Medic in the Mekong: A soldier’s valor under fire in Vietnam

On May 13, 2024, death claimed a member of an elite company of military personnel. Ten days after his passing in Sugarland, Texas, Medal of Honor recipient Clarence Eugene Sasser was laid to rest in the Houston National Cemetery.
A Texan all his life, Sasser was born in Brazoria County and grew up in a small town near Houston. In 1965, he graduated near the top of his class in one of Marshall High School’s last segregated classes. He enrolled at the University of Houston to study chemistry but dropped out due to a lack of funds.
With his college deferment thus lost, he was drafted into the U.S. Army in June 1967. He eventually qualified as a medical aidman and shipped out to Vietnam, where he was assigned to 3rd Battalion, 60th Infantry, 9th Infantry Division.
On Jan. 10, 1968, Pfc. Sasser was attached to a company on a reconnaissance mission in Dinh Tuong province in the Mekong River Delta. The operation was conducted as an air assault, but upon arrival, the company immediately came under a well-prepared Viet Cong ambush from positions surrounding the landing zone.
“I [got] grazed getting off the helicopter in the leg,” Sasser said afterward.
But that was just the beginning, as the enemy hit the intruders with small arms, recoilless rifles, machine guns and rocket fire. The Americans suffered more than 30 casualties in the first few minutes, the rest taking cover in a rice paddy.
While the firefight raged, Sasser ran across the paddy to retrieve wounded soldiers and deposit them wherever he could find cover. In the process, he took a painful hit in the left shoulder by hot fragments from an exploding rocket. Refusing medical attention, Sasser ran through a barrage of rocket and automatic fire, pausing to give urgent treatment to some and searching for others.
At that point, Sasser, having suffered additional leg injuries, was dragging himself through the mud, grabbing handfuls of rice straw for propulsion — just as well, he later said, since raising one’s head was a constant invitation for Viet Cong snipers.
Seeing a soldier 100 meters away, he crawled over, treated his wound and then encouraged another group of troops to crawl to relative safety.
Sasser continued this rice paddy triage for hours as the battle continued into the night, with U.S. Air Force aircraft providing support and preventing troops from being overrun. By the time helicopters arrived to evacuate the wounded, the struggle for survival had lasted nearly 20 hours.
Evacuated to Japan, Sasser began helping at the medical facility and persuaded the doctor to retain him in the medical department.
While there, he learned he had been recommended for the Medal of Honor, which he later received from President Richard Nixon in 1969. He also received the Purple Heart. Sasser was honorably discharged as a specialist 5th class in June 1969.
Sasser later married Ethel Morant and the couple had three children together. He eventually took a position in an oil refinery for five years before beginning a longtime career with the United States Department of Veterans Affairs. When he later lamented that he had never finished his college education, Texas A&M awarded him an honorary doctorate of letters in 2014.
In 2010, a statue of Sasser was erected in front of the Brazoria County courthouse. Still, it took some time for Sasser to accept recognition for his service.
“I don’t think what I did was above and beyond, I never have, and for a long time, I had a problem with that,” he said in a Library of Congress interview. “But finally … a friend helped me reconcile it to the point that it meant, ‘Hey, you did your job.’”