Good Soldier
Stand
to the next morning was cold, damp, and very lonely. We had heard
movement in the valley and fired artillery the night before, but had no contact.
By 10:00am the heat was oppressive again. I sent a patrol to the valley to find
a stream and fill all the empty canteens. We began improving our defenses and I
had each squad dig an additional foxhole for the incoming company troops. The
digging was real hard, in the red clay with baseball sized rocks in it. The clay
stuck to your entrenching tool like glue and you had to take a stick and scrape
it off. Digging a 2' x 6' fighting trench, two feet deep was an all out effort
for three or four men to complete in a couple of hours, especially in this heat.
We broke for lunch around noon. I told everyone to relax, only the
OP's on full
alert. I had each squad leader assign a team to take the empty canteens of one
of the incoming platoons and refill them from the valley. I also told them to
share their own canteens, keeping only enough to get them down to the valley
floor. The company made a wrong turn when they reached the ridge line and
traveled over an hour before they realized their mistake. It was nearly 15:00
hours by the time they arrived. The water crew had to really move fast and
reckless to make it to the stream and back before dark. The company was
exhausted from the march and very thankful for the fighting positions we had dug
for them and for the water. Captain Brennan had some explosives flown in and we
blew all the trees in the perimeter and setup an LZ. He also has more sandbags
and some concertina wire brought out. It looked like we were going to be here
for awhile. We started sending out three or four squad sized ambush and recon
patrols each day. There were daily contacts made, usually only sightings or
hearing movement and the application of artillery. The third day he sent my
platoon minus the weapons squad, out on a recon in force. As we moved rapidly
down the ridge we made contact just minutes after passing through the
OP. The
point man and
slack man were hit in the initial burst of gunfire. After the
initial bursts of AK-47 fire, we all opened up for a couple of minutes before I
realized that we were not receiving any return fire. I called for a cease fire
and after a few seconds, began to move forward. I found Doc bent over the
slack man. He had turned to motion to the others to get down, when he had been hit in
the lower back by an AK-47 round.
The bullet had blown
a ten inch hole out his navel region. He was in serious pain. Doc was plunging the second
morphine syringe into him as I arrived. The soldier was clawing at his
intestines, desperately attempting to stuff them back into his abdomen. I took
his steel helmet and placed it over the wound, telling him to hold it there to
keep flys from infecting the wound. The morphine was not handling his pain, so I asked Doc to give him another dose
of morphine. Doc said that another would probably be fatal. I looked Doc in the
eye and
asked him whether he thought he would survive the 30 minutes it would take to
get a chopper in and fly him back to the evacuation hospital. He looked into my
eyes and just gave me the syringe. I told him to check on the others, I would
stay with this man. As he left, I waited for another minute or two before I
administered the final syringe. He had turned chalky white from blood loss by
now and his skin was very cold to the touch. Within seconds of administering the
third syringe, he finally began to calm down.
He said he couldn't
see. I told him to just lie still, the chopper was on the way. After a few
seconds, he whispered something, but I didn't hear what it was. I leaned over
and asked him to repeat it and he said," Was I a good soldier?" I told him that
his people back home would be real proud of him, he was a true hero. He then
asked if he was going to die. I told him that I thought he might. He then said
he was afraid. I told him not to worry, where he was going, things were much
better and he was a good person, so he had nothing to worry about. He smiled,
exhaled loudly, but without any real force, just a deflating of his lungs, and
the light of life in his eyes faded. I reached up and closed his eye lids with my
fingers just as Doc came back to report that the point man had bad shoulder and
leg wounds, but would make it. My platoon sergeant said that there were blood
trails leading away down the ridge and wanted to pursue them. I
told my RTO to tell the CO what had happened and had everyone else
setup a perimeter. The platoon sergeant, my RTO, a machine gunner, and I took
off following the blood trails. There were half inch thick dark red worms of
congealed blood, every 8-10 feet. Someone was hit real bad and judging from the
quantity of blood was dying. After about thirty yards we lost the trail, so we
turned back and rejoined the rest of the platoon. I had the RTO call the
CO and
get a Medevac for the point man, then we headed back to the
company perimeter carrying our "Good Soldier" with us. The chopper arrived a few minutes later. We were put on
perimeter security and another platoon sent out a squad sized
ambush in the same
direction as our contact, after the CO had done a
road runner artillery mission from
the OP outward along the ridge line and also in the valley on both sides, just
in case. We spent the next few days on perimeter guard for the company CP
as other platoons sent out ambush. I guess we deserved a rest after the
last two days.
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