Remarkable stories of war told by the men who fought for a proud nation. Their words. Their voices. Our first episodes tell riveting stories from World War II, then we move on to the Vietnam War and other dramatic conflicts.
The Deadly Rice Fields of Vietnam: SP5 Clarence Sasser
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In this preview, SP5 Clarence Sasser relives the traumatic mission for which he was later awarded the Medal of Honor. Check back tomorrow to hear our full interview with Sasser.
Specialist 5th Class Clarence Eugene Sasser served in Vietnam as an Army Medic. In spite of numerous wounds and excruciating pain, he continuously administered aid to fellow soldiers for 20 hours as his company was attacked in Vietnam.
Sasser later said this about spending the night under fire:
“The tough part wasn’t enemy fire, it was listening to guys call for their mama, and you can't do anything. Listening to them beg all night. And then you don’t hear them anymore in the morning, so you know they died.”
I'm Ken Harbaugh, host of Warriors In Their Own Words.In this preview, we'll be sharing a clip from tomorrow's interview with SP5 Clarence Sasser. If you'd like to hear more previews like this, please let us know at [email protected].
SP5 Clarence Sasser:
We went into an area on helicopter. Slicks, we call them. Bringing back a little memory, some of them good, some of them bad. But we went into this area on helicopters. The entire company did, and it turned out to be a fairly hot area, which was, I really hate to say, common back then, that you went in the areas and you found more than you expected. But it was interesting because we were not scheduled for any action. We were a backup company on that mission, and we were just to take it easy until, or if and when, another company or someone got into trouble and needed some reinforcement, some backup or somebody to pull them out, from term we used back then. And we were just cooling it, and orders came down from our battalion headquarters that wanted us to go check out an area that they had found, that they suspected may be an area of activity.
So we ate that morning and loaded on the helicopters, about nine that morning, went into this area, and it was daybreak the next morning before we got out, those of us that lived. It's a particularly distressing period to remember and everything. Probably the hardest part of it all was spending the night with my friends and just listening to them call, beg for help, when you couldn't do anything. You knew some of them were dying, you knew they were dying. You knew you'd never see some of them again. As for myself, I had been injured fairly severely, but being the medic, I knew that my injuries were not life-threatening. So other than the pain, and the trauma, and the fright, it was something, it really was. But hell, I got through it.
The whole thing was scary. But after a while, even that becomes second nature. That's what I found, one of the most marvelous things about the human psyche, is it get used to things. No matter how bad it is, it can get used to it and it will get used to it if it's given enough time. The scariest moments... Oh, I had been helping a wounded soldier out and was going back to, what I call, my little spot, where at this point, we're still in the rice paddy. And was going back to my spot where a friend was, where I knew that he was laying there, and I didn't dare stand up because obvious reasons. I stand up, a sniper can find me. It was obvious who I was, or what I was, to anybody observing the area. Medic was a fairly higher priority, in that you kill the medic and injured people die. So you got a much higher casualty rate.
And all of a sudden I heard, what we had come to know of as, incoming. If you've been there, you can always tell when it's coming in. Just from the sound of it. I heard it and I heard it, and I knew by the sound and the direction that it was going to land pretty close to me. The question is, what do you do? Do you freeze and stay or do you try to get away? But again, you have only a few senses to try to figure out what's going to happen, where it's going to go and all of that, but I knew this one was coming fairly close to me. So the method that I had hit on to get around in the rice paddy, understanding the discussion about rice paddies earlier, they were probably 40, 45% mud with a little layer of water on top. The mud in this rice paddy was at least thigh deep, with water up to the waist, and it made moving extremely difficult. So I had hit on the method of I could grab a handful of rice and just pull myself sliding over the mud in the water, and I could move around quicker thataway. Plus I was down and was out of line of sight, in other words. So I heard this coming in and oh man, oh Lord, it's going to be close. So I started moving and everything, and got to a... And understand, when I say the distance, we're not talking over 10 or 12 feet. And got to a intersection of two dikes that formed a cross. And just as I was rolling up and was going to put my back out, because I knew it was going to fall, they came down and hit right where I was when I realized that, when I initially heard it. That to me, probably was the scariest moment of knowing that if I didn't do something, it was going to get me. It still sprayed me with shrapnel and all of that, but okay, yeah, not life-threatening.
Well, as I said, I had my back sprayed with shrapnel. I had a gunshot wound through the thigh, that was pretty much flesh and muscle, no artery or nerve, no bone damage. Through the arm, and a piece of shrapnel in the side, and a gunshot wound to the head.
Ken Harbaugh:
That was SP5 Clarence Sasser. Make sure to catch our full interview with Sasser when it releases tomorrow.
