American Medics Aid Wounded Enemy GIs
(EDITOR’S NOTE:
Charles Black,
Enquirer military writer, had returned home after four months in Viet
Nam. He was with men of the 1st Cavalry
Division
during many of their recent engagements with Communist guerrillas, and
his
articles on the war will continue in The Enquirer daily.)
By CHARLES BLACK
Enquirer Military Writer
After prowling over the
positions of the North Vietnamese battalion which the 1st Cavalry
attack had
surprised on the Tae River, the patrol from Capt. John Fox’s Company A,
2nd
Battalion, 12th Cavalry moved back to the company’s position where the
day’s work
was being planned.
Fox said Lt. Col. Kenneth
Ingram was moving his battalion headquarters and more companies into
the
landing zone where the attack had started the previous morning, about a
mile
back through the open woods where the battle had been fought.
American casualties had been
light, the official term used to describe the deaths or injuries of a
few good
men and good friends and a term concerned only with numbers, not with
the
impact of the loss.
There is no adequate term to
describe this impact. It is a private
and grim struggle every soldier and everyone who is closely associated
with
soldiers must meet - laying aside the overpowering feeling of loss in
order to
meet the next day’s events and cope with them.
Morning Chores
I found that the morning
probably would be spent in securing the area, hauling out captured
weapons and
medical supplies and getting ready for a sweep in the apparent
direction the
PAVN battalion had headed when it fled the fight.
An air mobile operation is
never static, and it was almost a certainty that Lt. Col. Harlow Clark
had
other operations already under way as he bounded battalions and
artillery out
into the woods in search of the North Vietnamese Army units he was
fighting.
Few Last Words
I shook hands all around,
had a few last words with Lt. Bill Schiebler, of whom I had become a
very close
friend in recent weeks, and walked off through the woods toward the
landing
zone.
Helicopters were buzzing
in and out of the field back
there. Two Chinooks had already picked
up the choppers which had been disabled by hits, and there were a few
infantry
patrols and working parties coming back and forth.
It was easy to keep moving in the right direction.
About 50 feet from the last
sight of Company A, however, some of the risk of walking through these
woods
was emphasized. Two North Vietnamese
soldiers who had stayed in camouflaged spider holes suddenly popped up
and
began firing at anyone in the open, including me. They
both had automatic weapons, one a Russian rifle and the
other a Chinese submachinegun.
A quick burst of M-16 fire
dropped them.
One was hit in the chest and
throat and died at once. The other had
two creases on his temple and died later in the afternoon after being
treated
by a medic in the field, evacuated to the battalion aid station for
further
treatment, and finally being helicopter-lifted back to the field
hospital at
Camp Holloway. There a surgeon and a
full team of medics tried to save him.
I recount this because it
was a series of efforts on the part of Americans to save a wounded
enemy who
was obviously a hopeless patient - wounds were too serious for any
chance of
recovery.
Attitude Typical
This attitude toward the
question of prisoners is typical in American troops.
There have been isolated
instances of untypical actions, and they were reported in accounts from
the
battles involved. Those came in the
heat of battle when anger and grief struck home in the midst of a
violent situation.
When killing is going on as
a means of survival it is hard to pick the correct niceties to observe. Wounded PAVNs snipe and fight, as do wounded
Americans. Wounded and unwounded PAVNs
sometimes attempt to trick men into an ambush situation by pretending
surrender.
Above all, a soldier’s
reactions are hair-trigger and violent in the midst of a fight. Few things cause a quicker reaction than the
face of the enemy.
Treat Prisoners Well
Usually, Americans not only
take prisoners but treat them well. In
fact, the soldiers realize that the intelligence those prisoners give
when
questioned is far more harmful to the enemy than any other
consideration.
I caught a Huey out of the
field. Four soldiers had brought the
dying North Vietnamese down the trail and loaded him on the same
chopper. He lay in a litter and the crew
chief, Sp5
John Blake, kept glancing at him suspiciously when his hands moved. Once he pulled the poncho covering the
soldier up over the boy’s chest to shield it from the wind, then shook
his head
and shouted at me:
“Just a kid. They
are sending them down to die for
nothing. They can’t win and they should
know it. I wonder how many more they
will send down here to get killed before it’s finished?”
I couldn’t answer that, so
we talked about the vast quantity of weapons and medical supplies and
the large
number of prisoners who had been taken.
‘Willing to Talk’
“Those guys are all willing
to talk,” Blake said. “They aren’t what
I expected.” They don’t seem to know
too much, but what they know they are willing to talk about.
“Maj. Billy Williams (of the
First Squadron Ninth Cavalry) captured three of them who waved his
chopper down
in a field,” he said. “They were
starving and tired and said they had been trying to get captured for
three
days.”
I found later that Williams
landing to pick up the trio, which included a loquacious lieutenant who
was
exceedingly valuable to intelligence specialists, when they all made
for his
copper on a dead run - carrying their weapons.
“They piled in, weapons and
all, like drowning men getting into a boat,” Williams told me later. “My crew chief was grabbing those
submachineguns away from them like a drowning man grabbing for a boat,
too.”
First Blood
He had drawn the very first
blood of the campaign on this place the day the brigade moved out,
according to
Lt. Col. John B. Stockton, his commander.
Three other PAVNs had fled and opened fire on the chopper after
it picked
up the three prisoners and Williams had finished them with a strafing
run.
I met Williams and Capt.
John Oliver, the rifle platoon commander from Bravo Troop, back at
Catecka tea
plantation as I walked away from the helicopter to see what else was
going to
happen.
“I think Bullwhip 6 (Stockton’s
nickname because of his radio call sign) has something laid on you
don’t want
to miss,” Oliver said. “You spend the
night here and get some sleep and Russ Bronson, will get you in on it
in the
morning.”
Capt. Oliver had been an
outstanding figure in the previous day’s events on the Tae River. I decided that if he was going out on
“something” that it was probably as interesting as could be, so I
hunted up
Capt. Bronson and took him up on an offer he had made concerning
loaning me a
place in his tent and the use of an air mattress.
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