Preserving The Oral HistorIES of Combat Veterans
4:51 | Can I cut the mustard? Tom Agnew was apprehensive on the way to Vietnam and wondering if he was up to the task. He was assigned as a medic in a helicopter evacuation unit, known as Dustoff. On one of his first missions, he learned not to triage the wounded too quickly. (Caution: coarse language.)
Keywords : Tom Agnew medic Vietnam Chu Lai I Corps Americal Division Montagnards Harry Newling Graham Bose John Dilman Jimmy Powell check ride Dustoff
Tom Agnew was an Army brat who always wanted to be a soldier and a hero. When it was his term to serve, Uncle Sam decided he would be a medic. He was apolitical, so it didn't bother him that he may go to war in Vietnam. He would be going to try and save lives.
You could get a lot of ground fire when you were going in to land at a hot LZ. Medic Tom Agnew remembers a lot of them, especially the one which he departed dangling from the end of a cable. While he was out there, a tracer round went by his head and made him angry, so he took out his pistol and fired back, which must have greatly amused his antagonist.
After a huge typhoon devastated Chu Lai, Tom Agnew was sent to a different Dustoff unit at Da Nang. The job was the same, medical evacuation. This late in the war, it was more often ARVN troops.
Something good can still come out of a bad war. Modern EMS was borne from lessons learned in Vietnam by combat medics such as Tom Agnew. He passed on those lessons while training emergency medical personnel in his postwar career. First he had to deal with protestors and a tendency to hit the deck when he heard a loud noise.
