Posted on 05/13/2017 3:21:41 AM PDT by Chainmail
On May 13th, 1967, I was shot through my upper right thigh, shattering my femur and almost severing my leg. I celebrate this day every year because it was the day I almost died but through God’s grace, I have lived this half century more.
I was a twenty-one year old Lance Corporal (E-3) in the Marines serving as an Artillery Scout (an enlisted Forward Observer) with Golf Company 2nd Battalion, 1st Marines (2/1) about 16 kilometers Southwest of Danang, Vietnam. Our company was on a local sweep a little north of Hill 55, following the edge of the Song Yen river that bounded ours and the 7th Marines’ Tactical Area of Responsibilities (TAOR). We headed slowly south, searching for the enemy, as always. At first light, I heard a sudden burst of gunfire and saw several Marines firing at a VC that was running away in the open and getting away pretty quickly. We had just gotten the M-16 and even though several hundred rounds were fired in those few seconds, that guy kept running. I aimed carefully with my M-14 and shot him (I had the last M-14 anywhere around; I was an artilleryman and I claimed that “we didn’t have M16s yet” and got away with keeping it). We ran up to get him and found that I had hit him in his right hand, chopping off the edge of his hand, taking his little finger with it. He was an older VC – 40 or so – and I could see he was in a lot of pain, so I bandaged his hand with one of my own bandages and gave him a cigarette. He calmed down, since you don’t bother bandaging somebody or giving somebody a cigarette if you’re just going to kill him. We found out through our Chieu Hoi scout (a former VC that had surrendered and now worked to help guide us and interpret) that he was an outpost for an enemy company just ahead of us, so we deployed to meet them, one platoon working around behind the enemy to block them and two platoons to begin the approach to where we thought they were.
We caught up with them near Dien Xuan village at the edge of a large open and dry rice paddy that had been recently plowed. We passed through one treeline and we were starting to cross the wide open area of that plowed-up paddy, the enemy opened fire. Firefights always started with a couple of quick shots and then very quickly developed into a stuttering, shattering roar, with hundreds of weapons – ours and theirs - being fired, all full-auto, all at once. We were experienced, so we were all flat on the ground and we were initially unscathed. We started firing 60mm mortars and some LAW rockets and the enemy, unusually for them, stood their ground and started firing rockets back at us. I detected two machine guns straight across from us, between 150 and 200m away. I started working up an artillery fire mission to hit those positions with 105mm fire. As I waited for the mission to be cleared and to start sending rounds, I saw dust coming up from the window of a house directly across from me - someone was firing from that window. I fired a raking burst just under the window, from right to left and the house began to smolder and burn.
My artillery fire mission was cancelled because we started to get some wounded and a “Sav-A-Plane” was put into effect – so artillery and mortar missions were stopped to allow medevac helicopters to come in without being hit by our own stuff. The platoon to my left started assaulting across the open rice paddy towards the enemy but several of them were hit all at once, five that I could see. I could also see that the enemy was still shooting at the wounded men by the dust kicking up around them. I was only about 50-60m away and in pretty good cover, so with very great reluctance I realized that I was the closest guy to them and I’d have to go out there and try get them to safety. During those seconds while I was spooling up my nerve, my first-day-in-combat FO Lieutenant, Hank Graves plopped down next to me and said “I’ll cover you”, holding a single-shot M79 40mm grenade launcher. I could see that his safety was on, so I said “the safety comes off by pushing it forward, Sir” and then I got up and ran for the first guy I could reach.
I left my rifle behind because I’d need both hands and it wouldn’t have done me any good to carry a rifle anyway. That plowed paddy was rough and difficult to run on because it was so jumbled up and hard. My ankles twisted and I stumbled steadily ahead towards the nearest guy I could reach. I was sure that I was as good as dead, that the next shot would hit me between the eyes. Everybody was shooting and bullets cracked all around me. The Marine I reached had been shot sideways through the hips and his guts were protruding. He was struggling and thrashing around with pain and I tried to carry him but he was too tall and too broken to move that way. I tried lifting him and pulling him by lifting under his arms but that didn’t work either. His hips were broken and it hurt him too much. A Marine ran towards us from our treeline, a guy we called “Big John” (I never found out his real name – he was known as our “duty hero” and he had been wounded at least twice before), and he grabbed the wounded guy’s feet while I lifted him under his armpits and then we ran towards cover with him between us. Before we got very far, Big John ran out of breath and couldn’t go anymore so I had us all lay flat, as low as we could get and told Big John to take deep breaths. After a few seconds, we got up again and ran some more, finally reaching the inside edge of our treeline. The wounded Marine – LCpl Dave Johnson – was turning blue and I was afraid that he was going to die, so I leaned over him and told him that he “was on the way home”. I knew that there were more wounded men out there and I couldn’t stall anymore, so I started to stand again to get moving back out into that field when I heard a loud bang and fell immediately next to Dave.
