Alfred Rascon: The Medic They Called Doc, and the 34 Years It Took to Give Him His Medal

Alfred Rascon's platoon knew exactly what he had done, because he had done it on top of them — twice throwing his own body over wounded men to take grenade blasts meant for them, shot through the hip, a grenade's shrapnel in his face, still crawling back for a machine gun the enemy was about to capture. His sergeant recommended him for the Medal of Honor within days. The recommendation never advanced. Rascon got a Silver Star, went home, and lived twenty-seven years without knowing he had ever been nominated — until the sergeant he had saved asked him how it felt. This page is the documented record of what he did, what his institution did with the paperwork afterward, and who carried his case when the system would not.

The service, and the promise

Alfred Velazquez Rascon was born on September 10, 1945, in Chihuahua, Mexico, the only child of Alfredo and Andrea Rascon. His parents brought him to the United States as a small child and raised him in Oxnard, California, north of Los Angeles, in the largely Hispanic neighborhood of La Colonia. He started grade school, President Clinton would later note, speaking not a word of English. He grew up near three military bases and fell in love with the armed forces; at seven, wanting to do his part, he built a homemade parachute and jumped off the roof of his house. In his own words, the chute suffered a “total malfunction,” and he broke his wrist.

Undeterred, he graduated from Oxnard High School in 1963 and talked his parents into signing an age waiver so he could enlist at 17. He took basic training at Fort Ord, California, trained as a medic at Fort Sam Houston, finished jump school at Fort Benning, and joined the 173rd Airborne Brigade in Okinawa. In May 1965 the brigade deployed to Vietnam — the first major Army ground combat unit sent there. Rascon, who had not wanted to stay back with the medical platoon, became the reconnaissance platoon’s own medic: he lived with them, patrolled with them, trained them to start IVs and apply tourniquets, and was, in his words, a grunt first until somebody was hit. They knew him simply as “Doc.”

He was not a citizen of the country he was fighting for. He would not become one until 1967. Asked later why he had volunteered to join and go to Vietnam when he was not even a citizen, he answered: “I was always an American in my heart.”

The promise made to a combat medic runs in both directions, and Rascon stated his half of it himself: “You’ve got to take care of your people.” What follows is what his half looked like on one morning in 1966 — and what the other half looked like for the thirty-four years after it.

What happened — March 16, 1966

On March 16, 1966, during Operation Silver City in Long Khanh Province, Rascon’s unit — the Reconnaissance Platoon, Headquarters Company, 1st Battalion (Airborne), 503d Infantry, 173d Airborne Brigade (Separate) — was moving through the jungle to reinforce its sister battalion, which was under intense attack by a numerically superior force. Sergeant Ray Compton, the point man, spotted enemy soldiers some twenty yards ahead. The platoon came under heavy fire from crew-served weapons and grenades, and several point squad soldiers were severely wounded. Rascon was 20 years old. He later called what followed “ten minutes of pure hell.” The sequence below is established by his official Medal of Honor citation, filled out by the contemporaneous reporting:

• Ordered to stay down and out of the way — his platoon sergeant’s warning, as the Washington Post recorded it, was “Stay down and keep out of the way, Doc, or you’re going to get killed” — Rascon went forward anyway, through the fire, toward the cries for a medic. He repeatedly tried to reach the severely wounded point machine-gunner, Pfc. William Thompson, lying exposed on an open enemy trail, and was driven back each time.
• He jumped to his feet, reached Thompson, and intentionally placed his own body between the wounded man and the enemy machine guns, taking numerous shrapnel injuries and a serious wound to the hip — a bullet that, as Clinton told it, went parallel to his spine and came out by his shoulder. He dragged the larger soldier off the fire-raked trail. Thompson did not survive.
• Hearing the second machine-gunner, Pfc. Larry Gibson, yell that he was running out of ammunition, Rascon crawled back under heavy fire to the wounded gunner, stripped the bandoleers of ammunition from him, and carried them to Gibson, who resumed his suppressive fire.
• Fearing the abandoned machine gun, its ammunition and spare barrel would fall into enemy hands, he went back for them. On the way he was wounded in the face and torso by grenade fragments — one blast ripped his mouth open — and recovered the gun and gear anyway, so another soldier could add fire against the pinned-down squad.
• He saw the point grenadier, Pfc. Neil Haffey, being hit by small-arms fire with grenades being thrown at him. Rascon reached him and covered him with his own body, absorbing the blasts and saving Haffey’s life, taking still more wounds. Haffey’s verdict, decades later: “I wouldn’t have any of that without Doc. I was dead.”
• Moving toward the wounded point squad leader, he saw grenades hurled at Sergeant Ray Compton. Again he covered a man with his body — Compton this time — absorbing the full force of the explosions.
• Critically wounded, bleeding from his ears and nose, he kept searching for and treating the wounded after the enemy broke contact, and directed their evacuation. Only after he was placed on the evacuation helicopter did he allow aid to be given to himself.

