..........
It was essential for medevac helicopters to drop their extraction hooks at safe sites, or more normally they would need to find a viable and secure LZ—which was often even more difficult in overgrown jungle terrain, in marginal weather or close to the enemy. The quickest way to lose a helicopter was to land it under heavy close-range fire. So it was understood, as Philip Caputo memorably remarked, that "happiness is a cold landing zone." The dustoff pilots became renowned for their courage in placing themselves and their ships in harm's way, but there was always a fine line to be drawn between an acceptable risk and a suicidal one.
Quite apart from enemy action, even the basic physical and administrative preconditions for a medevac mission were often daunting. Such problems persisted from the start to the finish of the war. In War Zone D during July 1965, General John J. Tolson recalled that 173rd Airborne Brigade members "found that they had to go to unusual lengths to clear new landing zones for medical evacuation." One company of the 1st Battalion (Airborne), 503rd Infantry, tried to clear an LZ with 100 pounds of C-4 explosives, but the GIs could make little impression on the trees. In July 1969, the 1st Battalion, 3rd Infantry, accidentally dropped a massive mahogany tree across its LZ, and the men needed a whole day to clear it away. Then again in Laos, in March 1972, according to Tolson, "even single-ship re-supply and medical evacuation missions had to be planned and conducted as a complete combat operation. This entailed a separate fire plan, allocation of escorting armed helicopters, and contingency plans for securing downed crews and aircraft." Such operations were by no means easy or instant, as might casually be assumed by the armchair strategist.
The sheer complexity of organizing many of the dustoff missions leads us on to the final price that had to be paid for them, which was surely by far the most serious and costly of all. In a nutshell, medevac often distorted the tactical shape of battles, because it was normally given priority over every other type of mission. As F.J. West put it in Small Unit Action in Vietnam, care for the wounded, and even retrieving the bodies of the dead, became a mission "more sacred than life itself." Strict attention to these considerations became elevated into a vital point of honor, as well as a precondition for high morale both among soldiers in the field and (albeit less directly) among the civilian population back home.
Both the in-country comrades in arms and the Stateside relatives of conscripted teenagers had to be reassured that the United States would do everything possible to rescue its soldiers if they should be injured or in danger of falling into enemy hands. And the men also needed reassurance that, if the very worst befell them, their bodies would not simply be left to rot in a suppurating alien jungle. This approach was excellent in itself and in many ways supremely humane. However, the requirements of medevac frequently changed the planned evolution of battles, or even led to new engagements that had not been planned at all. It became a force that worked strongly against the freedom of tacticians to organize tactics.
The need to search for a viable LZ for helicopter medevac often distracted the unit fighting on the ground (which had by definition just suffered one or more injuries) from pursuing its battle against the enemy in front. There are numerous examples of this in eyewitness narratives. In essence, what often happened was that an infantry company would advance, come under fire, lose a few men, and then start looking for and securing a suitable LZ somewhere close to—or embarrassingly often, rather far from—its immediate rear.
Unless the unit was relatively lucky, this effort might involve at least a whole platoon, which would normally constitute the company commander's all-important tactical reserve. As soon as that platoon became unable to participate in the main battle, all further offensive movement beyond the front line would naturally become unthinkable, and the general battle plan would instantly dissolve.
Arranging this medevac effort would also take up a great deal of the company commander's attention when he should have been converting the firefight into an assault and exploitation. The overall result was that the whole company would freeze and abandon its forward movement.
The alternative would have been for the whole American company to press forward without detaching any significant part of its combat strength or diverting command energy into medevac-related tasks, so that it could finish mopping up the enemy before starting to worry about its own wounded. If this system had been generally adopted, it would certainly have increased the number of U.S. soldiers who later died of their wounds. Moreover, it would arguably not have secured any more decisive strategic result against the notoriously elusive VC and NVA. However, it was the "traditional military thing" to do in any firefight, and it would surely have increased the extent and scale of many tactical victories, at least at the local level.
That might have added up to either a good or a bad thing in itself. But the new doctrine that was actually put into effect (i.e., dropping everything in order to care for the wounded) did clearly indicate that a major, if not a seismic, change had suddenly taken place in the whole art of war.
