Casualty Evacuation Helicopters: Reevaluating the Role of the Dustoff in the Vietnam War

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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.

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

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