Alpha Company, 3/506th
(Currahees*)
Tet Casualties:
During the first three weeks of the enemy's 1968 Tet offensive, Alpha
Company's rifle platoons suffered 13 dead and 33 wounded, out of
approximately 120 troopers in the field. In effect, more than one out of
three men in the line platoons was hit.
The number of KIAs that year could have been higher if not for the excellent
medical care the wounded received. This was true for the entire American
Army. A wounded soldier was never more than a 30 minute chopper ride
away from a modern air-conditioned medical facility.
Excerpts below from
After Tet
by Ron Spector
"In WW II about 71% of men who became casualties survived their
wounds. In Korea the figure was 74%. In Vietnam over 81% of men wounded
in battle survived."
"In all, Army medevac helicopters carried at least 400,000 US
military personnel and a considerably larger number of Vietnamese troops
and civilians to hospitals during the ten years from 1963 to 1973. It is
impossible to say how many lives were saved..".
"The rate of loss to hostile fire for medevacs was three and half
times the loss rate for all other types of helicopter missions."
"Although officials in Washington were fond of pointing out that
the casualty rate for American forces in Vietnam was considerably lower
than in World War II and Korea, that had far more to do with the larger
percentage of personnel in support units and the availability of
improved medical care than with any differences in the intensity of
combat. Men in “maneuver battalions,” the units that actually did
the fighting, continued to run about the same chance of death or injury
as their older relatives who had fought in Korea or the
Pacific."
Excerpts below from
365 Days
by Ronald Glasser, MD
"If you’re going to die in Nam, you’ll die straight out, right
where it happens. If you don’t die right out you’ve got a pretty
good chance." "Age helps; the patients are
all kids who up until they were hit were in the very prime of life.
There isn't one who is overweight. None of them, if they smoke, has
smoked long enough to eat up his lungs. There are no old coronaries to
worry about, no diabetes with bad vessels, no alcoholic livers, no
hypertensives. Just get them off the choppers, intubate them, and cut
them open."
* The men of the 506th Regiment,
101st Airborne Division were known as the
Currahees. Stephen Ambrose wrote about their World War II exploits in his book "Band of Brothers" which
was made into an HBO movie.
Related sites:
Tet Offensive
1968
Vietnam War
Casualties
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Memorial Services, Alpha
Company
John
Melgaard.
2nd platoon medic, Alpha Co.
Tet 1968.
Medic Jim Mezzetta.
Jim replaced Melgaard at the end of February 1968. Jim wrote his father
about the first two WIAs he treated (Blanco and Lopez). Read the letter
of a young medic by clicking on thumbnail.
Andrew Lovy, 3/506th
Battalion Surgeon.
"Some of the true heroics in Vietnam are those of the medivac
pilots... medivacs will make a landing, frequently without gun support
in order to bring a trooper out. They have gone into areas where there
is barely room for the rotor blades..."
 The
above excerpt is from Lovy's "Vietnam
Diary", which was published in 1970. (The title of Lovy's book
has the same name as this website, but "Pieces" and Lovy's
book are two completely different books.)
Click the thumbnail to read updated introduction
to Lovy's book.
Also, read excerpts from Lovy's October 1967 diary
entries. These
entries were written while Doc and the 3/506th crossed the Pacific
aboard the USS Weigel on their way to Vietnam. Doc Loy's book will be
available for download in the near future at http://www.currahee.org.
Blanco & Pete Figueroa
Hospital at Long Binh
My friend Pete came down from Danang to visit when he heard I was in the
hospital. I learned from him that Jose Santana (photo below), a close friend we
grew up with in Brooklyn - and our softball team's fastest outfielder -
had been killed in action. Jose had received his draft notice while
on his honeymoon in Puerto Rico. He was killed on New Year's Eve, 1967.
Jose Santana
Aug 1946- Dec 1967
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