Since 1973, the minimization of American casualties has become an increasingly prominent feature of all U.S. deployments overseas. Quite apart from the traumas of Tet, Hamburger Hill and the Mayaguez incident, the need for economy in lives lost in limited wars was underlined in the public consciousness by some sharply unpalatable losses in both Beirut and Grenada in 1983, and even in the otherwise triumphant Gulf War of 1991. In 1994, the entire American peace-keeping operation in Somalia was called off after 18 U.S. soldiers had been killed in a single botched assault against one of the country's warlords, Mohammed Farah Aidid. In more recent times, the often very violent U.S. interventions in such places as the Balkans, the Sudan and Afghanistan have always been predicated upon a demand for, and an expectation of, absolutely minimal U.S. casualties. This has normally meant the use of air power or cruise missiles rather than of troops on the ground. Or if ground troops have been deployed, they have come to be very carefully protected and husbanded. Today we even seem to have reached a situation in which the dustoff itself has become almost obsolete, for the simple reason that there seem to be so few U.S. casualties to medevac.
Against this scenario we should remember that, although care for the wounded in Vietnam might often have caused a battle to be prematurely curtailed, there were also many occasions on which rescue missions for the missing or dead actually produced an escalation of the fighting. Perhaps the most spectacular example was the saga of Bat 21, a Douglas EB-66 aircraft that was shot down in 1972 in a part of the DMZ that happened to be occupied by an entire NVA division. A major 12-day battle was fought to rescue the one crew member known to have survived, and additional aircraft and helicopters were lost in the process.
More prosaic, but perhaps rather more typical, was the five-day fight for the body of Lieutenant Bill Little in November 1969. It started as a platoon action but grew until it involved two companies of the 2nd Battalion, 3rd Infantry, 10 armored vehicles and a large weight of air- and artillery-delivered ordnance. Lieutenant Little had been killed while he was trying to medevac the pointman of his recon platoon, but the rest of the platoon had then been unable to retrieve the body and had called in Charlie Company to help. The attackers encountered a strong bunker complex and were repulsed, necessitating dustoff evacuation of their own wounded. At this point, an insulting enemy voice broke into the battalion radio net to taunt the would-be rescuers, saying: "We have your lieutenant. Come and get him."
The NVA were thus using Bill Little's body as bait, and the U.S. response was eagerness to retrieve it, exactly as proffered. Without that taunt, there might not have been quite so strong a desire to assault the strongly fortified NVA area. But the action duly escalated, and a sustained air and artillery bombardment was laid upon the bunkers. After several delays, a combined attack finally was launched by both Bravo and Charlie companies, supported by what was (for Vietnam) an impressive array of armor. The whole area was then promptly evacuated by the NVA, who suffered fairly heavy losses for no further U.S. casualties. The body of Lieutenant Little was successfully recovered from its shallow grave, where it had been buried with all the respect due to a brave opponent. This action was certainly a tactical victory for the U.S. side, but it is important to remember that its inner structure had in many ways been shaped and determined not by deliberate tactical planning, but by the overriding urge to recover a single dead body.
According to the tenets of classical strategy, this sort of thing would seem to be complete nonsense. Why on earth should it matter whether a fallen American lieutenant was buried with honor in Vietnam by his enemies or in the cemetery at West Point by his family and friends? Why should the status of one body (or in other cases, of one wounded man) be allowed to change the whole course of a battle? In the 19th century, when life was cheap and few fallen warriors were even given marked graves, that sort of question would have been verging on the incomprehensible, if not the inconceivable. Even in World War II, where total U.S. losses were more than five times those suffered in Vietnam in about half the time span, it was still very much the exception, rather than the rule, for any special effort to be made to "save Private Ryan."
We have to stop and wonder just why these matters should be viewed so differently today.
Perhaps the answer lies in the perceived importance of the cause being fought for. In Vietnam, most GIs tried to execute their mission as well and as efficiently as possible. Yet many still felt a deep contempt for the Vietnamese whom they were trying to defend, reinforced by a belief that American civilians neither understood nor supported the war. Without any loss of military professionalism, they found it difficult to work up any fierce commitment to the preservation of the Republic of Vietnam. At the same time, it was correspondingly easy to feel totally devoted to the lives and welfare of one's own comrades in arms. It therefore became natural to feel, as Lanning put it, that "the people (animals) of Vietnam are not worth one drop of American blood," or that even a spectacular tactical victory, in which dozens of enemy troops were killed, was "not worth nine lives."
