slatten49 Loc: Lake Whitney, Texas

'Beloved by their fellow grunts, corpsmen and medics are the first responders for Marines and soldiers wounded on the battlefield. Here are the first-hand accounts of three decorated 'Docs' who provided life-saving aid in Vietnam.' All were taken from this month's VFW magazine, and all three will be contained in this thread, for continuity's sake.
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By Jerome Greer Chandler

The scene could have come from the movies. May 21, 1969: 19-year-old Navy Hospital Corpsman Micheal Kuklenski was three weeks deep into his Vietnam tour...on patrol with Alpha Co., 1st Bn., 7t Marines, 1sr Marine Div., when he heard a land mine go off. Almost simultaneously, he saw something tumble over his head. It was a boot, and in it part of a lower leg.

"Corpsman up," came the yell. Three men were down, one of them dead. They lay across an open field. Kuklenski starting out across it to render aid. Already there was the company's senior corpsman, Jim Goss.

One of the surviving Marines, a former athlete, had lost both legs below the knees. Goss and Kuklenski tied off what was left to stop the bleeding, then administered morphine.

Suddenly, the critically-wounded Marine broke into song. It was his birthday. "He's singing Happy Birthday," remembers Kuklenski, a VFW Department of Texas member and retired businessman in suburban Dallas. "I'm trying to save his life...and keep some composure."

A week later, the conscientious objector corpsman's composure would be put to the ultimate test.

May 29, 1969: Alpha Company set an ambush for North Vietnamese Army regulars, 30 of who had been using a trail on a regular basis. Unbeknownst to the Marines, the NVA saw this and countered with an ambush of their own. Instead of the usual 30 NVA, more than three times that many showed up.

"They pretty much wiped out our unit," Kuklenski said. Seventy percent of those in his unit were k**led or wounded. Kuklenski was one of them. Three separate times he was hit, incurring wounds to both arms and both legs.

Unable to walk, the powerful fireplug of a man (he was a former star guard on the Dallas Jesuit High School football team) pulled himself along with his elbows treating the wounded as he went, remembering all along the mantra of corpsmen and medics alike: 'clear' the airway, stop the bleeding, prevent of treat for shock.'

His deeds earned him the Silver Star.

According to U.S. Navy Bureau of Medicine and Surgery Historian Andre Sobocinski, more than 10,000 Navy hospital corpsman served with Marines during Vietnam. Of those, 645 were k**led in action and more than 3,300 wounded.

Sanders Marble, PhD., is senior historian, History Branch, of the U.S. Army's Medical Department (AMEDD) Center of History and Heritage at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas. He said, "There are no clear statistics on how many {Army} medics deployed to Vietnam."

There are, however, crystal clear stats as to how many medical personnel in Vietnam were awarded the nation's highest comendation for bravery. According to the Medal of Honor Society, 259 medals were conferred for actions during the Vietnam War. Twenty of them went to medics, corspmen and the like...one out of every 13 conferred.

slatten49 Loc: Lake Whitney, Texas

Part II

Like Micheal Kuklenski, courage was part and parcel of Jess Johnson's kit.

Now 66, Johnson was 18 when he deployed as a medic with A Co., 1st Bn., 501st Inf. Ret., 101st Airborne Div. Courage was instilled in him by his father, a soldier with the 78th Lightning Division who lost a leg during the Battle of the Bulge in WWII. One day, Johnson's father took him aside and said, "You have to be in combat to be man." As a result, the son volunteered to go to Vietnam.

"Because of my naivete," Johnson said, "I didn't believe that I could ever get hurt."

Time would put the Bronze Star and two-time Purple Heart recipient's belief to the test...illustrating the importance of courage, composure and faith.

Johnson's experience in combat taught him that a wounded patient's perception can tip the person into shock, a state of affairs that can lead to death. He believes a medic must give his or her patients hope. Johnson's technique was to make a wounded soldier laugh by saying something like, "I can't believe that you're going home and I have to stay her."