The bullet hit me on the inside left of my thigh and blew through the outside right of my leg and I just collapsed. I said something like “Unhh, I’m hit” and felt intense, stunning pain. It felt like someone had taken a sledgehammer to my leg and crushed it, which was a fairly accurate analysis. There was no feeling of impact at all when the bullet hit me. My femur was shattered into bits and I was bleeding a lot and the open hole in my greatly expanded leg was too large to cover with my bandages. I grabbed an empty cloth bandoleer and tied it around my upper right thigh next to my crotch and used my Kabar knife to tighten it down to close off the artery and the bleeding. By this time, I felt my blood pool up to my neck while I laid there. A corpsman reached me and tried to get bandages on me but the holes were just too wide, bigger than my spread-out hand. Big John had also been hit (possibly the same bullet that hit me), so the three of us just lay there, waiting until we got help. I remember feeling guilty that I couldn’t just get up and continue helping to get the wounded but there wasn’t any way I was going to be able do it. I also remember being very surprised that I had been hit, even though I had seen people hit all around me for months and I had just finished being near-missed by hundreds of rounds. It’s funny how our young minds work.
Lt. Graves crawled up next to me and said “I’m really sorry you’re hurt Rick, but can I have your rifle?” I told him that it was “all his”. I called in my own Medevac (“Button Vermillion”) – and while I was on the radio, one of the guys from my artillery battery asked which one of us was wounded and using radio jargon I said “Chinstrap Bravo 61 Alpha, Actual” which meant “me”. The voice on the radio said that he was sorry that I was hurt and wished me well. Red-headed Lt Joiner, one of the platoon commanders, came by and treated us to a show of bravado to entertain us by firing offhand with his .45 at the enemy while bullets crackled all around him. I said “Sir, get down, please, you’re drawing fire”. I was fading from loss of blood, so I don’t remember when Dave and Big John were carried to the medevac helicopter but I remember watching that big Sikorsky UH-34 land in that open paddy while everyone was still shooting. I remember really wanting to be on that plane when I felt a tug on my shoulder and it was my VC prisoner from that morning. He pointed at the helicopter and I nodded and he helped pull me up and he helped carry me to the open door of that bird. I remember watching him waving at me with his bandaged hand as the plane lifted us up and on to Charlie Med in Danang.
When I got to Charlie Med, I was completely naked – they cut your clothes off in preparation for triage – but I still had a frag grenade in my hand in case the helicopter went down. Nobody wanted to be taken prisoner in that neck of the woods. There were about a dozen wounded arriving at the same time we did, so there were a lot of men on stretchers lined up on the ground outside the field hospital, waiting to be treated. The corpsmen saw the grenade I had and freaked, which I thought was funny because grenades are just paperweights until you pull the pin. We had a lot of very badly wounded men there and I remember one who had been horrifically burned by a white phosphorus booby trap and was bleeding all over from his burns. The other thing I noticed was how quiet we all were; we were all in almost unimaginable pain but none of us made any noises at all. I was very surprised when they moved me in for treatment first because I thought many were worse off than I was. I was brought into a room, up onto a table and I was bent forward at the waist and a corpsman stuck a long needle into my lower back and then moved in front of me and apologized because his first attempt at a spinal missed. I told him that it’s fine, go ahead a try again. He tried again and then there was the most blessed relief you can imagine when that pain finally stopped.
I was put into something they called the “spider”, a frame to hold me and my limbs in position and a short curtain was put up at my waist between me and the work they were doing on my leg. From my angle, I was looking up at a large circular reflector around a lamp above us and I could see some of what the surgeons were doing with my leg. The lead surgeon looked at me and said “we may have to take your leg off – are you OK with this?” I told him to “do what he had to do”. He asked me to try to wiggle my toes, which I did, I think - since I couldn’t really see what was happening. I talked to the anesthetist while they were working and I said that I looked like an el Greco painting, with all the color of yellow and green in my skin as shown by that reflector. The surgeon turned to him and said “shut him up!” so he stuck some morphine in my I.V. and I was out.
When I woke, I had a plaster cast going from the upper chest, all the way down both legs which were spread in about a 20 degree angle. I had a steel pin transversely through my shin just below the knee and I had tubes all over the place, with freezing cold blood coming through an I.V. in my left arm and I could feel chill blains all the way to my heart. My First Sergeant visited me to see how I was doing and to see if I could still make it back to combat duty but I think even he was convinced that I wasn’t going to be much use for a while and that I should head home.
It was a long process of recovery, taking years, but Dave and I both made it. Dave went back to Vietnam about a year later and was wounded again, same place in his body and was discharged as disabled after that. Dave was a true character and married his sweetheart while he was in Unauthorized Absence (AWOL) from the hospital, concealing his colostomy bag in his tuxedo. There was some discussion whether I would keep my leg but thanks to the grace of God and the skill of my doctors, I kept it and learned to walk again after several grafts and 7 months in traction. I got out of the Marine Corps after a tour with the Air Wing as a machine gun instructor, then returned to the Marine Corps 3 1/2 years later to serve another 24 years, retiring in 1996.
