Early in my tour, I'd say May to July 1971, I was at the hospital when troops brought in a wounded woman from the perimeter. Sometimes the Vietnamese strayed to close to the kill zone, especially by the river where the women liked to wash clothes on a large rock. This was a dangerous place to do laundry; one of the guard posts killed a Viet woman for doing that very thing. In that incident the woman was struck in the head by a M79 gas grenade fired by a guard tower.
This old woman had stepped on a mine, one of the small ones. I think it was a model -14. We just called them poppers. They were designed to blow off feet if you stepped on them. If you crawled over one well that would be a different story. They were a small but nasty high explosive and very hard to see. They were scattered all over the sandy perimeter.
She had stepped on it with no protective foot gear so her foot was completely destroyed. A large gobbet of bloody meat with some toes still showing hung from a long shredded tendon coming out of her calf. She was screaming completely freaked out begging and bleeding out from the stump.
A group of medics was assembling and starting care. Just as I got there a MD took over. He was pissed at the noise and the mess. He ordered everyone back to their work and told someone to get the Red Cross to get her the fuck out his hospital. He bitched out everyone for even allowing her to be brought in.
One of the medics, a male nurse or a 91-C, stood up to him saying "this is an old woman in pain we need to help her". Everyone was looking at him now so he relented and allowed dressings and morphine. He was still angry and insisted they do it in the hall and turn her over to the Red Cross STAT. He left and the medics took care of her.
I'm proud of the medic who stood up for the old woman. Standing up against a doctor took a lot of courage and it goes to show what a crazy place Nam was. Life was cheap and a Vietnamese life was cheaper.
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