Allen Clark - Dak To Special Forces Camp Attack 17 June 1967
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Captain Allen Clark was working out of the Dak To Special Forces camp when it was attacked at 4:30 am on June 17, 1967. That was also the first night that the Air Traffic Control team, which included Ernie Camacho (me), spent at Dak To. We had a front-row seat to watch the attack on the Special Forces camp. We were also attacked by mortar at our location across the runway from the camp.
As we recounted the story on the page describing our arrival, I believe I saw Captain Clark on a stretcher across the back of a jeep on the way to a medevac helicopter the next morning. We knew nothing of the outcome of that attack, other than there were killed and wounded as a result. Now, in the fall of 2024, 57 years later, Allen found this website, contacted me, and told me the story of that night. I have some photos here on the website of the SF camp and Allen used them to describe what took place. He originally told his story in a book he wrote, "Wounded Soldier, Healing Warrior", but that book is out of print. He graciously photocopied the first chapter that talks about the attack so that I can add his story here. |
Wounded Soldier, Healing Warrior
by Allen Clark
(book is no longer in print)
Chapter 1: "Oh, God, I'm Dead"
by Allen Clark
(book is no longer in print)
Chapter 1: "Oh, God, I'm Dead"
Dak To, Vietnam, 4:30am, June 17, 1967
Muffled sounds of distant mortar fire infiltrated the quiet stillness of the predawn darkness. This sounded so familiar by now that, even though we were expecting a ground attack, I barely took notice and only glanced up briefly from the letter I was writing to my wife. The sounds came increasingly closer, though, when suddenly, from just outside the inner perimeter, I heard the alarming shouts of a Vietnamese man employed in our camp at Dak To (pronounced "dahk toe"). I quickly pulled out my .38-caliber pistol and dove behind a nearby jeep for cover. I recall not understanding what he was saying, but soon realized that mortar fire had begun dropping into our camp.
In a Special Forces camp, an American Special Forces team member or attached personnel such as I were responsible for a two-hour shift inside the inner perimeter all night long. The morning of the attack I had the last shift, from 4 to 6 a.m. Our duty was to walk periodically the inner perimeter to ensure that none of our Montagnards nor Vietnamese did sneak in to spike our mortars or knife us in our bunkers prior to an attack. An American with a radio sat on duty inside an underground bunker situated just outside the mess hall. His super-secret SOG (Studies and Observation Group) unit monitored the U.S. raiding parties in Laos and our radio relay site (code named Leghorn) across the border. Leghorn was a site up on a steep elevation in Laos and was used to receive radio messages from the SOG missions along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. If a team was in trouble, a message would go back for help to the SOG Reaction Force based in Kontum. Eventually, a North Vietnamese Army unit overran the position later in the war. In thinking abut the enemy movement the previous evening, a ground attack was imminent. I shouted down to the SOG soldier to radio for flare/gun ships from Pleiku that would help us spot the enemy as they came at us from across the Dak Poko River or from any other direction. ("Dak" in Vietnamese means both "stream" and "village". Thus, "Dak Poko" refers to the Poko River and "Dak To" revers to the village of To).
By that time the mortar rounds were hitting closer, and our soldiers popped out of bunkers and tents to scramble to battle positions. I ran to my bunk building just outside the inner perimeter. Smoke from exploding shells stung my nostrils as I grabbed my AR-15 rifle and strapped on ammo pouches and a grenade harness in preparation for battle. Hurrying back into the inner perimeter, I took it upon myself to get our three mortar positions manned so we could get flares up and deliver counter-battery fire on the suspected enemy firing positions. I collared a tall, blond Quartermaster Corps soldier and ordered him to one of our three mortar pits.
In the fog of war, mistakes are made and I will always regret one made the night before. Right at dusk we peered at the high ground across the river to our south and saw figures there. In the haze of the upcoming darkness, we must have decided they were perhaps a group of villagers rather than any of our people or a patrol from the Vietnamese army post at Tan Canh a few miles away. As a consequence no air strike was called on the enemy, who were obviously setting up their mortar positions for the next morning's barrage.