50 years is a long time ago, yet it feels like it was almost last week. I know that I was one of many tens of thousands who went through experiences like this, a river of wounded, flowing through the Philippines, Japan and then hospitals in the States to finish our recoveries. I am deeply grateful to my Maker for letting me live for all these years and for all of His gifts. I remember my fellow Marines and our Corpsmen and that incredibly brave medevac pilot, and those skilled surgeons with warmth and I’ll always be thankful that I could be there with them and that I didn’t let them down.
I only decided to tell that short story about my last day in combat to kind of record a piece of history.
I'm sorry that you feel that way - it was a waste but in that sense, all wars are wastes of lives, ours and theirs.
But the purpose of our investment was to support an ally and to stop the push by the Soviets, Chinese et al to further "National Liberation Wars" - a sort of program of assisted civil war.
In that we succeeded: the weren't any more National Liberation Wars and the Sovs and the Chinese looked at us as anything but pushovers.
I believe that when Gorbachev was sitting across the table from Reagan, he saw all of us and our 10,000 miles away/eight year war and saw the steel that is really in us.
Thank you for telling us about it and thank you for your efforts and courage during our war.
Semper Fi.
Thank you for all you did during our war - you had your own corner on tough duty.
Semper Fi!
One way or another, it was almost certainly 7.62X54: I thought at the time that it was a machine gun but Lt. Graves was sure that it was a sniper - a fairly famous sniper in our area.
I really would - I went to Vietnam as a tourist with my wife in 2000 and nobody knew who he was - apparently, he was from "out of town". I really wanted to buy him and his family dinner!
At Hahn, I was 40 miles away from Battalion HQ. During Air Force tac evals, I was down in the Wing CP for 4 days as the Army Liaison Officer. The only other officer with a TS clearance was the BC, so I was it.
Within 30 minutes of my first tac eval, they dropped an NBC input while I was briefing the Wing Cdr on the deployment of our platoons. His expert, the Wing Disaster Preparedness Officer, overreacted by recommending Alarm Red, which meant everybody had to go full MOPP.
You can imagine the looks I received when I spoke up to offer my recommendation...lol, an Army butterbar surrounded by 4-5 Air Force bird colonels. It was in my wheelhouse, as I was my battery's NBC officer. The Wing Cdr liked my recommendation so much (Alarm Yellow, no MOPP), he loudly told his staff that, as long as he was in command, he wanted to see the "Army lieutenant" whenever there was an NBC input.
I am trying to think of the perfect reply, but there just isn’t one.
I can only thank you for your bravery, your heart, and your service. And for taking the time to tell us about it.
Your writing is gorgeous — please write more! I am sure you have other stories to tell about what you saw and did and about the men who were there with you. Maybe write up a little story each week and post it here on FR. Let me be the first to ask to be on your ping list.
Thank you for your service — not just during the war but for making a career of it and teaching others. You are a very generous man to give so much to your country.
I salute you with the greatest of respect.
Thanks for the ping, and for your many years of service. Glad you’re still here to tell about it.
I don't really know how brave I was - I just didn't want to let my fellow Marines down. I'm sure that you know exactly what I mean.
I do have a lot of stories, probably too many. The funniest ones were when I was commissioned a lieutenant and had to deal with all those post-Vietnam troops of that time. They were handful but I sure enjoyed the crazy stuff they came up with. We'll see if the Free Republic can stand me and my stories.
Semper Fi!
I laugh at how some sites like Drudge have mentions of the anniversary of "The Summer of Love", while we remember a much different summer.
Of course you are right. But all I remember is the outpouring of grief at a life cut tragically short, in some foreign Asian war.
My uncle was a brave man, as my father said “the best of the bunch,” cut down by “friendly fire.”
The entire town turned out for a day of mourning. It is forever seared in my memory.
I honor their memory.......and I honor your service, courage and valor in defense of our country and its people.
Thanks for the riveting story you posted.
Leni
I can tell stories about my stint in the Army but they’re not about heroics. I remember when drunken roommates in the old brick barracks at the Presidio of San Francisco (6th Amy HQ) held one of the guys upside down out of out the two-story window. I remember others setting their gas discharges on fire. They also hooted at and called out to women soldiers who marched by beneath our windows—something I disapproved of and with which I did not join.
Yeah, I saw that too.. idiots. You and I know who the truly valuable men of our country were - and I'll always thank God that I was on the same team.
It's terrible that he was killed by "friendly" fire. Given the scale and chaos of that war, sometimes it happened.
I'll keep your uncle in my prayers.
It's terrible that he was killed by "friendly" fire. Given the scale and chaos of that war, sometimes it happened.
I'll keep your uncle in my prayers.
I’m glad you liked it Leni. You wouldn’t believe how difficult it was to write it. Too much emotion, even after all this time.
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