We were part of a “hammer and anvil” operation on the day I got hit. One company maneuvered behind the suspected enemy position and acted as a blocking force. My company was the hammer charged with making a frontal assault on the enemy and my platoon was in the lead. We were driving through rice paddies as we approached a small village which was our objective. We came to a creek and I decided to try to have my lead track drive across it. The track got stuck and I had to hook two others up to it with pull straps to extract it. We carried metal bridging struts strapped to our tracks and I used a number of them to make a ford across the stream over which our whole company advanced.
As we approached the village, I brought my tracks on line. But, we were stalled by another stream about 100 yards from the village which was in a wooded area. My men were strung out in the open behind two-foot-high paddy dikes but the drivers and gunners were still in the tracks. We could see the VC setting up automatic weapons and taking up positions in front of us. I radioed for permission to open fire and was told to wait while the position of the blocking force was verified by some commander in a helicopter overhead. My men were itchy and when the enemy opened fire we responded and the firefight ensued. To hell with waiting for permission.
It was an intense firefight and we were pinned down by an automatic weapon in a fortified position slightly to our right. This was not a skirmish. It was a full-on battle that lasted for an hour or more and seemed like an eternity. Two of my tracks were hit with RPG’s and were set afire, the ammo stored inside going off. The drivers, my medic, my RTO and my Platoon Sergeant were dead. One of my men, a track gunner, was laying on the ground about 50 feet in front of me. I jumped up and started to run to him to try to pull him over the berm. One of my men shouted, “no two six, he’s dead”. I stopped abruptly as a line of bullets kicked up mud right in front of me. That man saved my life.
I can still see the scene in my mind as a track came speeding up from behind us with his ramp down. There was a soldier hanging off the back firing his weapon at the enemy position. When the track spun around he jumped down and threw one of my wounded men on the ramp and signaled the driver to go. As he accelerated the wounded man slid off the back but managed to hang onto the ramp as he was dragged through the paddy screaming. They took him back to the company’s main position.
At one point my West Point class ring came off my finger and in the middle of the fight of my life, I searched through the mud to find it and put it back on my finger. Then, as I raised my head to observe, I saw a flash and saw a black object that appeared the size of a baseball coming directly at me. The enemy had picked me out and had fired an RPG to take me out. I stuck my head down in the muck and that RPG either went over my head or lodged in the dike. But there was no explosion. I had survived again.
My weapon was jammed and I had to manually cock it each time to fire a single round. Pretty useless in a firefight. Half my thirty men were dead or wounded. Our ammo had dwindled to a mere one magazine and a hand grenade. I got on the radio and without using approved radio procedure yelled, “you better get us some help up here or you can kiss our asses good-by”. Men were scared as hell and a few were crying saying, “we’re all going to die”. I radioed for permission to move back and was told to hold my position. I tossed the radio aside and put two rounds into it. I no longer needed permission and I decided to take the remainder of my platoon to the rear. Retreat, in other words. My citation refers to it as “a successful retrograde movement”. But they were too scared to move. So, I told them they could stay there and die if they so chose. I jumped to my feet and slogged through the paddy toward the main company position. They followed.
For some reason I never felt fear during a firefight. It was probably due to my training in which I learned to function under extreme stress. Always afterwards, I would shake and nearly hyperventilate from the excess adrenalin in my system. This day was no exception and I was pissed. I was angry that the rest of the company did not advance to help us. I was extremely pissed at the enemy’s automatic weapon position that had chewed us up. I armed myself with our version of an RPG (a LAW) and started to run toward that enemy position. Just then a fighter jet flew over my head very low to the ground. I stopped transfixed and moments later awoke laying on my back on the ground. I raised up on my arms and saw the lower part of my right leg standing in my boot with a piece of bone sticking out. I reached down and touched the bone and it all became real. I shouted, “medic I’m hit” and lay back down.