Amid the noise of exploding incoming mortars, I shouted to other soldiers to put flares on the south high ground where we had seen activity the previous night. They were to begin pumping in the flare canisters and rounds for our 81mm mortars. When I peered over the sandbags into the 4.2-inch mortar pit, A-team member Sergeant Cramer asked for someone to help him load. Rushing back to the center of camp, I found Sergeant Arturs Fisers, my B-57 teammate, told him to help Cramer, and tried to grab soldiers for the other two mortar pits, while at the same time trying to spot enemy blasts through the smoky darkness so we could pinpoint return fire. I intently watched the area where we had seen movement seven hours earlier. Obviously, it was not distant guns attacking us; it was the enemy closing in - nearby and hiding in the cover of the dark night.
The camp executive officer (XO) came up beside me and handed me a small radio, but confusion, caused by the suddenness of the attack, made my communicating with the underground headquarters bunker difficult. Why I remained unprotected in the open I will never know, but there I was.
"What's happening?" the XO's voice crackled on my radio. I assumed he was in an underground bunker.
With a rifle in my left hand and the radio in my right, I looked across the river to spot the enemy and started to respond to the command bunker when a sudden jolting thud knocked me forward, and I landed flat on my stomach. There is no flash with mortar fire; it makes impact, and a splash of metal shoots out in a giant cone, hitting everything in its path. One had exploded about eighteen inches behind my left leg, knocking me to the ground.
"Oh, God, my legs, my legs! Help me!" I screamed. "Oh, God, I'm dead!"
Sergeant Leslie St. Lawrence, one of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research medics assigned in my camp, heard my cries for help and ran to my side.
"I'll take care of you and get a litter," he shouted as he grabbed a soldier and ordered him to take care of me until he returned. However, confusion and fear for his own life caused that soldier to run for cover instead.
Our men returned fire, but the enemy's mortars fell ten to our one. With mortar shells raining down all around me, I began worrying that I might get a head wound in addition to the wounds in my legs. Knowing that a head wound would probably be fatal, I looked for possible cover. Spotting a nearby drainage ditch, I dragged myself through the dust then over concrete, inch by inch, on arms and elbows until I reached apparent and better safety in a small drainage ditch.
Sergeant St. Lawrence returned with Sergeant Cramer, a member of the A-team, and together they placed me on my stomach on a stretcher. Bent nearly double and dodging mortar blasts, they carried me through the camp toward the safety of the medics' bunker, which was nearby. As they slowed to make the 90-degree turn into the bunker, another mortar blast exploded nearby, wounding both sergeants. As they fell, my stretcher dropped to the ground with a jarring thud. An earlier blast had stunned Sergeant Jim Hill, the team medic, as he emerged from the bunker to help me. But, after regaining his composure, he managed to pull me inside to safety and much needed medical attention. Sergeant Hill quickly started an IV of dextran and placed pressure bandages on my legs.
"Don't waste your time with me," I mumbled. "Go outside and help the wounded. I know I'm going to die because I have no feeling in my legs."
My wife, Jackie, had occasionally pointed out what she called my overzealous sense of responsibility toward others. Perhaps she was right. As I lay wounded and in shock, I thought only of the other soldiers falling on the battlefield.
"No, sir," Sergeant Hill responded reassuringly. "You're not going to die. You have a shrapnel wound in your leg and a piece of it is putting pressure on a nerve. That's stopped the bleeding so don't worry about it. I'll check on the others when I'm through with you."
Hill turned, scrambled through the bunker entrance, and then disappeared through the barrage of mortar fire to get plasma, morphine, and bandages from the Vietnamese first-aid tent dispensary, which was outside the inner perimeter. While he was gone, I slowly surveyed the bunker. Sometime or other, I realized the body of an air force major sat slumped in the bunker corner with a mortar fin sticking out of his head, an instantaneous death for the pilot who had flown in the night before and was hit in an unprotected Quonset hut aboveground.
I could hear shrapnel from exploding mortar rounds falling on tin roofs like heavy rain. Eventually, through the sounds of those explosions came the sounds of the air force C-47, which we called "Puff the Magic Dragon," firing at the North Vietnamese with three 7.62 Gatling guns that rained terror on the enemy. I could envision the tension beneath the surrealistic effect caused by the shadows of the flarelight over the enemy positions.
