Battle Ready

hundred feet). The pilots thought they could back up the helos against it and lower the helos’ end ramps. The wounded could be loaded while they hovered. It might be a sphincter tightener for some guys, but it should work.

I was determined to walk down to the helos in front of my Marines; I didn’t want to be carried. Though I knew I wasn’t going to last much longer, I managed to march/stagger, with help, down the trail to where the other wounded were gathered. Before I moved up the ramp, I gazed out at my troops. The looks of comfort, reassurance, and concern for what lay ahead from those grim faces will always stay with me.

As the helos hovered next to the cliff, a VC raised up to take a shot at them with his RPG (rifle- propelled grenade) launcher, but a Marine spotted him and opened fire, and the VC had to duck down before he could take the shot.

The helo crew chief strapping us into the stretchers noticed that I was shivering on the bare canvas. He took off his white, fleece-lined flight jacket to wrap around me.

“Don’t do that,” I told him. “It looks new. The blood will ruin it.”

“I don’t give a shit about that,” he said, and laid it over me.

Before I got on the chopper, the excitement and my adrenaline kept the pain manageable. But by the time it lifted out, it was coming on full force. I felt worse than I ever had in my life — in body, mind, and spirit.

Several weeks later, I received a letter in the hospital from Colonel Trainor. It read:

“I don’t know if Lt. Hughes [Dan Hughes, my XO] or any of the others have written you about the events subsequent to your evac. At any rate let me fill you in. Dan and I went down to Red’s pos [my first platoon’s position] and Dan took command of the company. We shifted Becket [my second platoon] to the low ground. You trained your team well, Tony, they performed magnificently. We stayed on the operation for two weeks and had a real war going. Alpha [my company] had most of the action. The VC tried to prevent us from penetrating, but when Bravo [Company B] came down on them from above, they skied [ran]. After that they kept firing at us from outside the cordon. Obviously they were trying to draw us away from the area. In this they failed. It was a grand war for a while.”

He went on to add that we had suffered three killed and nine wounded during the operation, and we had killed forty-one VC of the enemy’s C-111 Company.

The day after I was hit, my company found Loi’s cave complex and eighteen thousand pages of documents: dossiers, pay rosters for agents, and agent lists with names and photos of senior South Vietnamese officials. Weapons and food caches were also discovered. The intel find was the largest and most important of the war.

“It was a pleasure having you in my command,” Trainor added. “I have put you in for the Bronze Star.”

Though Trainor liked to give medals to the troops, he didn’t easily give them to officers. This endeared him to all of us, and made a medal he’d recommended a special privilege. It was a great honor to receive it.

MEDEVAC II

The medevac helo took the wounded to the 85th Evacuation Hospital, a U.S. Army field hospital south of Danang.

Zinni’s wounds were serious enough for an immediate operation. After the pre-op X ray (rounds were still in his back), he was cleaned up and prepped, and IVs were inserted. As he lay there on his stomach after the prep, he noticed an unexpected flurry of whispers and huddling among the doctors and nurses. Something was up.

After a time, the huddles broke up, and a nurse pulled a chair up to his gurney, turned it around, and sat down backward, with her face almost touching Zinni’s.

“I’m the senior nurse,” she said. “Can you clearly understand me?”

“Yeah,” Zinni said.

“We have recently received an experimental drug called ketamine,” she continued, “and we’d like to use it on you. An officer like you can give us good feedback on its effectiveness.”

Zinni gave her a tentative nod. These were medical people. He trusted them to know what they were doing.

“The drug is experimental,” she added. “We’ll need your permission before we can use it. You should know that you’ll remain conscious throughout the operation and won’t have tubes jammed down your throat, the way you normally might in an operation of this kind.”

“That sounds good,” Zinni said. “But how can I be conscious?”

“It’s a hallucinogen,” she said, “but it’s an effective anesthetic without the ill effects of normal anesthesia.”

“I guess that’s okay,” Zinni answered, “and not having tubes jammed down my throat is appealing. So let’s do it.”

“That’s a good decision,” she said. “I’m sure you won’t regret it. And you’ll be helping us.”

The Ketamine turned out to be living hell. Though there was no physical pain, he had nightmares so vivid that he actually felt he was living through them: One was like an out-of-body experience — floating above his body as the surgeons were cutting into it. In another, he horribly relived the chaos, carnage, and deaths of the battle where he had taken his wounds. In another, he was dead and in a box, returning to his wife and family back in the States. The nightmares were so present, powerful, and fierce that he started thrashing around wildly during the operation, and had to be tied down and heavily sedated.

He woke up in a sweat, strapped to a bed in the intensive care unit.

With him was his first sergeant, Alls, with tears in his eyes, grasping Zinni’s hand. He’d been holding Zinni’s hand since he’d arrived in intensive care (Zinni had been vaguely aware of the squeeze; it had been a small and welcome comfort). After giving Zinni a heads-up about his company — who had been hit and evaced — he left.

“You went through a really rough trip,” the nurse told him after he had gone.

“I know,” Zinni told her. “I still remember it.”

At that moment, he tried to move. And that was when he began to realize something was wrong. Not much above his waist worked right — like his arms.

Later, the surgeon explained why. “As we removed the rounds from your back,” he said, “we couldn’t just clean the wound and put you back together. The injury had wrecked too much. What we had to do, in order to prevent infection, was to debride the wound. That is, cut away about a third of the muscle tissue on your back and side. You’ve got a pretty big crater back there,” he added sympathetically.

“What’s going to happen,” the surgeon went on, “is we’ll keep you here for about a week, then we’ll send you to Guam for extensive physical therapy. There they’ll also take skin grafts taken from your legs and butt to cover the hole in your back.

“I have to be honest with you,” he concluded. “I doubt if you’ll regain full use of your arms and back.”

This was a shock. “What will this mean for my family and my future?” Zinni asked himself.

On his way out, the surgeon gave Zinni one of the rounds he’d dug out of his back.

The next week was tough. Twice a day the medics literally ripped the bandages off the wound, with the most excruciating pain he’d ever known. Before this ritual, any troops on the ward who could move left the area. It was too painful to witness.

“Sir, you’re really fucked up,” a wounded lance corporal told him. “You should see your back.”

“No, thanks,” Zinni thought.

After a few days, he was able to get up and walk a little. It wasn’t easy, but he was able to get himself upright and to shuffle around the ward. The troops on the ward did everything to help.