Pfc. Clarence Sasser was an Army medic in Vietnam. He was awarded the Medal of Honor for keeping alive most of a company of soldiers for nearly 24 hours, after being shot three times and pinned down in a rice paddy by a Viet Cong ambush. He got the troops to cover after nightfall, and kept them alive for 5 hours until help arrived. Clarence Sasser told the story in his own words, in 1987.
The Backup Company
“Certainly it [10 January 1968] was the longest day of my life. We were already out of our base camp on a search and destroy mission. It was a battalion wide operation. There were a whole bunch of companies out that day. We for once had, in our opinion, became lucky. We were the backup company.”
“…on the morning of our third day orders were received that told our company to be prepared for a helicopter pickup…. I knew instantly that something was wrong, because they told us we better eat. And at 10:00, 10:30 in the morning, for your platoon sergeant to tell you all had better eat, you know, that tells you that maybe he knew something that we didn’t know….”
“We went into this rice paddy, and immediately we began receiving fire.… And just as I was getting out of the doors, I was shot through the leg, which of course pitched me out in the mud…. The mud, along with the water, maybe two and a half feet deep. “
“The door gunners on the choppers were just firing their weapons and trying to provide cover while the machine, while the helicopters came in.… There was a wood line on three sides of the rice paddy, and they were entrenched in the wood lines on the three sides.”
“We spent the remainder of that day in that rice paddy. It was not until dark that we managed to reach the wood line, which of course provided a little bit of cover for us. The, we were hit with, of course, automatic weapons fire, carbine fire, and they had the rice paddy zeroed in with mortars.”
Gliding Through the Rice Paddy
“I found it was a lot safer, you present much less of profile if you were to just slide along in the water. You know, the rice of course grew in tufts, and you could grab yourself a tuft and, you just glide right along the water and the mud, and it was almost like swimming. You could make faster time like that, along with presenting less of a silhouette to be hit again, because of the depth and the nature of the mud and the water.”
Sasser used that gliding trick to make his way all over the rice paddy, to where the other soldiers were. He treated them until his supplies ran out, and he directed them to make their way to the woods for cover. He was wounded several times in the process, but just kept going.
“I Just Knew I Was Dead”
“I was sprayed all over the back and the left side with shrapnel…. But what I think probably was the most serious injury I received was this knot here, caused by a ricochet off of my head, the bullet. It puts a new light on what my mother used to say about being hardheaded. Of course by then I had lost my hard hat.”
“… the most serious injury I received was this knot here, caused by a ricochet off of my head, the bullet. It puts a new light on what my mother used to say about being hardheaded.”
“I remember grabbing my head and just falling out, or at least just laying out. It had severely stunned me with a concussion. I just knew I was dead. I don’t know how long I laid there. … it gradually came to me that someone was shaking me, and that I was hearing these sounds, and that if I was hearing these sounds then I couldn’t be dead. I was, of course, a very young, strong, healthy, country boy, and I healed very quickly. So, I recovered.”
In Part Two, Sasser rounds up the rest of the company and they make it into the woods at dark, where they depend on Close Air Support until they can be helicoptered out at dawn.