His wounds were so severe that, as Clinton noted at the ceremony, he was given last rites. He survived, and spent months recovering in a hospital in Japan.

What the institution did afterward

The men who were there filed the paperwork. The institution lost it — and “lost” is the institution’s own president’s word for what happened. At the 2000 ceremony, Clinton stated it plainly: Rascon “was given a Silver Star for his valor that day in 1966, but the request for his Medal of Honor somehow got lost in a thicket of red tape.”

The documented sequence, from the Washington Post’s reporting in November 1999 and February 2000:

• 1966: Compton recommended Rascon for the Medal of Honor within days of the action. In the confusion of the escalating war, the recommendation was not advanced up the chain of command. Rascon received the Silver Star instead.
• Rascon himself did not know. He served out his enlistment, became a U.S. citizen in 1967, earned a commission, rejoined the Army, and volunteered in 1972 for a second tour in Vietnam as an adviser — all without knowing a Medal of Honor recommendation had ever carried his name.
• 1993: In his first conversation with Compton since Vietnam, the sergeant asked him: “How does it feel to be a Congressional Medal of Honor winner?” Rascon replied: “I don’t know.” Compton was outraged — “It’s almost like what he did for us went unnoticed” — and he, Haffey, and Gibson went to work resubmitting the nomination. Compton’s explanation of why was a debt ledger in one sentence: “You have to pay your debts. If you feel like you owe somebody your life, it’s forever.”
• The Army Decorations Board turned the resubmission down, following regulations, because too much time had passed.
• Rep. Lane Evans of Illinois, an advocate for Vietnam veterans, took up the case, along with the Society of the 173rd Airborne Association. Evans’s assessment of the Pentagon’s posture: “The Pentagon saw Al Rascon’s case as setting a precedent they didn’t like, and they were going to fight it every step of the way.” In 1997, Evans pushed the case to the White House, handing Clinton a packet of material about it at a social function.
• May 1999: The Pentagon reversed itself and recommended the medal. November 1999: Defense Secretary William S. Cohen approved it, and the papers went to the president.
• February 8, 2000: President Clinton presented the Medal of Honor to Rascon in the East Room of the White House — 34 years after the action, with the men he had saved in the room, Compton and Haffey among them. Rascon asked his recon platoon to stand, and gave the medal away in his only remarks: “The honor is not really mine, it ends up being those who were with me that day. What you see before you is common valor that was done every day.”

One detail from Rascon’s own mouth belongs in this section, because it captures the institution’s follow-through better than any summary. In his Army oral history, recorded in November 2000, the interviewer asked when he had found out he was going to receive the Medal of Honor. Rascon answered: “Oh god, this is what, probably sometime in late November 1999. But officially to this day I’ve never been notified by the Army.” Thirty-four years, a lost packet, a board refusal, a presidential intervention — and the Army itself never once wrote to tell him.

A correction belongs here too, in the interest of the record this section keeps. Some later summaries date the discovery of the loss to a 1985 reunion of the 173rd. The contemporaneous reporting — the Associated Press and the Washington Post, February 2000, and the accounts Compton and Rascon gave at the time — puts the conversation in 1993, twenty-seven years after the fight, and the resubmission fight in the years that followed. This page follows the contemporaneous record.

Where it stands now

The account, as far as the medal goes, is closed — and Rascon himself never stopped adding to the service underneath it. After the ceremony he continued the career the medal had interrupted on paper: he was serving as inspector general of the Selective Service System when Clinton hung the medal on him, and in 2001 the Senate confirmed him as the system’s 10th director. In 2002 he returned to the Army as a medical service officer with the Army Surgeon General’s office and deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan — a man who had been given last rites in one war, back in uniform for two more, nearly four decades later. His medal is held at the National Museum of American History of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC.

Notice, though, what closing this account required, because it is the pattern this site exists to document. The fight lasted minutes. The medal took thirty-four years, and it did not move because the institution re-examined its own files. It moved because the three men whose lives were the receipt — a sergeant who had filed the original recommendation, a grenadier, and a machine-gunner — discovered by accident, in a casual conversation twenty-seven years later, that the debt had never been recorded; because they resubmitted it themselves and were refused on timeliness; and because a congressman carried their packet past the Pentagon and put it in a president’s hands. The institution’s contribution, across three and a half decades, was the Silver Star it substituted, the board refusal it issued, and — by Rascon’s own account — not even a letter at the end. The accounting arrived. But it arrived the way it arrived for Henry Johnson and Paris Davis: from outside, carried by the owed, over the institution’s objections about the calendar.

The ledger

Rascon is this section’s “finally accounted” exhibit — the medal delivered in his lifetime, to a man who got to hear his platoon stand up for him one more time. His fight is finished; his place on this list is the proof of what a lost packet costs even when it is eventually found: thirty-four years.