Sergeant Hill returned and I was feeling no pain and took on a combative attitude by saying, "Kill those SOBs," knowing that the ship's Gatling guns would wreak misery and havoc upon the NVA (North Vietnamese Army) positions.
Thirteen years later, in 1980, I ran into Sergeant Jimmy Hill, and then again in 1992. I tried to contact him again in 2004 to no avail. Then, in December of that year, I received a surprise phone call from the man who knew more about my injuries than even I did at the time. It seems that he had been wondering all these years how I was doing. He has graciously provided the following account of what happened that day.
Sergeant Jimmy Hill
In the early morning hours, I was awakened by a series of loud explosions. I got out of my bunk, put on my pants, and heard another loud explosion - this time near my own bunker. I heard someone screaming, "My feet! My feet!" At the time I thought that whoever had been on the 4.2 mortar had dropped a plate on his feet. As I exited my bunker and mounted the stairs, I saw a big flash. The next thing I knew, I had sandbags on my chest and pain in my right shoulder. After removing the sandbags, I started up the stairs where I met two men bringing a litter into my bunker. One may have been Sergeant St. Lawrence, but I don't remember. As I reached up to grab the foot end of the litter in order to assist them, blood poured off the litter and all over my chest. We managed to get the litter into the bunker and placed it on a bunk. That's when I recognized Captain Clark. He had severe, traumatic wounds to his lower limbs and was in a state of shock. Another American, a member of the SOG, was with him. I had no plasma in my bunker so I asked the SOG to stay with him while I ran to the dispensary where I retrieved the needed supplies - plasma and morphine. As I left the dispensary to return to my bunker, it took a direct hit from a rocket round. Fortunately, I was able to get back to Captain Clark and immediately started two IVs, administered morphine, and applied two loose tourniquets in the hopes that if he survived, his legs could be saved. The blood flow had subsided quite a bit.
At that time, Captain Clark told me that he couldn't feel his legs. I told him not to worry, that he had shrapnel wounds and quite possibly some shrapnel pressing on the nerves. In reality, I didn't think he would make it to be medevac'd. In confidence, he told me that he wanted me to contact his father and his wife because the name on his uniform was not his real name. He gave me his real name, as well as his father's and his wife's names, and asked me to write them and tell them what happened. His fear was that he didn't think they would be told. I assured him that I would write to them.
During this time, KIAs (killed in action) were being brought into the bunker, including the major with the tail fin between his eyes. As daylight started to appear, A-team Commander Larry Gossett summoned me to attend to the wounded Montagnards and South Vietnamese. About a day later, a medic showed up to treat my own wounds (shrapnel in the right shoulder) and assist me. It would be several years before I learned that Captain Clark had indeed made it after all.
Evacuation
Apparently, I never passed out in the bunker, but I did go into shock. Sometime in the early morning when the camp had grown strangely silent, two litter bearers carried me out facedown on my stretcher. I turned my head sideways to survey the aftermath of battle and saw confusing contradictions. The blue summer sky contained no clouds and stretched into eternity like a giant canvas awaiting the stroke of some unseen artist. Bright reflections from the rising sun bounced off the tin roofs of the camp buildings that were riddled with holes from mortar fire. Sandbags, ripped open by the shelling, reluctantly spilled their contents onto the battleground.
Captain Larry Gossett walked around, seemingly without purpose, grasping his rifle close to his chest as if it were some precious cargo. Wearing his black jumpsuit, the Vietnamese team sergeant just stood and stared into space, his face as blank as the cloudless sky above. The Vietnamese camp commander, lieutenant Le Quang Nghia, had been killed in the battle. Stillness and silence replaced the shouts, screams, and mortar explosions of only a few minutes before and blanketed the camp with an eerie oppressiveness. I was so awestruck by this scene that I hardly noticed when the litter bearers gently placed my stretcher on the ground next to a waiting jeep.
I couldn't believe this was happening to me. I had tried not to think about it. I had tried to push the idea of being wounded, or worse, to the back of my mind. What I had always feared more was to have been captured. I had only forty-four days of duty left in Vietnam, and this was the day I should have flown out of Saigon for a week of rest and relaxation in either Australia or Thailand. After that, I would have returned to Dak To with my replacement, and then headed home to complete one more year of duty before my resignation would be effective. My war would have been over. Now it was over all right, but not the way I had planned or expected.