There was thus apparently a type of unspoken multiplier at work, whereby it was subconsciously thought to be acceptable to lose one American life for every 10 or 20 of the enemy's, but any greater sacrifice than that was perceived as something of a defeat.
This line of reasoning was, of course, encouraged by the Pentagon's strategy based on attrition and the body count, in which it was just as important to minimize American deaths as it was to maximize the enemy's. Those two goals, however, often turned out to be incompatible, because rescuing one's own wounded of-ten meant that the battle against the enemy had to be broken off at a critical time, or diverted into an unplanned direction.
Today's Educational Sources and suggestions for further reading:
Article from Vietnam Magazine
The risks you guys took.
Had a little experience (very little) in the Duc Pho area, just enough to see that it was no place to sight see, that is for sure. Wherever you went eyes were on you.
Never liked flying in helicopters much, always figured it a miracle that they didn't go down even more often than they did.
So, thanks for getting our people out. Americans are not disposable. My salute, Sir.
On This Day In History
Birthdates which occurred on April 03:
1367 Henry IV Bolingbroke Lincolnshire, King of England (1399-1413)
1569 Giovanni Battista Massarengo composer
1715 John Hanson Port Tobacco MD, 1st US President under Articles of Confederation
1783 Washington Irving New York NY, American writer (Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Rip Van Winkle)
1798 Charles D Wilkes Commander (Union Navy), died in 1877
1822 Edward Everett Hale US, clergyman/author (Man without a Country)
1823 William Marcy "Boss" Tweed corrupt NYC political boss
1837 John Burroughs writer/nature enthusiast (Burroughs Medal namesake)
1842 Ulric Dahlgren Colonel (Union volunteers), died in 1864
1858 Matthew Ricketts 1st Black man elected to Nebraska State Legislature
1860 Frederik W van Eeden Dutch utopian writer (Walden)
1885 Harry St John Philby [sheik Abdullah], British explorer
1894 Dooley Wilson Tyler TX, actor (Sam-Casablanca)
1898 George Jessel toastmaster general/entertainer (Diary of Young Comic)
1898 Henry R Luce Tengchow China, publisher (Time, Fortune, Life, 1965 Fisher Award)
1900 Camille Chamoun President of Lebanon
1904 Sally Rand US, actress/fan dancer (1933 Chicago World Fair)
1904 Iron Eyes Cody Tulsa OK, actor (Black Gold, Ernest Goes to Camp)
1907 Isaac Deutscher Polish/English historian (Stalin/Trotsky biography)
1915 Paul Touvier war criminal
1916 Herb Caen Sacramento CA, columnist (San Francisco Chronicle)
1921 Marilyn Maxwell Clarinda IA, actress (Grace-Bus Stop)
1924 Doris Day Cincinnati OH, "girl next door" actress (Pillow Talk)
1924 Marlon Brando Omaha NE, actor (On the Waterfront, A streetcar Named Desire, Godfather)
1926 Virgil Grissom Mitchell IN, Lieutenant Colonel USAF/astronaut (Merc 4, Gemini 3)
1929 Miyoshi Umeki Otaru Hokkaido Japan, actress (Best Supporting Actress Oscar-1957-Sayonara, Mrs Livingston-Courtship of Eddie's Father)
1930 Max Frankel journalist
1930 Helmut Kohl chancellor (Germany, 1982-1998 )
1933 Robert K(B-1 Bob) Dornan (Representative-Republican-CA, 1977-83, 85-97 )
1934 Jane Goodall London England, ethologist (studied African chimps)
1941 Jan Berry Los Angeles CA, rock vocalist (Jan & Dean-Deadman's Curve) died 3/04
1942 Billy Joe Royal Valdosta GA, country singer (Down in the Boondocks)
1942 Wayne Newton Roanoke VA, singer (Danke Schön)
1944 Tony Orlando New York NY, singer (& Dawn-Tie a Yellow Ribbon)
1945 Richard Manuel rock pianist/vocalist (The Band-Up on Cripple Creek)
1946 Carlos Salinas de Gortari President (México, 1988-94)
