Crew Was Charged with Counting the Dead in Vietnam

Veteran Skip McDonald's crew was charged with counting the dead in Vietnam 
Journal Standard
By Matt Trowbridge Rockford Register Star
Posted Apr. 11, 2015

This story is part of our latest Rock River Valley Insider, which focuses on the 40th anniversary of the U.S. officially leaving the Vietnam War. The content will publish in the April 12 edition of the Register Star.

Then he was flown to a hospital in Denver. He had met Betty Yang, who is originally from Korea, during training at Fort Carson. Now Yang visited him every day. A month later, they were engaged. Four months after that, they married. March 14 marked their 45th anniversary.

Phillip "Skip" McDonald was on the bomb damage assessment (BDA) crew and was charged with counting the dead. McDonald was wounded 35 days in-country and received a Purple Heart.
SUNNY STRADER/RRSTAR.COM

Philip “Skip” McDonald, a platoon leader for the 3rd Mechanized Infantry Division, trained six months in Fort Carson, Colorado, for a job that didn’t really exist in Vietnam.

“You ride on these things with tracks that carry 10 guys and have a 50-caliber machine gun on top,” he said, “but we never rode them in Vietnam because rocket propelled grenades would go right through them, explode and kill everybody inside. So we all rode on top instead of getting inside.

“I didn’t ride tracks in Vietnam anyway because we were cavalry. I jumped out of helicopters. There wasn’t a lot of mechanized infantry in Vietnam.”

When he arrived in-country on Sept. 15, 1969, McDonald discovered that his main job was something he considers a little “sick.” He was on the bomb damage assessment crew and was charged with counting the dead.

“The B-52s come in, blow a whole bunch of crap up and then you go in there and try to count dead people,” said McDonald, who returned to his native Rockford after the war. “We had a battalion commander who kept a chart for each company, and you got points for step-ons and estimateds. Pretty sick.”

A step-on is exactly what it sounds like: a body you can step on.

“You got awards for each company and you got more points for a step-on than ones you thought you killed but couldn’t find (estimateds) that maybe left a blood trail or something, like deer hunting.”

McDonald was in-country for 35 days, but that was a long time for an officer at the front during the height of a war that killed almost as many Americans in combat (47,424) as World War I (53,402).

“You weren’t treated like they are treated today. These kids come home from Iraq and Afghanistan and, good for them, they have this big parade and everything for one kid. We had 27 wounded and nine killed in one afternoon and we were considered baby-killers. We weren’t.
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