His face veiled in serious thought, Captain Gossett slowly approached me, looking sad, vulnerable, and pensive. "Sergeant Hill says I'm fine, Captain," I said reassuringly. "The medics will patch me up, and I'll be back in action this afternoon."
Obviously, the morphine had begun to influence my grasp on reality. Captain Gossett and I had been as close as soldiers become in a war. Now, he just stood there staring at me. Then, without saying a word, he slowly turned and walked away.
I learned from listening to conversations and from information gathered much later that on that day thirty-seven men were killed (including two Americans) and seventy wounded, nine of whom were Americans. The NVA had used launching tubes to fire captured U.S. Army 81mm mortar rounds into our camp. We had been attacked, wounded, and killed with our own ammunition!
As soon as my litter was shoved onto the chopper, the door gunner offered me a cigarette. I didn't smoke, but I will always remember that small gesture of kindness. I recall a C-130 landing on the Dak To airstrip as I was Jeeped out to my medevac flight. The army is such a small world. I learned later the line companies of the 2nd Battalion, 503rd Regiment, 173rd Airborne Brigade, were being airlifted in to Dak To. The battalion commander was Lieutenant Colonel Edward A. Partain, with whom I had visited in our mess hall the day before.
I must have slept during the medevac flight, because I remember nothing after that until I was jarred back to consciousness by the thud and bounce of our landing. Although groggy from morphine, I could still hear the whirring of the helicopter's rotor blades overhead. Through heavy eyes, I looked through the open door to see two out-of-focus medics bent almost double as they ran through whirling clouds of dust toward the chopper. As they carefully slid my stretcher out of the helicopter, I learned we had landed at the 18th Surgical Hospital at Pleiku in the central highlands. This scene became forever ingrained in my memory. Years later, whenever I watched the popular television show M.A.S.H., I winced each time the medics rushed to incoming choppers in that same bent-double position to offload the wounded of the Korean War.
The hospital staff placed me on a soft bed with crisp white sheets smelling of antiseptic. Everything around me looked white and peaceful - quite a contrast to the blood-soaked and body-strewn battlefield I had left that very morning. A young, light-haired Special Forces doctor from the Pleiku C-team approached my bed to check my chart. His familiar face and quiet demeanor took me back to the year before when I reported to B-57 in Saigon, and we had been roommates for one night. Would he remember me? The morphine administered on the battlefield that morning still shielded me from pain, and it again began its work, refusing to allow me more than a few minutes of consciousness at a time. As I slowly slipped back into its tenuous hold on my mind and body, I noticed a small grin spread across the lips of the young doctor, and I knew he had recognized me, too. When I told him I was working under an assumed name (due to my intelligence assignment), he responded that he knew who I was. He knew my real name.
I awakened approximately thirty hours later on Sunday afternoon, June 18, to be greeted by a domelike ceiling above me. At first I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me, but I just couldn't focus yet. I finally realized that the dome above me formed the ceiling of a Quonset hut that housed the hospital ward. I looked around slowly. The beds in the ward were positioned so close together I felt as if I could reach out and touch the men on either side of me. All the patients in the ward were covered with bandages or wearing casts or both. Did this obvious postsurgical recovery ward I lay in mean that I also had been through surgery?
In spite of the numbing effects of morphine and other medications, I slowly became aware of my physical condition and began to take inventory of my wounds. My right arm and hand felt numb. A needle emerged from the back of my left hand and connected to a tube that snaked its way up to a bottle hooked upside down on a rack above my head. My right leg and foot were in a cast, and my swollen, black-and-blue toes protruded like five proud sentries on duty. Although still groggy from anesthetic, as I surveyed my body, the reality of my condition not only rushed into my mind, but it also literally slammed into my very soul. Fear gripped every fiber of my being. I began to breathe rapidly, and my heart felt as if it would burst right out of my chest. Nothing protruded from the other side of my bed - no toes, no foot, NOTHING! My left leg was gone!
"Can you wiggle your toes, Captain?"
