Vietnam War Fighting Forces: 326th Medical Battalion’s Air Ambulance Platoon

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As more rounds came through the right side of the ship, Rosen did an abrupt left pedal turn and dived for the treetops, literally dragging the skids through the trees in an attempt to evade the enemy gunfire. With the rotor clipping the treetops, Rosen headed for Camp Evans at top speed.

As Keith W. Nolan later wrote of the incident in Ripcord: Screaming Eagles Under Siege: ‘…Doug Rupert [was] in agony beside him, his smoldering left arm blown almost completely off above the elbow. Deocales and Wieler, meanwhile, were urgently attending to Brent Law, [and] the bullet that had blasted through Rupert’s arm had shattered against the copilot’s armored seat, a fragment of it catching Law just below the edge of his armor ‘chicken plate.’ There was little that Deocales and Wieler could do, for the bullet fragment had ruptured Law’s liver, and he bled to death almost immediately on the floor of the Huey.’

In the chaos, according Nolan’s account, no one on the medevac was aware that just as it was lifting off a 101st soldier darted forward, ‘…and, reaching up with both hands, managed to grab the right skid just as the medevac wheeled around. [The soldier] had both arms and legs wrapped around the skid, [but] as the helicopter went into a dive down the side of the ridge, the wind blasted [him] so strongly that his legs came loose, and he was just hanging on with his hands.’The helicopter started pulling up at that point, going full throttle, [the soldier] was blown off the skid. The helicopter must have been several hundred feet up going in excess of 100 miles an hour when he lost his grip. He just went straight down into the jungle…there was no way he could have survived….’

After landing his helicopter, which was no longer airworthy, and unloading the mass of wounded, including his co-pilot and the body of his dead flight medic, Rosen checked himself for wounds. He found that his now-shattered ceramic body armor had stopped an NVA bullet.

Those five missions had lasted 2 1/2 hours, and during that time Rosen and his crew had evacuated 26 soldiers from the LZ just east of FSB Ripcord. As they landed again and again in the midst of the battle, they had asked no more of the ground troops than to ‘Give us your wounded.’

For his heroic action, Captain Lawrence Rosen was nominated for the Medal of Honor, which subsequently was downgraded to a Silver Star.

The article was written by Colonel John Aure Buesseler, M.D., U.S. Army (Ret.) and originally published in the February 2005 issue of Vietnam Magazine.

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

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