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I was there when the 24th Evac was closing, toward the end of my tour in Summer 1972. It had not physically changed much in the last 3 or 4 years, according to old-timers. There was a tall doctor who resembled Frank Zappa, who had been there since it opened in 1966. Also, "Sweetpea" the translator was still there, and today she resides in New Orleans. She was at the 24th until the end. 

I left before the official, total closure, but I can tell you a lot about the last phases. I was in on the last few "live kicks and groans" . Basically, the 24th began closing the less essential wards such as psych , sending patients instead to the 3rd Field Hospital in Saigon. Most clinics, things like that, also closed. The Long Binh Dispensary remained open as long as I can recall, however. Mainly, the 24th just kept open the ER, X-Ray, op / post-op, etc. This remaining vestige of services was due to continued influx of casualties, mostly ARVN and VC / NVA. The war was actually at its highest point in history in 1972, so far as the allies, but for the US it was at one of the lowest. We had dwindled from 180,000 US troops in-country a year earlier, to only about 50,000 or so! (This is a vague figure in my memory.) Thus, within all of Vietnam were only about as many Americans as had inhabited Long Binh Post at one time. Long Binh had dwindled to 5,000 G.I.'s before I left.

We couldn't even pull perimeter guard at Long Binh... we had to bring in Montagnards, ARVNs, Cambodians, Koreans, etc. And we had had a long-standing Filipino Contingent on-post for many years, who were still there. But this allied influx only made Long Binh an Asian post, which caused it to be periodically surrounded by VC and NVA. Long Binh was as far from the war as it could be for several months, then suddenly it was a paranoid hotspot. And on-post crime was very bad, both G.I. and Asians. There were 3,000 Vietnamese living illegally on-post, mostly in a colony of criminals within the one remaining grove of rubber trees on the base. Many Vietnamese still worked on-post, most of them faithful to the end, although some were getting busted for bringing in bombs, grenades, dope, etc. There were a lot of cases of sabotage. As for the 24th, we had trouble keeping burglars out of the empty wards, and especially out of Supply and particularly Medical Supply.

I personally caught a Korean captain who was making his way out of Med Supply with a bag full of antibiotics... he had cut a hole in the floor directly under the vault room. Moreover, a load of ampicillin, designated as property of the 24th Evac, had been seized from a captured NVA medic near Long Binh.

Long Binh took a big rocket attack in early August, and also sappers blew up the chopper fuel tanks and the ammo dump in July. The post was surrounded that summer also by 3 battalions of NVA tanks and arty! You should have seen the B-52's bombing just outside our perimeter! The USAF saved us without a single enemy round being fired onto Long Binh Post. One factor that really saved us was that the NVA reportedly stalled momentarily, as their leaders pondered whether to destroy Long Binh, or to save it to make into a Ho Chi Minh University! (Today, Vietnamese refugees tell me that most of the 25-square-mile base is totally GONE! Dismantled!)

We were trucking a lot of material out to allied camps, and to property disposal yards off-post. This meant that suddenly I was riding shotgun on convoys of junk. It was very scary... I did not want to be the last KIA or POW in VN, especially when I was doing nothing more than guarding hospital beds and desks, typewriters, etc. And we had trouble every time we slowed the trucks down for a turn: not by VC, but by boysan thugs who would try to jump onto our trucks from the back seat of Hondas, in order to throw goods off the truck. They doubted we would shoot them for that, so we started fixing bayonets, and that kept them off. But one time on a desolate country road, two boysans jumped out of the elephant grass to throw rocks at the truck I was on, and I brought my M-16 right down on them, then yanked it up and fired over their heads once I realized what was happening. (Wow, to have the reflexes I had then!) I could not recall any classes on this scenario having been taught in combat medic school or neuropsych specialist school back at Ft. Sam...

Long Binh was like a ghost town compared to its former "glory." It was melancholy to see the fading away of an era in history, which I had grown up watching on TV for years, then while still a teen came to see it die. (But bless him, Sammy Davis, Jr., came to Long Binh to give us a show! What a guy!)

Everyone was anti-war; even the lifers were coolly disinterested in it all. But despite the frustration of being there when Jane Fonda was "joining ranks with the NVA," and when everyone was down on the war, we never in any way felt militarily defeated. We always knew we were victorious in our own realm of operation. The cocky swagger of the occupational victor was always evident among us. The U.S. definitely won "its part" of the war, if you could actually pick out a particular country's " part" within that tossed-salad of warring factions and scenarios.

There were so many medevacs, most were having to be shuttled to the 12th Evac at Cu Chi, to the 3rd Field Hospital in Saigon, etc. As most of you know, the 93rd Evac at Long Binh was long closed by the time of my arrival incountry in 1971. But still we had lots of trauma cases, mostly neuro or brain injuries. And I have a photo of a surgeon taking a live M-79 round out of the abdomen of a Cambodian... outside, under lights at night, staff wearing helmets and flak jackets. (In subsequent years, I saw that doctor walking around in the background in a TV news story about the Pentagon, and he was now a Colonel! I'd like to know who he was, and to find out what decoration he and his op staff received.)

Other sources of casualties were the massive Cambodian Border battles and the 2-month Battle of An Loc.  Although the ARVN actually fought gallantly at An Loc, it was nonetheless destroyed by NVA tanks, the ones which later surrounded Long Binh. From choppers, you could see lines of Soviet T-54 tanks pouring down Highway 13 ! We could have bombed them in Laos, but Laos would not agree to it. So in keeping with the politics of the time, we had to let them go from Hanoi to Long Binh before vaporizing them.

Choppers were in the air all the time, and medevac's were taking as many hits as any others. Then we struck a deal with the enemy... The U.S. asked them if they would please stop shooting down out medevac's... But the enemy said we needed to take off the M-60's then.  We said no, they shoot us all the time. They said, well, we cannot distinguished the Red Cross markings very well. We said, (typical of American compromise,) we will paint our medevac choppers solid white, paint a big red cross on them, and take the guns off them!  A lot of guys, including myself, rebelled against this and refused to fly medevac missions. Especially in the height of the war, when 100,000 fresh NVA were pouring into the country (half of them across the Cambodian border, near us!) And at a time when the US was flying as many as 300 chopper missions a week just along a 5-mile stretch of road near Long Binh. But guess what? It worked! They actually quit shooting at our medevac's!

When I left Vietnam, it was a miracle that I got out alive. I even had to bum a very insecure ride on a convoy to Saigon, and find my way through that city of almost certain death, just to get to Tan Son Nhut AFB for my DEROS flight home. Within "The Loop" outside the AFB were about 2,000 Viet boys being rounded up for the draft. This was at a time when a battalion of ARVN's were deserting every day.  Also, there was a Viet woman at the gate pretending to be selling stuff, but the MP's pointed out to me that she was VC, and I watched as she counted the departing GI's by nodding slightly, and making notes. What a place! And there were Viets working everywhere on the AFB of course, at a time of very dubious loyalty from the natives. Thus I did not consider myself out of Vietnam until I could no longer see the fires of artillery in the night. Vietnam was going to hell, and I was going to Heaven.

Joseph Blair Turner
1971-1972
MOS 91A10, 91B40, and 91F20


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