What difference does it makes to the dead, the orphans and the homeless whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?
—Mahatma Gandhi
Normal daytime medivac, Hoi An “International” air strip 1969.
We had been lying in a washed-out sandy trench alongside the Hoi An military runway for what seemed like an eternity.
Peering cautiously above the rim of that hole, I could see the tracer rounds and parachute flares from a nearby battle, but that fighting was someone else’s hell. My hell was at the bottom of the pit.
The bright starlit night and the flares overhead only accentuated the horror. Four badly wounded South Vietnamese soldiers were lying just a few meters from my feet, their lower bodies mangled and bleeding uncontrollably despite the best efforts of a South Vietnamese medic.
Based on the damage, I assumed that this patrol had triggered a Bouncing Betty mine, the kind engineered to spring up out of the ground and explode at waist level. At that height, the shrapnel was dispersed enough to disembowel an entire squad rather than just the man who triggered it.
Or maybe this carnage had come from an American-made Claymore mine. It didn’t matter—whatever it was, it had done its job well.
As an Army medic, I’d been brought out to the airstrip along with a radioman to assess the situation and call in a U.S. helicopter to evacuate the wounded if needed. Obviously, this time, it would be needed.
Three of the men looked as if their lower bodies had been ripped open with meat cleavers. As hard as the Vietnamese medic worked, the bleeding didn’t stop. I gave him what bandages I had and a tourniquet I carried in my medical aid bag and he used them as proficiently as he could.
The other soldier was the worst. He must have been the one who stepped on the mine, because it had taken off both of his legs above the knee. Everyone’s eyes, even those of his wounded comrades, fixated on him.
If there had been any mercy that night, the trauma and shock of the wounds would have knocked this man out. Instead, he lay awake, staring up at the stars, the flares and the tracers. I had been in Nam long enough to recognize that glassiness in the human eye—a sign that death is stalking. He had the look, but that night death would not come quickly.
And then the awful motion started. This half-soldier began to lift his stumps in the air and examine them. He did it slowly, purposefully, repetitively, raising and then lowering them. It was horrible. The chatter on the radio began to increase in volume and intensity as the radioman desperately called for the Medivac chopper.
Summoning a Medivac liftoff was usually pretty mechanical. The radioman would call in the location, the security situation, and the number and disposition of the wounded. Most of the time, a helicopter would be circling above you before you knew it. But not this awful night.
Somewhere out there among the tracers and the flares, Americans were wounded and dying, making four Vietnamese casualties a very low priority for Medivac. The radio operator pleaded to the communications center in our compound back in Hoi An, begging for a chopper. Failing at this, he began to curse and threaten. All the while the half-soldier kept raising and lowering his bloodied, bandaged stumps.
I put my hand on my .45 caliber pistol and began thinking the unthinkable for a medic—taking a life, rather than saving one. What were the odds that the half-soldier would make it out of this pit alive? And even if he did, what would his life be like in his country? The ARVN—the South Vietnamese Army—threw out their broken soldiers like garbage. There was a street in Da Nang near my headquarters lined with thousands of these limbless, obsolete soldiers. They sat in groups talking, smoking, arguing, begging, and waiting. But God only knows what they were waiting for, since the street they lived on led to nowhere. There was no future for such half-soldiers in Vietnam.
The radio operator stared at me through the darkness as I nervously played with the flap holding my pistol in place. He knew what I was contemplating—a quick, short blast of mercy. Instead, I moved my hand away, swore at the radioman and begged him to do whatever he could to get these men out. I began to focus on the firefight off in the distance and avoided the carnage in the pit, as if my staring into the darkness could will the chopper to arrive. The brutal Asian heat seemed to freeze time.
At one point, the half-soldier stopped raising his stumps. We all thought he was dead, but soon the heavy lifting started again.
The radioman finally got a reply that help was on the way. Simultaneously I heard the rotor blades of the incoming Medivac. Time accelerated as I picked up a hand-held strobe light and ran to the center of the corrugated, single-strip runway. I held the powerful flashing beam over my head with one hand and cradled my M-3 grease gun with the other, wanting the pilot to see the face of a “friendly” on the ground even though it might expose me to enemy fire.
Fortunately, no shots rang out, and as the chopper was touching down, the radioman and the Vietnamese medic ran to get the wounded out of the pit and inside the helicopter. The last man out of the pit was the man with no legs. The crew chief of the chopper told us to take him off his stretcher and place him on one already bolted into the helicopter. As we hoisted him up, the prop blast from the helicopter blades shook the stretcher, spraying me with his blood. Then the chopper lifted off.
Without remembering how I got there, I found myself climbing down from my truck back at the Hoi An Military Assistance Command/Vietnam (MAC/V12) compound. As I passed the radio shack, a radioman came out and told me that the legless man had died on the way to Da Nang. The pilot called it in. The pilot also wanted to know why “we had waited so long to evacuate the wounded.”
I was numb. I shook my head and walked away from the radio operator wishing that the sky pilot had been sitting in that awful pit with me the last few hours. The sun was just coming up as I went back to my quarters. I sat in my blood-soaked uniform, drank bourbon until the pain went away, and cried until I could cry no more.
My ghosts, especially the half-man from 1969, came to visit me in the night for years. For the most part, I managed to keep them walled up in the dark recesses of my mind, but the dead always seemed to return. And they were waiting for me in Angola.
I went there in 1997 as part of an international effort seeking ways to reduce or eliminate civilian injuries from buried land mines. Twenty years of war in this country in southwestern Africa had sown 10 million land mines buried among 10 million people, creating a country of the limbless. In Angola you can’t walk down any city street or visit any village or school without being confronted by the hobbling victims of these mines. My work in Angola made it impossible to forget that long-ago night in Vietnam—and now, I was adding to the horror with new experiences.
I remember the face of a little girl in a refugee camp in Angola’s Bie Province. She was about 10 years old, had only one leg, and walked on crutches.
I thought of Kara, my own daughter, growing up in America. What would it be like if some awful thing, buried in the ground years ago, had ripped a limb off her? What if she had to lie in a pit for hours waiting for help to arrive?
Still, if anything like that should happen to my daughter, there would at least be hope. The little girl in Angola had none of that, only the prospect of a life of begging on village streets, an empty life on a journey, down a street, that most likely would go nowhere.
Young refugee mine victim, Bie Province, Angola.
12 U.S. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV) was a joint-service command of the United States Department of Defense. MACV was created on 8 February 1962. MACV was first implemented to assist the Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) Vietnam, controlling every advisory and assistance effort in Vietnam. https://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Military Assistance_Command,_Vietnam.