Combat Corpsman

TRAINED TO HEAL ... AND TO KILL


All his life Greg McPartlin wanted to be a Marine corpsman, a medic skilled at saving lives. Three months of bagging-and-tagging bodies during Vietnam s Tet Offensive took the luster off of being a Marine but not off McPartlin’s desire to serve his country.

After assisting in the sea recovery of Apollo 11 the first ship to bring men to the moon the twenty-year-old McPartlin was redeployed to Vietnam as an elite Navy SEAL. Barred as a medic from the make-or-break training of BUD/S considered vital to service as a Navy SEAL, McPartlin had to show he had what it took.

But McPartlin had been in country before. In a war where you partied with your buddies in Saigon one day and crawled through an enemy-infested jungle hell the next, he proved that he was not only an outstanding medic but a real Navy SEAL the toughest of the tough.

Combat Corpsman is McPartlin’s often humorous—and sometimes heartbreaking—account of his year of combat in what had been a Viet Cong stronghold until the SEALs took control and Charlie placed bounties on the men with green faces. It is the first inside story of a Navy SEAL medic, a man who wanted to heal, not to kill, but did both to save lives.

This edition is heavily illustrated with 80 historical and personal photographs from Greg McPartlin’s tour of duty in Vietnam.


Editorial Reviews:


I wish I could make up anything as riotously wonderful yet starkly realistic as this book.

—H. Jay Riker, author of The Silent Service: Virginia Class


An accurate and humorous account of an early Navy SEAL platoon in Vietnam.

—Frank Thornton, the most decorated SEAL from Vietnam era


You would be hard-pressed to find a more gritty, realistic, tale of the rigors of combat and the actions of a SEAL Corpsman. The action on these pages is so real you can smell the mud, feel the sweetish taste of the powder smoke in the back of your mouth, hear the fragments whiz by and the bullets snap past - and know in a small way just what it is like to be one of the best.

—Kevin Dockery, author of Hunters and Shooters and The Complete History of the Navy SEALs