The voice of the young doctor sitting on my bed sounded like a distant whisper. Trying to take in and comprehend what I had just realized, while at the same time trying to follow his instructions, I tried and just barely felt sensation in my right leg and foot. He patiently proceeded to explain the extent of my wounds. I had sustained severe injuries in the mortar attack at Dak To, and as a result, doctors had amputated my left leg just below the knee. My right leg had sustained extensive shrapnel wounds and fractures of the tibia (shinbone) and fibula (a slender bone on the outside of the leg).
"We'll try to save your right leg," the doctor said reassuringly.
TRY? The reality of that statement penetrated my mind like a knife, and I knew exactly what it meant. I guess he could see the worry on my face, so he tried to help me see the positive side of my situation.
Muffled sounds of distant mortar fire infiltrated the quiet stillness of the predawn darkness. This sounded so familiar by now that, even though we were expecting a ground attack, I barely took notice and only glanced up briefly from the letter I was writing to my wife. The sounds came increasingly closer, though, when suddenly, from just outside the inner perimeter, I heard the alarming shouts of a Vietnamese man employed in our camp at Dak To (pronounced "dahk toe"). I quickly pulled out my .38-caliber pistol and dove behind a nearby jeep for cover. I recall not understanding what he was saying, but soon realized that mortar fire had begun dropping into our camp.
In a Special Forces camp, an American Special Forces team member or attached personnel such as I were responsible for a two-hour shift inside the inner perimeter all night long. The morning of the attack I had the last shift, from 4 to 6 a.m. Our duty was to walk periodically the inner perimeter to ensure that none of our Montagnards nor Vietnamese did sneak in to spike our mortars or knife us in our bunkers prior to an attack. An American with a radio sat on duty inside an underground bunker situated just outside the mess hall. His super-secret SOG (Studies and Observation Group) unit monitored the U.S. raiding parties in Laos and our radio relay site (code named Leghorn) across the border. Leghorn was a site up on a steep elevation in Laos and was used to receive radio messages from the SOG missions along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. If a team was in trouble, a message would go back for help to the SOG Reaction Force based in Kontum. Eventually, a North Vietnamese Army unit overran the position later in the war. In thinking abut the enemy movement the previous evening, a ground attack was imminent. I shouted down to the SOG soldier to radio for flare/gun ships from Pleiku that would help us spot the enemy as they came at us from across the Dak Poko River or from any other direction. ("Dak" in Vietnamese means both "stream" and "village". Thus, "Dak Poko" refers to the Poko River and "Dak To" revers to the village of To).
By that time the mortar rounds were hitting closer, and our soldiers popped out of bunkers and tents to scramble to battle positions. I ran to my bunk building just outside the inner perimeter. Smoke from exploding shells stung my nostrils as I grabbed my AR-15 rifle and strapped on ammo pouches and a grenade harness in preparation for battle. Hurrying back into the inner perimeter, I took it upon myself to get our three mortar positions manned so we could get flares up and deliver counter-battery fire on the suspected enemy firing positions. I collared a tall, blond Quartermaster Corps soldier and ordered him to one of our three mortar pits.
In the fog of war, mistakes are made and I will always regret one made the night before. Right at dusk we peered at the high ground across the river to our south and saw figures there. In the haze of the upcoming darkness, we must have decided they were perhaps a group of villagers rather than any of our people or a patrol from the Vietnamese army post at Tan Canh a few miles away. As a consequence no air strike was called on the enemy, who were obviously setting up their mortar positions for the next morning's barrage.
Amid the noise of exploding incoming mortars, I shouted to other soldiers to put flares on the south high ground where we had seen activity the previous night. They were to begin pumping in the flare canisters and rounds for our 81mm mortars. When I peered over the sandbags into the 4.2-inch mortar pit, A-team member Sergeant Cramer asked for someone to help him load. Rushing back to the center of camp, I found Sergeant Arturs Fisers, my B-57 teammate, told him to help Cramer, and tried to grab soldiers for the other two mortar pits, while at the same time trying to spot enemy blasts through the smoky darkness so we could pinpoint return fire. I intently watched the area where we had seen movement seven hours earlier. Obviously, it was not distant guns attacking us; it was the enemy closing in - nearby and hiding in the cover of the dark night.
