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Blogs by Charles Keller
The TET Offensive of 1968 9/4/2024 12:53:26 PM
The fear that removes the naivety of youth's false feelings of invincibility never leaves the soul The T.E.T. offensive of 1968 is a memory which will NEVER leave me.
For days and nights during the first week of February,1968, we never slept.
Choppers filled with wounded, dead bodies, parts of bodies were carried away from those helicopters. Day in and day out. Nights we worked to save the ones who could be saved all the while being under circling Hueys firing constantly into the mass of VC trying to overrun us. Machine gun fire, rockets, M-16s endlessly filled the night air. Bodies of the warriors from the enemy hung from the concertina wire on our perimeter and covering the hundred yards of clearing beyond it.
Marines and Navy CBs from bases across the road from our hospital defended us from the constant attack.
We, as corpsmen in a hospital, weren't armed. The only time I carried a weapon in Vietnam was when I was in the back of an ambulance delivering a wounded Vietnamese civilian to the civilian hospital in Danang and on the few medivac flights I took with wounded Marines taking them to the hospital ship in the harbor.
Those nights were among the most fearful of my time there. Being unarmed and unable to defend ourselves we knew that if the people defending the perimeter were overrun while we worked non-stop to help those wounded Marines we would probably be killed. During moments of lull we huddled in a small room and listened to the carnage. Another corpsman who had come in from Khe Sanh with a badly wounded Marine explained to us what to do if a satchel charge was tossed into the space we occupied.
Being defenseless in that environment will fill the bravest man with dread and fear. Those memories NEVER go away!
We received the Navy Unit Commendation Medal for those days and nights. Four of us received Letters of Commendation for our actions.