"If I could make my patient laugh a little bit and give him hope that he's going to see his wife and brand new baby," he said, "That would usually
increase survivability by 50%. You never, ever want to say, "My God man, I don't know if I can save you."

There's a strange relationship between battlefield patient and combat medic or hospital corpsman, one of intimate detachment. Life and limb, you hold another human being's fate in your hands.

"I never talked to them again after I medvac'd them," Johnson said. "I didn't know if they lived or died. I did the best I could."

It's this kind of composure that helped Johnson survive 11 months in Vietnam, many of them around the murderous A Shau Valley.

Sept. 11, 1971: Four members of 2nd Platoon were hit early in the day in an NVA ambush. Johnson and the M60 gunner set off to find them and render aid. At the time, he didn't realize he would exhaust his day's medical supplies treating them.

Later that day, the platoon leader dispatched Johnson and another man down a sloping hill to a grassy area. The day was typical for the A Shau: no wind, dead calm and hot as Hell. And yet patches of the grass were moving.

"I look up and there's this air-vent, in the middle of no place," Johnson said. He'd stumbled across an NVA command bunker.

Johnson called his platoon leader. The lieutenant said a fire mission was about to be called in from the USS New Jersey.

Thirty minutes later, its massive rounds began to fall. As he ran back up the hill for shelter, Johnson stepped into a fire ant mound. He bent over, yanking to free his foot.

"As I'm bending over, I hear a whoosh!" he remembered.

It was a large, lethal piece of one of the New Jersey's rounds. Had he been standing, he'd have been decapitated.

It was not the last piece of providence Johnson encountered that day.

As the sun set over the valley, 2nd Platoon set out on yet another patrol. It was then he heard the voice, loud and clear and unmistakable: "Don't take any unnecessary chances."

"I looked around," he said. "There was nobody there."

Then he remembered the voice saying, "Get ready." Moments later, there's a massive explosion. Johnson grabbed his depleted medical kit and ran toward the site.

One final time, the voice commanded, "Follow the steps." He followed in the footsteps of his buddies to cut the chances of triggering another landmine.

Eight men lay wounded. Johnson triaged them, sorting them into three categories: those who could wait; those who needed immediate care; and those who were likely to die. One man had lost both legs above the knee, another had a broken nose and third groped to find his eyes, one dangling from each socket. Johnson retrieve them, washed them with canteen water and re-inserted both.

"Doc" Johnson believes the voice was that of his guardian angel, shepherding him through the carnage in one piece so he could help others.

slatten49 Loc: Lake Whitney, Texas

Part III

Ask medics or corpsmen their motivation for pursuing combat medicine and they're likely to answer, "I wanted to help." That's what prompted Kuklenski, Johnson and this author. It also sparked 68-year-old Steve Vineyard to become a combat medical corpsman. The Clifton, Texas, resident and rancher went through Navy boot camp before attending 16 weeks of Hospital Corps School. Another three weeks in Field Medical School learning how to operate with the Marines came next.

Comparatively, the Army spent only eight weeks molding Vietnam medics...half the time the Navy dev**ed.

When he landed in Vietnam, Vineyard volunteered for the Marine 1st Reconnaissance Battalion. He saw his share of combat, earning a Purple Heart. "Doc" Vineyard performed minor surgery regularly.

"We'd come off patrol and take care of the guys' problems so they didn't have to go to the battalion aid station," he recalled.

Medics and corpsmen didn't spend all their time crawling about under fire. Mundane day-to-day matters consumed most of their time: ensuring men took their dreaded Dapsone anti-malaria pills, making sure they drank copious amounts of water and took enough salt pills, clearing out boils that erupted when web ear etched red, salty wounds into sweaty flesh.

It was these daily tasks, as much perhaps as combat that earned one the title "Doc."

In the field, medics' and corpsmens' medical kits contained...among other items...bandages, abdominal dressings, flexible plastic coverings for treating sucking chest wound, IVs clamps and morphine.

