News

Vietnam Medic Shares His Story of Survival

Laura Lane

11/11/2013

Nov. 11--On Dec. 5, 1968, a land mine pretty much blew off Danny Walls' left leg. When medics hustled his stretcher into the MASH unit in Chu Lai, he ended up in what was called the "meat room."

The Navy chief back at medical supply had shown me this room my first day in Vietnam. He had told me it's where they put the ones that are going to die. I laid there for a long time watching as the other men had their sheets pulled over their heads. A man walked up to me and asked if I wanted to live, and I said, "Yes I do." I think he was a Catholic priest, and his face and quiet manner looked like a person who'd seen a lot of men die. A short time later I was wheeled into the OR and given ether.

Walls graduated from Oolitic High School in 1965 and got a factory job at Hoffman's television plant in Orleans. He found the work boring, so he joined the U.S. Navy. Tensions were building in Vietnam, and the first U.S. combat troops had been sent to Danang Province.

Walls reported for duty at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center on April 26, 1966. After boot camp, he trained to become a hospital corpsman. He ended up at a civilian hospital in Panama as a Navy liaison, where his job included fingerprinting dead soldiers.

His two-year stint there was cut short as American military involvement in Vietnam escalated; 400,000 U.S. troops were deployed there. Walls went to North Carolina for training in combat field medicine and jungle warfare, spent 30 days with his family and arrived in Vietnam at the end of January 1968. It was the dawn of the Tet Offensive, when the Viet Cong launched multiple and devastating surprise attacks against South Vietnam and its American allies during a planned two-day cease fire for the Lunar New Year.

The first night in the village I was blown out of my bunk by a huge explosion that ripped the side off the 30-by-30-foot building I was in. For the remaining two weeks I was at this village, I slept in a sand-bagged bunker. In the day the corpsmen would teach me the ropes of taking care of the villagers and at night I'd monitor the shortwave radio or stand bunker watch.

Walls soon packed up his gear, boarded a Navy helicopter and landed in the South Vietnamese village of Binh Thuy, where he was to serve as doctor to the locals, as well as a military medic and soldier. He called medical corpsmen the paradox of war: the combatant and the medic, trained to help people, and also to kill. It wasn't long before firefights broke out in the area, the soldiers led by a fearless sergeant.

In one of those firefights he had looked at me lying on the ground and said, "Don't lay there, get up and shoot back." We stood there together shooting back at the enemy with our M-16s on full automatic while the other Marines kept hidden behind rocks. It was a very exhilarating feeling, the both of us standing in the open daring the bastards to shoot us. We then took off running towards the Viet Cong that were hiding in the rocks and instead of shooting us they broke and ran. Sarge shot one through the chest and I shot one in the lower leg and Sarge finished him off.

When a gunbattle broke out during another patrol mission, that sergeant was shot in the foot. When a helicopter came to take him away, he shouted at Walls. "Don't stay out in the open and fight. Get behind something." Walls treated the sick and villagers with shrapnel and bullet wounds as best he could; he was the closest thing to a doctor they had. He used the same doses of penicillin to treat bubonic plague in the South Vietnamese and his fellow soldiers' gonorrhea. A tablespoon full of medicinal cherry-flavored syrup cured children's coughs. He delivered a baby one night as red tracer fire flew over the hospital, then left a midwife with the mother and newborn to run outside and return fire. The war was all around, day and night, and he soldiered on. Walls remembers encountering his first mine field.

I couldn't see them on top of the hill but I heard a muffled blast and saw a large plume of black smoke. Suddenly, I heard someone holler "corpsman" and I started up the burnt-off hill. When I got near the top, I looked and there lying on the ground were several men. I dropped to one knee and asked God to watch over me and then I walked over to the wounded. Another Marine had followed me up the hill and he sat there on the ground frozen in fear. One Marine was already dead, his skin a bright yellow and his right arm burnt black as a cinder. A soldier was lying on the ground, his face blown away and his arms and legs twisted in grotesque ways. Another soldier was burnt black and large pieces of flesh were missing from his body, his eyes unresponding. Sarge had his right leg from the groin down completely missing. A black Marine had huge pieces of flesh missing above each knee. I told the other Marine to go down the hill and call a Medivac helicopter but he refused to move. I went down the hill and got a radio and called for the chopper, but was told there wasn't one available. I had two men to keep alive. When I got back to where the wounded were, the Viet Cong started shooting at me. The helicopter finally arrived an hour and a half later. Later, word came back to me that both of the wounded Marines had lived and they both thanked me for what I'd done. I never knew their names.

Walls carried an M-16 rifle and kept a .45-caliber handgun strapped to his backpack, which contained medical supplies ranging from sterile bandages to ampules of morphine. He also carried with him a 35mm Minolta camera he had bought in Panama, passing it off to others to snap pictures of soldiers' antics and of war's realities. One photo, taken the afternoon of Dec. 5, 1968, shows 21-year-old Walls in a shell crater cradling his rifle. Out on patrol two hours later, two Marines with Walls stepped on land mines. He tended to their wounds.

I went back to the first Marine, who was now screaming, and I gave him a shot of morphine. The chopper was there and I went to pick up the Marine and as I did I stepped on a large mine that picked me up and threw me about 10 feet away. I looked down and my left foot was pushed against the shin. I felt pain in my groin and saw shreds of meat hanging from my thighs. I looked toward the heavens and put my arm and fist in the air and screamed as loud as I could, cursing God. Before I could bring my arm down. I was shot in my right bicep, right armpit and right chest.

Then one of my Marines picked me up and put me on the chopper. He then put both of the other Marines on the chopper. Watching him run back and forth through that rice paddy picking up the other Marines with total disregard for his own life was one of the bravest actions I'd witness my entire time in Vietnam.

After emergency surgery at the field hospital to amputate much of his left leg, Walls was flown to the U.S. Naval Hospital in Yokosuka, Japan. He remembers smoking LSD for pain relief as instructed by his doctors in a bamboo pipe, and also a visit from dignitaries the week before Christmas.

Bob Hope, Billy Graham and Miss World 1968 visited us on the ward. I remember thinking if Billy Graham shook my hand that I might be healed and get up and walk out of there. That didn't happen, but the light that was in his eyes brought me new hope of better things to come. Behind him was Bob Hope. When I shook his hand something totally unexpected happened. I felt as though I had touched the hand of God. Even now, 45 years later, his hand still looks to be the size of the sky in my mind's eye.

Then Miss World, a sandy blond Australian woman, shook my hand and I realized I still had my manhood.

Walls eventually was transferred to a Philadelphia military hospital and got to thinking about his future. Leafing through a magazine, he saw an ad for a shiny new 1969 Dodge Charger. He had saved his combat pay, and called his mother back home and asked her to order him a red one. An automatic, he said; the loss of his leg would prohibit using a clutch. He came home on crutches, his left leg gone, and the car was parked out front.

Walls got back to the business of living. Within a year, he had a prosthetic leg, a new wife, a house, a job at the Navy Depot at Crane and a baby son. "As I lay there in the hospital, how little did I realize what God had in store for me."