The medic took my belt and made a tourniquet. He shot some morphine into my stump and they rolled me onto a stretcher. A helicopter was just starting to take off with wounded and they waved him back down and loaded me on. I was laying on my stomach with blood running out from under my body. I kept telling myself that if I could stay conscious, I would survive. I did. When the chopper landed, they carried me into the M.A.S.H. and began cutting off my clothes. I was asked my name, rank, serial number and where I was hit. The doc then said, “this is pretty bad son, you’ll be going home”. To which I replied. “I know. I lost my leg. It hurts too much to talk about it. Just put me to sleep”.
I woke to find my right leg amputated just 4 inches below my knee and my left leg in a full- length cast. It was then that I learned I had been hit in both legs. Both bones in my lower left leg were broken. The next two weeks consisted of continual IV’s and blood transfusions pared with morphine shots which led to blissful pain-free sleep followed by about an hour of extreme pain as I awaited the next shot. After two weeks I was transferred to Tan Son Nhut Air Base for transport to Yokota AFB in Tokyo. On arrival I was laying on a gurney in the hall when one of my wounded soldiers walked by. I stopped him and asked him how I did. He said, “you did alright two six”. That meant a lot.
After two more weeks of recuperation in Japan, I was flown to Travis AFB and taken to the Army hospital on the Presidio in San Francisco. I was there 18 months and underwent 17 more surgeries. Those surgeries had two purposes: to close the open end of my stump and to save my knee if they could. When I was in the Tokyo hospital, they took me off morphine and put me on pain pills to keep me from becoming addicted to morphine. Every day from my first post-surgery wake up to many months later a nurse would debride the open wound on the end of my stump. That consisted of removing the gauze that was stuck to the end of my stump taking dead flesh with it. Very painful.
Once at the Presidio, I was assigned to Physical Therapy daily. I called it Physical Torture. One day I managed to get upright on a scale. My left leg was in a full-length cast and my amputated leg was wrapped. I lost my balance and, as I fell, I instinctively stuck out my right leg and landed on the end of my stump. The pain was excruciating. I never did that again relying on the ‘parachute landing fall’ I learned in jump school.
I was told that I could stay in the Army but would have to transfer out of the Infantry and into a desk job, like in the Quartermaster Corps. I was told that my career path would have to be modified and that I would be lucky to reach the rank of Lt. Colonel. My self-image as a warrior was shattered and my self-esteem was gone. Everyone was treating me like my life was over. The general population seemed to hate me. I was in the depths of depression. I choose to get out.
There was more to that decision than just the change in my warrior outlook. I had become horrified by the face of war. It was gruesome, bloody beyond belief. Certainly not like the John Wayne and Audie Murphy movies I loved as a kid. I was despondent over my loss of men. When I was in country, I thought of my underlying mission as being to bring them home alive. I had failed. I hated Richard Nixon and became antiwar. I attended an antiwar rally and spoke against the war on a local campus but encouraged the assembled masses to respect those returning from Vietnam because they were doing their duty for our country. But don’t get me wrong: I was a patriot then and still am now. This is the greatest nation on earth.
My brother was a conscientious objector and I struggled to understand his point of view. One of my sisters had become a hippie and eventually caravanned to Tennessee to start a commune. One day, while I was still in a wheelchair in the hospital, my parents came to me to tell me that my youngest sister had killed herself. My wife left me shortly after that filing for divorce. My world had gone crazy. I questioned my beliefs.
The last six months of my time in the hospital I rented an apartment in Mill Valley, Ca. which I called “hippie haven”. I would drive into the hospital on Monday mornings and get in bed for doctor rounds. When that was over, I would go back to Mill Valley for the week. My brother and wife had introduced me to pot smoking and it became my escape from reality. I was lost.
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Incredible what you did and how you dealt with your life changing wound and have since impacted the lives of countless amputees. God bless you and the work you continue to do 🙏🇺🇸
Keep going. You're getting there.