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Posted by Russ Roth [24.21.77.67] on Thursday, August 18, 2011 at 03:35:24 :
In Reply to: Re: Upseting encounter today posted by Tim Holloway [69.54.28.229] on Wednesday, August 17, 2011 at 22:39:17 :
Tim,
We were an Armored unit with APC's (1/50th Mechanized Infantry) and lost a lot of guys to mines. We did leave the APC's behind and made air assaults also which to my knowledge no other armored unit did in VN. I made enough air assaults to be awarded an air medal and probably should have gotten a V device but no one seemed to be keeping track.
Four of those 6 were mines and the other 2 I was not on site with them when a bridge they were guarding was overrun. The most memorable casualty was the fella on March 17. He took an AK round as he was bent over topping a hedge row. It entered right above his heart and took out part of his bottom rib in the back. Lost a ton of blood and I never thought he would make it.
We walked into an ambush, outnumbered badly and nearly surrounded. I found out that day what real fear was. We eventually moved to a pickup zone and were extracted. EVERY bird had hits, was overloaded and leaking fuel. Couple guys got hit in the air on one of the birds but we had no KIA's. I found out in '99 at my first reunion the fella made it from someone that was medevaced to Japan about a week later. He had a picture of them together. I never thought he had a chance and nearly didn't when we were running with him on a litter. I had put his air mattress underneath his head and a bullet passed through it when they tried to take us down.
March 9th we were FOB with our APC's and got hit very badly. Medevac was shot down, 4 KIA's and 4 of our APC's were destroyed. There were about 2 dozen WIA's and I handled almost all of them because our side of the perimeter had the least bad stuff going on. I was doing triage long before I had ever heard of such a thing. We came out fairly well in spite of all the casualties and considering what could have been. Several fellas suffer PTSD over that particular battle.
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