Oh, and a shrouded flashlight doesn't hurt either as this author discovered July 12th, 1970. Treating a man fro the light of a fistful of burning matches doesn't work very well. Lesson learned: check our medical kit once, and then check it again. Your buddies are dependent on you.

Such is the stuff that binds men's wounds. In Vietnam there was...far more often than not...total faith in one another. The total commitment so many of these men made demanded nothing less.
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Author and VFW member Jerome Greer Chandler was an Army medic, a91A In 1970, her served with D Co., 2nd Bn., 501st Inf. Regt., 101st Airborne Div. A regular contributor to VFW magazine, Chandler is a former assistant professor at Jacksonville State University in Alabama.

lpnmajor Loc: Arkansas

Thanks Slats! Excellent post. Of course, I may be a teensy bit biased.

Training Corpsmen for combat involved teaching them combat triage, which is different from normal triage. In the middle of a hot firefight, the corpsman must return as many weapons to the fight as possible. Stopping the bleeding of a survivable wound took precedent over other wounds, as even minor bleeding will take a Marine out of the fight pretty quickly if allowed to continue. This goes against every instinct of those who's calling is saving lives, since the most seriously wounded may die while before you can get to them. It preys on the mind of every Corpsman I've ever met who had to make those choices.

Many Corpsmen had bruises on the ankles and arms, inflicted by Marines holding them back, as the instinct it to go to the wounded immediately is overpowering, but allowing them to do so was often fatal. I was always told "don't go to the wounded during a hot firefight, let a Marine bring them to you when they can do so with a reasonable chance of not getting hit themselves". Sensible advice, I'd say - and almost always ignored. This kind of stuff makes sense in a textbook during peacetime service, but is total bulls**t in combat. No one is going to let someone suffer if there's anyway humanly possible to do anything about it, but a Corpsman must always remember that more Marine's may die of they get hit. Those are agonizing decisions to make, and watching a Marine die from a distance because you knew you couldn't get to them without getting taken out yourself, creates a lifelong nightmare, seeing those deaths all over again every night.

I am proud if my fellow Corpsmen who risked life and limb to save as many Marines as they could, and I am proud of our Marines who saved as many buddies as THEY could, often ignoring their own wounds to d**g another wounded Marine to where "Doc" could treat them. I am especially proud of MY Marines, who kept my ass from being shot off or blowed up. I ate a lot of dirt, because some Grunt shoved my head in it to keep it from being blown off.

slatten49 Loc: Lake Whitney, Texas

Imagine my surprise when I read that Steve Vineyard, the corpsman in the last story, lives in Clifton, Texas. Clifton is my mailing address. I will have to make the effort to find him and recruit him into our local group of 'Nam Vets who have lunch once a month together. We currently are missing a corpsman to make our group complete. At our ages, it would only make sense to bring him into the realm. I hope he knows the Heimlich maneuver.

Our next luncheon is on the 29th, hopefully enough time to seek him out.

lpnmajor Loc: Arkansas

If he doesn't know the Heimlich, he'll know the boilers mate punch...........either will work in a pinch. I once spent 3 hours in supply looking for a fallopian tube. Senior Chief thought it was hilarious. I tried to find a Boiler's Mate, to tell him Senior was screwing his girlfriend. Fortunately for my career, I didn't find one........probably fortunate for Senior Chief too.

slatten49 Loc: Lake Whitney, Texas

Sounds to me like you were more about 'playing doctor' than practicing field medicine.

lpnmajor Loc: Arkansas

Every chance I got.

slatten49 Loc: Lake Whitney, Texas

I figured as much.

ghostgotcha Loc: The Florida swamps

I can offer nothing but praise for any medic serving with line troops in the field. Their bravery is without question.

I will also offer praise for those who help save lives back in the rear. They have earned so much respect with their dedication.

Medic, Corpsman? makes not difference which one - or the other - is the one who is injecting you with a good dose of morphine.

slatten49 Loc: Lake Whitney, Texas

Those who know, know well of what you write, Ghost.