Casualty Evacuation Helicopters: Re-evaluating the Role of the ‘Dustoff’ in the Vietnam War

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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.

Paddy Griffith is one of Great Britain’s most noted military historians, specializing in the evolution of battlefield tactics. For 16 years he was a senior lecturer in war studies at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst. For additional reading, see his Forward Into Battle: Fighting Tactics From Waterloo to Vietnam, and Airmobility 1961­71, by General John J. Tolson.

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Tags: 20th - 21st Century, Airborne Operations, Historical Conflicts, Vietnam War

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