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Purple and Broken Hearts

By Dennis Serdel Perry

I was drafted in October 1966 along with two guys I went to high school with. After basic training and advanced infantry training, they cut the orders for us. One lucked out and went to Fort Reilly, Kansas and was a clerk for the rest of his two years' drafted time; he hated it. Another went to 1st Air Cav for training and then to combat infantry in Vietnam. I went to Hawaii for advanced jungle training and then to Vietnam combat infantry in the new Americal Division.

The rule in 1967 was that if you were wounded two times, they took you out of the infantry and sent you in the back or back to the United States. The problem in Vietnam, like in Iraq, was that most of our wounds were shrapnel. Thus, with the heavy fighting in '67 to '68, many soldiers were getting hit once, but with multiple wounds. So during our tour, the military changed the rules and said we had to be hit three times to get out of the field.

Comparing notes with my one high school buddy who was in 1st Cav, he told me he was hit three times and the Army would not take him out of the fighting. His father had to write and personally visit his senator to get his son out of the fighting after being wounded three times. He asked, "Will you only be happy when my son comes home dead? You can only get wounded so many times before the bullet or shrapnel doesn't just wound you but hits it mark and kills you." Only after all that did they take his son out of the field.

Comparing notes when we came home I found that everyone (except for one who contracted malaria) in our original company was wounded at least once.

Only 18% of us actually fought the war, so I'm confused nowadays just "how wounded" Americans think a soldier should be to get a Purple Heart. It seems that if you have both legs and an arm blown off, Americans believe you should get a Purple Heart. But I know that I bandaged a machine gunner of ours when a bullet grazed his shoulder, but he acted as if it didn't even bother him. Now do Americans think that he should get the Purple Heart? One of my best buddies got a little shrapnel in his leg and spent a month on a hospital ship just offshore 'Nam and then went right back to combat. Should he get a Purple Heart?

The ones who complain the loudest about Purple Hearts are usually the chickenhawks. Medals don't mean a thing.

The anger combat Vietnam vets have is based on the following:

Don't send us to war unless you have a damn good reason. Don't send us to a war where your real purpose is to let it drag on so the war profiteers can make more money. Don't send us to free people who do not want to be freed, but hate us soldiers and just want us to get out of there. Don't send us to a war unless 90% of the American public will back us. And don't blame us for war crimes when the nature of war turns human beings into animals.