confusion. And, in fact, things started to move more smoothly as soon as I started pressing him hard.
My scouts (led by Corporal James, a black Marine from Washington, D.C., with an uncanny ability to read tracks and detect booby traps) were doing a magnificent job. This was very rough terrain — high mountains with flanking ridges.
In time, we approached a prominent ridge. On its other side, I was certain, lay the draw containing Loi’s headquarters. It was clear we were pushing against security forces for something important. We could see little cuts down in the rocks, which were obviously listening posts and sentinel posts. In one case, we found a little cup of rice, still warm, left there when they ran out ahead of us. My scouts were also coming across hastily strung booby traps — wires with grenades and the like.
I wanted to get to that high ground as quickly as possible, since it was only a matter of time before we made contact with the enemy. I expected first contact would come from some security outpost firing at us to hold us up or perhaps from one we’d overrun before the enemy troops could fall back.
I was wrong. About two hundred meters from the top of the ridge, Loi stopped and looked at me, “They won’t let you go any farther,” he said, then shifted his gaze again toward the trail to the top.
“What are you talking about?” I asked him.
“A VC and an NVA company are defending this ridge,” he said. “They will not let you get within 150 meters of the crest.”
That was information we had to check out. I called up a pair of scout Cobra helos we had up above the ridge to get their view. I was talking to them when the enemy opened up.
I had turned sideways to give the handset back to my radio operator, Lance Corporal Franky, when I was hit. Three AK-47 rounds at fairly close range, close enough to easily pass through my flak jacket. It felt like I’d been whipped across the side and back with a burning hot, wet towel. I went down. As I rolled into a shallow erosion ditch, I tried to get a sense of what was happening. Moments later, Lieutenant Bob Myers, my 1st Platoon commander, and Lieutenant Pete Metzger, our battalion intelligence officer, who was with our company, both rushed over to me.
I was still conscious… I never actually lost consciousness until I was medevaced out. Neither did I feel overwhelming pain. But I could feel the energy draining out of me, and I could tell I’d been badly hurt.
This couldn’t have come at a worse time. My company was under heavy fire. I knew they’d need me as long as I could stay lucid.
“Get the platoon spread out and return fire,” I told Bob Myers. The enemy was well hidden; the Marines were having a hard time picking out targets, but I just wanted to get the enemy’s heads down as we moved troops around. A Marine with a multishot flamethrower was nearby. When I told him to fire, he asked, “At what?”
“I don’t give a damn,” I told him. “Just fire.”
He did, and it slowed down the enemy’s shooting.
Bob then helped me get my flak jacket off. I hated these heavy things; but it was the policy to wear them. The Vietnamese Marines never wore them, nor did our advisers with them; and I was convinced the added weight and discomfort worked to wear down the troops and make them less alert.
“Great,” I thought, “now that I’m shot.” The flak jacket had been useless in stopping the rounds.
As he peeled off the jacket, a bloody piece of flesh fell out. Not encouraging. Bob then started to apply a battle dressing; the look on his face told me the wound was bad. While he was doing that, I called Colonel Trainor to give him a situation report. By then, one of our corpsmen, Doc Miller, was working on me. I was now feeling so weak I was afraid I would pass out.
“You’ll have to take over the company if I lose consciousness,” I told Bob. “Or worse,” I added. Bob was a good man, and capable. The officer who would normally have taken over for me, my company XO, Dan Hughes, was at the battalion command post on some coordination task. He’d try to get out to us as soon as he could, but I knew that until he came, it would be up to Bob to run the company.
All the while, I still had a company to run. I’d been on my stomach while they had dressed my wound. Now I raised myself up a little so I could see what was going on. I noticed a rise of high ground off to our left, and sensed the enemy was trying to get up to it. From there, they could fire down our flank with devastating effect. At the same moment, it dawned on me that we could do the same to him if we got there first.
“Get a squad with a machine gun on the hill,” I told Bob. He immediately tasked one of his squad leaders, Sergeant Bamber, to take the rise. The squad rapidly moved out and took it in a quick fight.
Meanwhile, calls of “Corpsman up!” were coming from the point team in front of us. They were taking hits.
At that point, Doc Miller gave me a rundown of what was wrong with me. “Your back is a mess,” he told me, “I can see your spine. I don’t know whether or not that’s been injured. If it was, then we’ve got to be worried about paralysis. Keep pinching your legs to be sure you have feeling. You’ve also lost a lot of blood, so there’s a good chance you won’t stay conscious.” And finally: “I don’t know how bad your pain is. I can give you morphine, but you’re better off without it unless you absolutely need it.”
The pain wasn’t actually excruciating. And besides, I really didn’t want to use the morphine, because once I did I knew I was no good to Bob Myers or anybody else.
The calls for a corpsman were growing more insistent. I looked into Doc’s eyes and said, “Doc, they need you.” The area between us and the point team was being raked with fire.
He looked up from me, stood up, and yelled “Fuck!” then charged off toward the wounded.
“We have to get the point team and the wounded back,” I told Bob. “Send a squad to get them.” Corporal Rocky Slawinski, the squad leader whose team was on point, had heard me. He came over to us. “I’ll get them. They’re my Marines,” he said. He and the remainder of his squad then ran up under fire and carried back the wounded.
It looked like we had several wounded, including my Kit Carson Scout, who was shot in the shoulder.
During the excitement, Loi had somehow grabbed a rifle (which really pissed me off), worked his way forward toward the enemy, and then crouched down in no-man’s-land, looking desperate. His former comrades had obviously seen and recognized him, and this had brought on a crisis of conscience. “They are calling my name,” he kept saying, over and over. It looked to me like he was about to make a crucial decision about which team he was going to play for.
“Take the rifle from him,” I told the ITT and Bob’s platoon sergeant, Staff Sergeant Lambert. Though he was initially reluctant to give up the weapon, his hesitation died when Staff Sergeant Lambert jacked a round into his shotgun. His “crisis of conscience” over, he gave up the rifle and moved back in our direction.
We had another serious problem.
There was no way we could get medevac helos in. There were no landing zones, and the enemy was tightly mixed in with us in the thick brush.
Just as this was sinking in, two Marine CH-46 helos came up and identified themselves as our medevac birds.
“We didn’t call for you,” I told them, “and we can’t take you now.”
The pilot said, “I know. I just want you guys to know we’re here, and we’ll come in whenever or wherever you ask.”
By then, a couple of hours had passed since I’d been hit, and I was feeling weaker than ever, and cold from the loss of blood.
Bob, who had done a great job of consolidating our position, had also found a possible LZ for the medevac helos farther down the slope. There was a rocky outcrop butting out over a cliff (the drop was several
