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I had an uncle that was drafted to play professional football but instead got scooped up by the Vietnam draft. He was an enthusiastic hunter but he refused to c
by comrade1234 2mo ago
I had an uncle that was drafted to play professional football but instead got scooped up by the Vietnam draft. He was an enthusiastic hunter but he refused to carry a gun in war and became a battlefield medic instead.
On the battlefield he would triage all of the wounded and treat them or evacuate them by helicopter based on their injuries. The problem was though that he treated soldiers on all sides the same - USA, south Vietnamese, and north Vietnamese. This wasn't normal - there were USA soldiers that would execute wounded north Vietnamese.
His story started making it back to the USA. There were these press conferences the government would do where they report wounded and dead and basically tried to show how they were winning. Reporters brought him up and asked McNamara (I think - if I remember the article correctly) about it and he answered something like "we are investigating it".
Nothing came of it though. My uncle had another article written about him a few years ago and he still talks about how he visited one of the north Vietnamese soldiers in the hospital that he evacuated and how happy he was to see him.