What has been done

• The Medal of Honor, presented February 8, 2000, by President Bill Clinton in the East Room of the White House — 34 years after the March 16, 1966 action, with the men he saved, including Ray Compton and Neil Haffey, present. The Pentagon had recommended the award in May 1999 and Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen approved it that November, after Rep. Lane Evans carried the platoon mates’ packet to the White House in 1997.
• The Silver Star he received in 1966 stands in the record for what it was: the substituted award, given when the Medal of Honor recommendation failed to advance.
• His service after the medal: Senate-confirmed in 2001 as the 10th Director of the Selective Service System, and a return to Army service in 2002 as a medical service officer, with deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. The medal itself is held at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.

What has not been done

• Nothing on the medal itself remains outstanding — the fight is finished. What has never been produced: an official finding identifying where the 1966 recommendation stalled or who let it die. The record contains the outcome — “lost in a thicket of red tape,” in the president’s words — and no accounting of it.
• And by Rascon’s own account in his November 2000 Army oral history, the Army never officially notified him that he would receive the medal at all. He learned it in late November 1999, thirty-three years after the action, through the same informal channels that had carried his case from the start.

What is being sought

• Nothing further. That is the point of his page. Every other case in this section is an account still open; Rascon’s is one of the few that closed while the man himself could stand in the room — the standing proof that accounting, however late, is possible, and of how much stubbornness it takes to extract it.

The record, on video

Rascon’s fight was quiet for twenty-seven years and then finished in front of cameras in the East Room. Six films: the ceremony itself, the news as it broke that day, the Society’s Living History portrait, Rascon telling the story in his own words at the Pritzker, the Medal of Honor channel’s feature, and his 2011 Living History interview.

Sources

• Congressional Medal of Honor Society, recipient page and official citation, Alfred V. Rascon — including action date (March 16, 1966, Long Khanh Province), presentation date (February 8, 2000, the White House, by President William J. Clinton), and the medal’s present location, the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution: https://www.cmohs.org/kiosk/recipients/alfred-v-rascon
• U.S. Army Medical Department (AMEDD) Center of History & Heritage, Alfred V. Rascon — the citation, and the note that he “was given a Silver Star Medal for his valor that day in 1966, but the request for his Medal of Honor somehow got lost in a thicket of red tape”: https://achh.army.mil/regiment/moh-bios-rascon/
• Oral history interview with Captain Alfred V. Rascon, AMEDD Center of History & Heritage (conducted November 17, 2000) — his account of his upbringing, enlistment at 17, service as the recon platoon’s medic, Operation Silver City, and his statement that he learned of the medal in late November 1999 and was never officially notified by the Army: https://achh.army.mil/regiment/moh-bios-rasconint
• The White House (Clinton archives), “Remarks by the President in Presentation of Medal of Honor to Alfred Rascon,” the East Room, February 8, 2000 — the full ceremony transcript, including the lost-recommendation account, the last rites, and Rascon’s own remarks: https://clintonwhitehouse6.archives.gov/2000/02/2000-02-08-rremarks-by-the-president-in-presentation-of-medal-of-honor.html
• Steve Vogel, “Medal Recipient Lauded for ‘Rare Quality,’” The Washington Post, February 9, 2000, and “Medal of Honor for Vietnam Medic From Md.,” The Washington Post, November 11, 1999 (archived reprints) — Compton’s recommendation within days and its failure to advance, the 1993 conversation, the Decorations Board’s refusal on timeliness, Evans’s role and the 1997 packet, the Pentagon’s May 1999 recommendation and Cohen’s approval: https://nightscribe.com/Military/alfred_rascon_moh.htm
• U.S. Army, “Medal of Honor citation marker instills warrior ethos,” Army.mil — Rascon’s later service as the Selective Service System’s 10th director, his 2002 return to the Army as a medical service officer with the Surgeon General’s office, and his deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan: http://www.army.mil/article/60892/Medal_of_Honor_citation_marker_instills_warrior_ethos/
• Congressional Record, “In Tribute to Alfred Rascon,” Hon. Elton Gallegly, June 26, 2001 — Rascon’s Senate confirmation as the 10th Director of the Selective Service System: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CRECB-2001-pt9/html/CRECB-2001-pt9-Pg11993.htm
• Military.com, “Spc. 4 Alfred Rascon: Profile” (March 2, 2017) — the 1993 Compton conversation and the platoon’s campaign, drawn from Rascon’s and his platoon mates’ accounts: https://www.military.com/history/spc-4-alfred-rascon-profile.html

Further record

• The ceremony, from the Society’s library — the Congressional Medal of Honor Society’s video-library page for the February 8, 2000 presentation, film courtesy the William J. Clinton Presidential Library.
• Rascon, a year after the medal — DVIDS, “‘What We Were Fighting for Was Each Other’”: Rascon on bearing the medal for everybody who has been in combat.
• His oral history, in full — the Army Medical Department’s complete November 17, 2000 interview, from Oxnard to Silver City and back.

Part of Betrayed, Not Forgotten — this site's accounting for the service members and veterans their own institutions failed. Videos are embedded from their publishers; nothing here is re-hosted.