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Here is a story about the 106th that you can tell the Marine, I was there.
It was late one February afternoon at Kishine Barracks, and the sky was pink and white with puffs of black clouds. A jagged golden streak of light separated the brown hills in the West from the sky above. As the light was waning four Medevac helicopters picked their way to the 106th amid the jumbled mass of buildings and houses that surrounded the compound. They landed safely on the helicopter pad, one in each corner, with their blades auto gyrating, and blowing dust and loose papers around in the cold crisp air.
Four choppers on the pad, the maximum it could hold, and each one carried two severely burned survivors of a Vietcong attack on U.S. Army armored personnel carriers. The wounded had been rushed to an aid station in Vietnam where they were stabilized, then loaded onto an Air Force Nightingale Flight (DC-7), jetted to Yokota Air Base, Tokyo, and then to Kishine Barracks--all in a matter of hours. They arrived with attending Army medics and two doctors from Vietnam, who were still in their stained, short-sleeved tropical uniforms.
Hospital corpsmen were pulled from every ward to unload the choppers, and off-duty medics in the mess hall and barracks were recruited, as there were eight patients requiring thirty-two litter bearers. The hospital commander, the chief nurse, and doctors and nurses were at the pad before the choppers arrived, and they were ready for action.
I was one of the corpsmen recruited for litter duty, and I grabbed my field jacket as I followed Sergeant McCloskey and two other corpsmen out the door of the orthopedic ward, and rushed to the chopper pad across the street. We were directed to a big gray-green Huey with its blades slowing to a stop, and its big side door sliding open. An Army doctor and medic from the Nam jumped down and started pulling a litter out the door, and I stopped in my tracks--there was a basketball lying on top of the litter at one end.
Some dummy had let the patient bring his basketball--I couldn't believe it! Who would waste valuable time to bring along a basketball? Sgt. McCloskey yelled for me to keep moving, and I got the end of the litter with the basketball. The litter occupant was really big. He was Caucasian with a Vietnam tan. But, it wasn't a basketball--it was his head! The poor guy was big because his body was swollen, and his head was swollen as big as a basketball--there were only slits where his eyes, nose and mouth were supposed to be.
We ran with the litter as fast as we could to the Burn Ward (The 106th was the Burn Center of the Pacific). I did what they told me to do, which wasn't much. I was a new medic, a medic in training. I watched two doctors work on my patient, along with nurses, clinical techs and experienced corpsmen. When they told me to get something I got it, but mostly I just watched--and prayed. A couple of hours went by, I guess, and I was told to go to dinner and to hurry back. I did. I ate fast. Everybody did. When I came back the two doctors were still working on the basketball soldier, but a nurse told me it was hopeless, and he died soon after. I am not exactly sure, but I think my patient was the only one of the eight that died. But, let me tell you, I saw heroics in action that day--I saw two doctors, some nurses and clinical techs do everything humanly possible to keep that soldier alive. And I saw all kinds of emotion--anger, frustration, etc., and last of all tears, not big tears, just little bits of moisture flashing in their eyes when they knew it was over.
I saw that medical machine go into action many times after that, and there were many, many more wounded soldiers saved at the 106th than ever died there.
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