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.

Subscribe Today

• Did you enjoy our article?
• Read more in Vietnam Magazine
• Subscribe online and save nearly 40%!!!
 

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.

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to