and Fair to carry him.

The arrangement, someone fighting so the medic could save, cost Deo his life.

Burchch fought from his stretcher with a machine gun until he lost consciousness.

He spent six months at Valley Forge Army Hospital.

Five decades later, he said, “I still recall the grit of debris in the air.

I can smell the smoke, hear the screams.”

The claim that the NVA were trained to shoot the medic first has been repeated for 50 years.

No capture training manual, no doctrinal directive ordering it has ever been found.

But VC ambush doctrine emphasized maximum casualties in the opening volley.

VC death squads assassinated over 36,000 South Vietnamese medical workers, teachers, and village officials between 1957 and 1973.

And the arithmetic was self-evident.

The unarmed man sprinting upright into the open towards screaming wounded was the highest value target on any battlefield.

The NVA did not need a written order.

They could see it.

US medics were convinced they were targeted, convinced enough to drop the Red Cross.

And the body count gives that conviction weight.

What a 10-week trained medic could not do was open a chest cavity, manage a severe head wound, or save an abdominal evisceration case more than 30 minutes from a surgical hospital.

When dust off helicopters couldn’t reach them, and dust off aircraft were lost to hostile fire at 3.3 times the rate of all other helicopter missions in Vietnam, the medic and the wounded waited.

Sometimes waiting was all there was.

Every on every modern soldier, tourniquet, heatic gauze, chest seal, is a Vietnam medic’s missing tool.

Tactical combat casualty care, now the global battlefield standard, was built from Vietnam era data, proving that extremity hemorrhage was the leading preventable cause of death on the battlefield.

The case fatality rate among the wounded dropped from 15.8% in Vietnam to 9.4% in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Vietnam medic died from an absence the next generation was built to correct.

Lawrence Joel shot twice, 13 men treated after his second wound, a chest seal made from a plastic bag, survived the war.

When they asked him about the Medal of Honor, he said, “I just wish I could have done more.

I never say that I deserved the medal.

That’s just not for me to say.

It was just my job.”

19 Medals of honor, 10ostumous, approximately, 1100 Army medics, and 645 Navy Corman killed in action in a job classified as non-combat.