The camp executive officer (XO) came up beside me and handed me a small radio, but confusion, caused by the suddenness of the attack, made my communicating with the underground headquarters bunker difficult. Why I remained unprotected in the open I will never know, but there I was.
"What's happening?" the XO's voice crackled on my radio. I assumed he was in an underground bunker.
With a rifle in my left hand and the radio in my right, I looked across the river to spot the enemy and started to respond to the command bunker when a sudden jolting thud knocked me forward, and I landed flat on my stomach. There is no flash with mortar fire; it makes impact, and a splash of metal shoots out in a giant cone, hitting everything in its path. One had exploded about eighteen inches behind my left leg, knocking me to the ground.
"Oh, God, my legs, my legs! Help me!" I screamed. "Oh, God, I'm dead!"
Sergeant Leslie St. Lawrence, one of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research medics assigned in my camp, heard my cries for help and ran to my side.
"I'll take care of you and get a litter," he shouted as he grabbed a soldier and ordered him to take care of me until he returned. However, confusion and fear for his own life caused that soldier to run for cover instead.
Our men returned fire, but the enemy's mortars fell ten to our one. With mortar shells raining down all around me, I began worrying that I might get a head wound in addition to the wounds in my legs. Knowing that a head wound would probably be fatal, I looked for possible cover. Spotting a nearby drainage ditch, I dragged myself through the dust then over concrete, inch by inch, on arms and elbows until I reached apparent and better safety in a small drainage ditch.
Sergeant St. Lawrence returned with Sergeant Cramer, a member of the A-team, and together they placed me on my stomach on a stretcher. Bent nearly double and dodging mortar blasts, they carried me through the camp toward the safety of the medics' bunker, which was nearby. As they slowed to make the 90-degree turn into the bunker, another mortar blast exploded nearby, wounding both sergeants. As they fell, my stretcher dropped to the ground with a jarring thud. An earlier blast had stunned Sergeant Jim Hill, the team medic, as he emerged from the bunker to help me. But, after regaining his composure, he managed to pull me inside to safety and much needed medical attention. Sergeant Hill quickly started an IV of dextran and placed pressure bandages on my legs.
"Don't waste your time with me," I mumbled. "Go outside and help the wounded. I know I'm going to die because I have no feeling in my legs."
My wife, Jackie, had occasionally pointed out what she called my overzealous sense of responsibility toward others. Perhaps she was right. As I lay wounded and in shock, I thought only of the other soldiers falling on the battlefield.
"No, sir," Sergeant Hill responded reassuringly. "You're not going to die. You have a shrapnel wound in your leg and a piece of it is putting pressure on a nerve. That's stopped the bleeding so don't worry about it. I'll check on the others when I'm through with you."
Hill turned, scrambled through the bunker entrance, and then disappeared through the barrage of mortar fire to get plasma, morphine, and bandages from the Vietnamese first-aid tent dispensary, which was outside the inner perimeter. While he was gone, I slowly surveyed the bunker. Sometime or other, I realized the body of an air force major sat slumped in the bunker corner with a mortar fin sticking out of his head, an instantaneous death for the pilot who had flown in the night before and was hit in an unprotected Quonset hut aboveground.
I could hear shrapnel from exploding mortar rounds falling on tin roofs like heavy rain. Eventually, through the sounds of those explosions came the sounds of the air force C-47, which we called "Puff the Magic Dragon," firing at the North Vietnamese with three 7.62 Gatling guns that rained terror on the enemy. I could envision the tension beneath the surrealistic effect caused by the shadows of the flarelight over the enemy positions.
Sergeant Hill returned and I was feeling no pain and took on a combative attitude by saying, "Kill those SOBs," knowing that the ship's Gatling guns would wreak misery and havoc upon the NVA (North Vietnamese Army) positions.
Thirteen years later, in 1980, I ran into Sergeant Jimmy Hill, and then again in 1992. I tried to contact him again in 2004 to no avail. Then, in December of that year, I received a surprise phone call from the man who knew more about my injuries than even I did at the time. It seems that he had been wondering all these years how I was doing. He has graciously provided the following account of what happened that day.