1946 John Virgo British snooker player
1947 Pat[rick] Proft Minneapolis MN, comedy writer (Naked Gun, Airplane)
1949 Lyle Alzado NFLer (Los Angeles Raiders)/actor (Oceans of Fire, Hangfire)
1955 Mick Mars [Bob Allen Dale] Terra Haute IN, guitarist (Mötley Crüe-Girls Girls)
1955 Aleksandr Nikolayevich Yablontsev Russian Lieutenant-Colonel/cosmonaut
1958 Alec Baldwin Amityville NY, actor (Joshua-Knots Landing, Beetlejuice)(STILL living in the USA)
1959 David Hyde Pierce Saratoga Springs NY, actor (Niles Crane-Fraiser)
1961 Eddie Murphy Brooklyn NY, actor (Saturday Night Live, 48 Hours, Beverly Hills Cop, Raw)
Deaths which occurred on April 03:
0628 Chosroes II emperor of Persia (579..628), murdered by his son
1287 Honorius IV [Giacomo Savelli], Italian Pope (1285-87), dies
1512 Richard Pafraet Dutch printer, dies
1525 Giovanni Rucellai Italian poet (Le Api), dies at 49
1826 Reginald Heber bishop & hymn writer, dies
1838 Francesco Antommarchi Napoleon's physician on St Helena, dies at 57
1862 James Clark Ross Arctic explorer, dies
1882 Jesse James outlaw, shot dead at 34, in St Joseph MO by Robert Ford
1901 Richard D'Oyly Carte promotor (Gilbert & Sullivan operas), dies
1936 Bruno Hauptmann convicted Lindbergh baby killer, executed
1941 André Michelin French tire manufacturer, dies at 88
1943 Conrad Veidt German/US actor (Cabinet of Dr Calgary), dies at 50
1946 Lieutenant General Masaharu Homma (responsible for Bataan Death March), executed
1956 T Kostov Bulgarian vice-premier, executed
1962 Benny "Kid" Paret US welterweight boxer, dies after fight, at 24
1971 Joseph Valachi US gangster, dies at 66
1971 Manfred Bonnington Lee [Ellery Queen], detective writer, dies at 65
1982 Warren Oates actor (East of Eden, Stoney Burke, The Wild Bunch), dies at 53
1986 Richard Manuel rock pianist/vocalist (Band), dies on 41st birthday
1988 Milton A Caniff US cartoonist (Terry & the Pirates), dies at 81
1990 Sarah Vaughan jazz singer, dies of lung cancer at 66
1991 Graham Greene British writer (3rd Man, Our man in Havana), dies at 86
1993 Pinky Lee kiddie host (Pinky Lee Show), dies of heart attack at 85
1994 Betty Furness actress/news consumer reporter (WNBC), dies at 78
1996 Carl Stokes 1st black mayor of a major US city (Cleveland OH), dies
1996 Ronald Harmon Brown Secretary of Commerce, dies in an "accident" at 54
1996 Roosevelt "Booba" Barnes bluesman, dies at 59
2002 Roy Huggins, novelists, TV writer and producer, died at age 87. (“Cheyenne,” “The Fugitive” and “The Rockford Files.”)
GWOT Casualties
Iraq
03-Apr-2003 11 | US: 11 | UK: 0 | Other: 0
US Private 1st Class Chad Eric Bales Ash Shahin Non-hostile - vehicle accident
US Specialist Donald Samuel Oaks Jr. Baghdad airport Hostile - friendly fire
US Sergeant 1st Class Randall Scott Rehn Baghdad airport Hostile - friendly fire
US Sergeant Todd James Robbins Baghdad airport Hostile - friendly fire
US Staff Sergeant Nino Dugue Livaudais SW of Haditha Dam Hostile - hostile fire - suicide bomber
US Specialist Ryan Patrick Long SW of Haditha Dam Hostile - hostile fire - suicide bomber
US Captain Russell Brian Rippetoe SW of Haditha Dam Hostile - hostile fire - suicide bomber
US Corporal Mark Asher Evnin Al Kut Hostile - hostile fire
US Corporal Erik Hernandez Silva Baghdad (SE of) Hostile - hostile fire - ambush
US Staff Sergeant Wilbert Davis Baghdad (south of) Hostile - vehicle accident
US Captain Edward Jason Korn Central part Hostile - friendly fire
03-Apr-2004 1 | US: 1 | UK: 0 | Other: 0
US Private 1st Class Geoffrey S. Morris Al Anbar Province Hostile - hostile fire
Afghanistan
A Good Day
http://icasualties.org/oif/ Data research by Pat Kneisler
Designed and maintained by Michael White
On this day...
