Army Combat Medics in the Vietnam War: Nine Personal Accounts (McFarland, 185 pp., $29.95, paper; $19.99, Kindle) is comprised the stories of men who served in I Corps from 1967-1971. Since each medic’s account is written by the medic himself, there is a different voice, a different perspective, and a different experience in each story.
Some have humorous elements; some have critical elements. All have tragic elements, but all exemplify the courage and commitment of these young men, almost all of whom qualified for the Combat Medic Badge, which is awarded to medics who perform their duties under fire.
Since the stories appear unedited, the work of Harry Spiller—a Marine who served two Vietnam War tours and is the author of many books about the military—might have been limited to finding the medics and gathering and guiding their stories.
The stories have some common threads of interest, including the fact that most of the medics felt that their medical training at Ft. Sam Houston was inadequate. It was “sorely lacking in preparing us for the rigors of combat,” one man said. “Training was for what happened in Korea instead of Vietnam.”
The men uniformly praised good leaders and criticized bad ones, including an unidentified battalion commander who put in for and received a Silver Star, because during an attack he foolishly tried to save his personal latrine. Another medic refused to write up a captain for a Purple Heart for a splinter in his butt sustained during a mortar attack. (This reviewer had no love in Vietnam for an officer who received a Purple Heart after stepping on the business end of a rake on the ground, which hit him in the head as he ran for cover during a mortar attack.)
Each story ends with the medic briefly telling what happened to him after the war. Many had late PTSD. Some sought friendship and comfort at unit reunions. Almost all felt guilty they had not done enough in Vietnam. One medic, Leo Flory, wrote a full-length war memoir, 101st Airborne Combat Medic, which I reviewed on these pages.
This book is important reading in that it makes clear that these 19- and 20-year-olds—many of whose lives were unpromising up to their Vietnam War service—came from a variety of backgrounds and states, rose to the occasions. and became competent, unselfish, and heroic medics.
Spiller, who wrote a book similar about Vietnam War Navy corpsmen, notes that, if treated in the field, a wounded soldier had an 85 percent chance of survival. How many lives must combat medics have saved? Some 1,100 medics were killed in Vietnam and 19 received the Medal of Honor, eight of them posthumously.
I recommend this book, which tells the stories of nine combat medics who survived.
–Harvey Weiner
Books in Review II 