Sergeant Jimmy Hill
In the early morning hours, I was awakened by a series of loud explosions. I got out of my bunk, put on my pants, and heard another loud explosion - this time near my own bunker. I heard someone screaming, "My feet! My feet!" At the time I thought that whoever had been on the 4.2 mortar had dropped a plate on his feet. As I exited my bunker and mounted the stairs, I saw a big flash. The next thing I knew, I had sandbags on my chest and pain in my right shoulder. After removing the sandbags, I started up the stairs where I met two men bringing a litter into my bunker. One may have been Sergeant St. Lawrence, but I don't remember. As I reached up to grab the foot end of the litter in order to assist them, blood poured off the litter and all over my chest. We managed to get the litter into the bunker and placed it on a bunk. That's when I recognized Captain Clark. He had severe, traumatic wounds to his lower limbs and was in a state of shock. Another American, a member of the SOG, was with him. I had no plasma in my bunker so I asked the SOG to stay with him while I ran to the dispensary where I retrieved the needed supplies - plasma and morphine. As I left the dispensary to return to my bunker, it took a direct hit from a rocket round. Fortunately, I was able to get back to Captain Clark and immediately started two IVs, administered morphine, and applied two loose tourniquets in the hopes that if he survived, his legs could be saved. The blood flow had subsided quite a bit.
At that time, Captain Clark told me that he couldn't feel his legs. I told him not to worry, that he had shrapnel wounds and quite possibly some shrapnel pressing on the nerves. In reality, I didn't think he would make it to be medevac'd. In confidence, he told me that he wanted me to contact his father and his wife because the name on his uniform was not his real name. He gave me his real name, as well as his father's and his wife's names, and asked me to write them and tell them what happened. His fear was that he didn't think they would be told. I assured him that I would write to them.
During this time, KIAs (killed in action) were being brought into the bunker, including the major with the tail fin between his eyes. As daylight started to appear, A-team Commander Larry Gossett summoned me to attend to the wounded Montagnards and South Vietnamese. About a day later, a medic showed up to treat my own wounds (shrapnel in the right shoulder) and assist me. It would be several years before I learned that Captain Clark had indeed made it after all.
Evacuation
Apparently, I never passed out in the bunker, but I did go into shock. Sometime in the early morning when the camp had grown strangely silent, two litter bearers carried me out facedown on my stretcher. I turned my head sideways to survey the aftermath of battle and saw confusing contradictions. The blue summer sky contained no clouds and stretched into eternity like a giant canvas awaiting the stroke of some unseen artist. Bright reflections from the rising sun bounced off the tin roofs of the camp buildings that were riddled with holes from mortar fire. Sandbags, ripped open by the shelling, reluctantly spilled their contents onto the battleground.
Captain Larry Gossett walked around, seemingly without purpose, grasping his rifle close to his chest as if it were some precious cargo. Wearing his black jumpsuit, the Vietnamese team sergeant just stood and stared into space, his face as blank as the cloudless sky above. The Vietnamese camp commander, lieutenant Le Quang Nghia, had been killed in the battle. Stillness and silence replaced the shouts, screams, and mortar explosions of only a few minutes before and blanketed the camp with an eerie oppressiveness. I was so awestruck by this scene that I hardly noticed when the litter bearers gently placed my stretcher on the ground next to a waiting jeep.
I couldn't believe this was happening to me. I had tried not to think about it. I had tried to push the idea of being wounded, or worse, to the back of my mind. What I had always feared more was to have been captured. I had only forty-four days of duty left in Vietnam, and this was the day I should have flown out of Saigon for a week of rest and relaxation in either Australia or Thailand. After that, I would have returned to Dak To with my replacement, and then headed home to complete one more year of duty before my resignation would be effective. My war would have been over. Now it was over all right, but not the way I had planned or expected.
His face veiled in serious thought, Captain Gossett slowly approached me, looking sad, vulnerable, and pensive. "Sergeant Hill says I'm fine, Captain," I said reassuringly. "The medics will patch me up, and I'll be back in action this afternoon."
Obviously, the morphine had begun to influence my grasp on reality. Captain Gossett and I had been as close as soldiers become in a war. Now, he just stood there staring at me. Then, without saying a word, he slowly turned and walked away.
