Through the intense fire of automatic fire and grenades, Rascon made his way to the point where my squad was pinned down and couldn’t move in any direction.Īlthough wounded himself, Rascon continued to move forward to work his way to my position, attending to my wounds as well.
My team had engaged a well-armed enemy force and the enemy had superiority and immediately pinned our fire team down. On March 16, 1966, Al Rascon was with the Recon Platoon on a search and destroy mission known as Operation Silver City. Compton, a sergeant in Alfred Rascon’s platoon, described what happened on that day: The events were part of Operation Silver City and took place in South Vietnam. March 16, 1966, changed the lives of Alfred Rascon and the members of his platoon. And you did not have the choice to come back and say I don’t want to take care of him. And you're about to see people that are going to get dismembered, disemboweled, and people that are about to die in your arms.
“Then all of a sudden, you've got to live by your wits and the skills of your self-teaching and the teachings of others, who are senior medics, and realize that, as a 19-year-old, you're not God. “Eventually what happens, you start seeing people that are killed and then realizing that you’re a 20-year-old or a 19-year-old kid, and you’ve got a medical bag that’s not appropriate to what you’re doing,” said Rascon. By May 1965, he was in Vietnam.Īlthough only 19 years old, he had no choice but to adapt to his role as a medic. After he completed jump school, he shipped off to Okinawa. So, at the ripe age of 17, in 1963, in August, I joined the Army,” he said in an interview with the Library of Congress.įollowing basic training and several weeks of additional instruction, Alfred Rascon became a medic. Once I graduated from high school I wanted to join the military. He needed permission from his parents to join military service. He didn’t want that and hoped to attend college but lacked the money. (See here for more details of Alfred Rascon’s early life.)Īfter graduating high school, he believed that as a young Hispanic male in Southern California his options were mostly limited to working in a body shop or a gas station. He read Sergeant Rock comic books, played with plastic soldiers and pretended to be an airman, once jumping off the roof of his house and breaking his wrist. It was a diverse neighborhood that included Japanese-American next-door neighbors who taught Alfred to speak some Japanese.Īs a child, Alfred saw many servicemen from different military branches visiting Oxnard during the Korean War. He grew up in the town of Oxnard, not far from Los Angeles. He immigrated with his parents to the United States from Mexico when he was just a toddler. On February 8, 2000, in a White House ceremony, President Bill Clinton awarded Alfred Rascon the Congressional Medal of Honor.Īlfred Rascon’s story started many years before that February 2000 White House ceremony. It was a necessary step due to the amount of time that had passed since the Vietnam War. Lane Evans (D-IL) led the effort to pass legislation to authorize awarding Rascon the Medal of Honor.
In 1999, Senator Spencer Abraham (R-MI), who I worked for at the time, and Rep.
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