0309 BC Origin of Seleucid Era
0419 [Etalius] ends his reign as Catholic Pope
1043 Edward the Confessor crowned king of England
1645 English parliament accept Self-Denying Ordinance
1657 English Lord Protector Cromwell refuses crown
1721 Robert Walpole becomes England's 1st Lord of the Treasury
1764 Austrian arch duke Jozef crowned himself Roman Catholic king
1776 Washington receives honorary LLD. degree from Harvard College
1783 Sweden & US sign a treaty of Amity & Commerce
1790 Revenue Marine Service (US Coast Guard), created
1848 Thomas Douglas becomes 1st San Francisco public teacher
1860 Pony Express began between St Joseph MO & Sacramento CA
1864 Skirmish at Okolona AR
1865 Union forces occupy Confederate capital of Richmond VA & Petersburg VA
1865 Battle at Namozine Church VA (Appomattox Campaign)
1868 An Hawaiian surfs on highest wave ever, he rides a 50' tidal wave
1882 Wood block alarm invented, when alarm rang, it dropped 20 wood blocks
1908 Frank Gotch wins world heavyweight wrestling championship in 2 hours
1910 Highest mountain in North America, Alaska's Mount McKinley climbed
1913 British suffragette Emily Pankhurst sentenced to 3 years in jail
1917 Lenin leaves Switzerland for Petrograd
1918 House of Representatives accepts American Creed written by William Tyler*
1919 Austria expels all Habsburgers
1922 Stalin appointed General Secretary of Communist Party
1923 2 "Black Sox" sue White Sox (unsuccessfully) for back salary
1925 Great Britain goes back to gold standard
1926 2nd flight of a liquid-fueled rocket by Robert Goddard
1926 1st performance of Jean Sibelius' 7th Symphony in C
1927 Interstate Commerce Commission transfers Ohio to Eastern time zone
1930 Ras Tafari becomes Emperor Haile Selassie of Abyssinia (Ethiopia)
1933 1st airplane flight over Mount Everest
1933 The longest North American hockey game requires a 1:44:46 overtime as Maple Leaf Ken Doraty scores to beat Canadiens 1-0
1936 Al Carr KOs Lew Massey on 1 punch, :07 of the 1st round (shortest boxing bout with gloves)
1941 Churchill warns Stalin of German invasion
1941 Rasjid al-Gailani forms pro-German regime in Iraq
1944 Supreme Court (Smith vs Allwright) "white primaries" unconstitutional
1944 British dive bombers attack battle cruiser Tirpitz
1945 Nazi's begin evacuation of camp Buchenwald
1946 Netherlands-German postal relations resume
1948 Harry Truman signs Marshall Plan ($5B aid to 16 European countries)
1949 KQW-AM in San Francisco CA changes call letters to KCBS
1949 North Atlantic Treaty, pact signed by US, Britain, France & Canada
1954 Don Perry climbs a 20' rope in under 2.8 seconds (AAU record)
1956 German war criminals Hinrichsen/Rühl/Siebens/Viebahn are freed
1958 Fidel Castro's rebels attacked Havana
1959 "Charlie Brown" by The Coasters was banned by the BBC because it contained the word "spitball."