I learned from listening to conversations and from information gathered much later that on that day thirty-seven men were killed (including two Americans) and seventy wounded, nine of whom were Americans. The NVA had used launching tubes to fire captured U.S. Army 81mm mortar rounds into our camp. We had been attacked, wounded, and killed with our own ammunition!
As soon as my litter was shoved onto the chopper, the door gunner offered me a cigarette. I didn't smoke, but I will always remember that small gesture of kindness. I recall a C-130 landing on the Dak To airstrip as I was Jeeped out to my medevac flight. The army is such a small world. I learned later the line companies of the 2nd Battalion, 503rd Regiment, 173rd Airborne Brigade, were being airlifted in to Dak To. The battalion commander was Lieutenant Colonel Edward A. Partain, with whom I had visited in our mess hall the day before.
I must have slept during the medevac flight, because I remember nothing after that until I was jarred back to consciousness by the thud and bounce of our landing. Although groggy from morphine, I could still hear the whirring of the helicopter's rotor blades overhead. Through heavy eyes, I looked through the open door to see two out-of-focus medics bent almost double as they ran through whirling clouds of dust toward the chopper. As they carefully slid my stretcher out of the helicopter, I learned we had landed at the 18th Surgical Hospital at Pleiku in the central highlands. This scene became forever ingrained in my memory. Years later, whenever I watched the popular television show M.A.S.H., I winced each time the medics rushed to incoming choppers in that same bent-double position to offload the wounded of the Korean War.
The hospital staff placed me on a soft bed with crisp white sheets smelling of antiseptic. Everything around me looked white and peaceful - quite a contrast to the blood-soaked and body-strewn battlefield I had left that very morning. A young, light-haired Special Forces doctor from the Pleiku C-team approached my bed to check my chart. His familiar face and quiet demeanor took me back to the year before when I reported to B-57 in Saigon, and we had been roommates for one night. Would he remember me? The morphine administered on the battlefield that morning still shielded me from pain, and it again began its work, refusing to allow me more than a few minutes of consciousness at a time. As I slowly slipped back into its tenuous hold on my mind and body, I noticed a small grin spread across the lips of the young doctor, and I knew he had recognized me, too. When I told him I was working under an assumed name (due to my intelligence assignment), he responded that he knew who I was. He knew my real name.
I awakened approximately thirty hours later on Sunday afternoon, June 18, to be greeted by a domelike ceiling above me. At first I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me, but I just couldn't focus yet. I finally realized that the dome above me formed the ceiling of a Quonset hut that housed the hospital ward. I looked around slowly. The beds in the ward were positioned so close together I felt as if I could reach out and touch the men on either side of me. All the patients in the ward were covered with bandages or wearing casts or both. Did this obvious postsurgical recovery ward I lay in mean that I also had been through surgery?
In spite of the numbing effects of morphine and other medications, I slowly became aware of my physical condition and began to take inventory of my wounds. My right arm and hand felt numb. A needle emerged from the back of my left hand and connected to a tube that snaked its way up to a bottle hooked upside down on a rack above my head. My right leg and foot were in a cast, and my swollen, black-and-blue toes protruded like five proud sentries on duty. Although still groggy from anesthetic, as I surveyed my body, the reality of my condition not only rushed into my mind, but it also literally slammed into my very soul. Fear gripped every fiber of my being. I began to breathe rapidly, and my heart felt as if it would burst right out of my chest. Nothing protruded from the other side of my bed - no toes, no foot, NOTHING! My left leg was gone!
"Can you wiggle your toes, Captain?"
The voice of the young doctor sitting on my bed sounded like a distant whisper. Trying to take in and comprehend what I had just realized, while at the same time trying to follow his instructions, I tried and just barely felt sensation in my right leg and foot. He patiently proceeded to explain the extent of my wounds. I had sustained severe injuries in the mortar attack at Dak To, and as a result, doctors had amputated my left leg just below the knee. My right leg had sustained extensive shrapnel wounds and fractures of the tibia (shinbone) and fibula (a slender bone on the outside of the leg).
"We'll try to save your right leg," the doctor said reassuringly.
TRY? The reality of that statement penetrated my mind like a knife, and I knew exactly what it meant. I guess he could see the worry on my face, so he tried to help me see the positive side of my situation.
Here are photos showing the Special Forces Camp