1962 Jockey Eddie Arcaro retires after 31 years (24,092 races)
1964 US & Panamá agree to resume diplomatic relations
1965 1st atomic powered spacecraft (SNAP) launched
1966 Luna 10 orbits Moon
1966 Tom Seaver, signs with the Mets for a reported $50,000 bonus
1967 113 East Europeans attending World Amateur hockey championships in Vienna, ask for political asylum
1968 North Vietnam agrees to meet US representatives to set up preliminary peace talks
1968 Martin Luther King Jr. deliveres his "mountaintop" speech to a rally of striking sanitation workers
1970 Miriam Hargrave of England passes her drivers test on 40th try
1974 148 tornadoes are reported over an area covering a dozen states in the east, south & midwest killed approximately 315
1974 Gold hits record $197 an ounce in Paris France
1975 Bobby Fischer stripped of world chess title for refusing to defend
1977 Egyptian President Anwar Sadat's 1st meeting with President Jimmy Carter
1979 Jane M Byrne (D) elected 1st woman mayor of Chicago IL
1981 Race riots in London's Brixton area
1982 UN Security Council demands Argentina's withdrawal from Falkland Islands
1985 Vic Elliot pocketed 15,780 pool balls in 24 hours in London
1987 Bill Elliott sets NASCAR qualifying record of 212.809 mph at Talladega
1987 Chicago Cubs trade Dennis Eckersley to A's for 3 minor leaguers
1988 Mario Lemieux wins NHL scoring title, stopping Gretzky's 7 year streak
1991 "Penn & Teller - Refrigerator Tour" opens at Eugene O'Neill NYC
1991 UN Security Council adopts Gulf War truce resolution
1996 St Francis Fighting Saints scores college baseball run record 71-1
1996 Theodore Kaczynski Jr. was arrested by FBI agents and charged with being the "Unabomber".
1996 Much of North America was treated to a total lunar eclipse
2003 16th day of Operation Iraqi Freedom US Marines and infantry moved with surprising speed toward Baghdad. Central Command said there was "increasing evidence" that Saddam Hussein's regime had lost control of its fighting forces. US troop casualty totaled: 51 dead, 16 missing and 7 captured. A power blackout in Baghdad coincided with heavy artillery fire. US forces attacked Saddam Int'l. Airport.
2004 The US Postal Service unveiled a new John Wayne commemorative postage stamp
Holidays
Note: Some Holidays are only applicable on a given "day of the week"
Switzerland : Glarius Festival (1388) (Thursday)
Massachusetts : Student Government Day (Friday)
US : American Circus Day
US : Don't Go to Work Unless It's Fun Day
US : Tweed Day
National Fresh Celery Month
Religious Observances
Anglican : Commemoration of Richard, Bishop of Chichester
Christian : Holy Saturday
Religious History
1189 The Peace of Strasbourg was signed, resolving the differences between Emperor Frederick Barbarossa of Germany and Pope Clement III.
1528 In Cologne, German reformer Adolf Clarenbach, 28, was arrested for teaching Protestant (some say Anabaptist or Waldensian) doctrines. The following year, Clarenbach was burned at the stake for his faith.
1593 Birth of George Herbert, English clergyman and poet. One of his verses endures today as the hymn, "The King of Love My Shepherd Is."
1759 Anglican clergyman and hymnwriter John Newton wrote in a letter: 'I believe that love to God, and to man for God's sake, is the essence of religion and the fulfilling of the law.'
1950 Death of American hymnwriter Ira B. Wilson, 70. Associated with Lorenz Publishing in Dayton, Ohio for over 40 years, Wilson's most enduring sacred composition was "Make Me a Blessing" (aka "Out of the Highways and Byways of Life").
Source: William D. Blake. ALMANAC OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. Minneapolis: Bethany House, 1987.
Thought for the day :
"Every evening I turn my worries over to God. He's going to be up all night anyway."
*The American Creed
I believe in the United States of America as a government of the people, by the people, for the people; whose just powers are derived from the consent of the governed, a democracy in a republic, a sovereign Nation of many sovereign States; a perfect union, one and inseparable; established upon those principles of freedom, equality, justice, and humanity for which American patriots sacrificed their lives and fortunes.
"I therefore believe it is my duty to my country to love it, to support its Constitution, to obey its laws to respect its flag, and to defend it against all enemies."
–Written 1917, accepted by the United States House of Representatives on April 3, 1918.
The story is told of a painter who was commissioned to portray a run-down church. But instead of an old, tottering ruin, he painted a magnificent edifice of modern design. Through the windows could be seen an ornate collection box for the gifts of the fashionable worshipers. Above it hung a sign bearing the inscription "For Missions." Sadly, the box was covered in cobwebs. 
