My eyes opened, was I dead? Or was I just recovering from some accident? I looked up and saw bright lights, then I realized where I was. The year was 1965, and I was suffering for major shrapnel damage, and amnesia. All I knew then was that I had been injured in combat and was in an army hospital. It wasn’t until I had been back in the states that my memory came to me. But I won’t bore you with the details of my recovery yet, I’ll explain how this all started. I was drafted into the army right out of high school. I went through basic training and was almost immediately put on the first ship to Vietnam. Vietnam? I thought. Vietnam was some far distant land that I knew nothing about, and my fears were reassured when we arrived at camp. Vietnam was far different than Montana. I had gone straight from the farm to some Godforsaken land, and I had had little training to prepare me for what was to come. The weather and terrain was so much different than Montana. In Montana we had long cold winters, but here in Vietnam it was hot and humid. I was about to start one of the most painful and difficult eras of my life.

The date was November 13th, I woke up in hot sweat. We loaded up into our platoons, mine was the 131st Infantry. I was a rifleman, which meant I was always on the front lines. We headed to join the fight, we were accompanied by the 42nd
Parachute infantry, and the 72nd tank column. Almost immediately shots started ringing out and my men started falling left and right. We had been ambushed by a large group of Viet Cong guerilla fighters. We needed air support immediately, but the closest wave of air support was 50 miles north and engaging the enemy.

As I ran, dodging bullets, to the safety of the woods. I turned around just in time to see my men being slaughtered. Then without warning I watched in horror as my best friend at the time, Tank Commander Andrew Beckett got his legs blown off by an enemy landmine. I was the only man left from my platoon. I was alone in some far land, behind enemy lines. . The next couple of nights I slept in the woods alone without being discovered by the Viet Cong gorilla warriors.

This changed my entire campaign. It wasn’t about fighting another man’s war, it was about my survival, and in the end my revenge. After those many nights in the wilderness I started heading north too hopefully join the fight with a new platoon of men. I had been traveling for days through desolate forest when I came upon a Vietnamese airfield. The airbase contained only a few helicopters, a bunker full of soldiers, and a single prisoner. This prisoner changed the war for me. I kicked open the bunker door and raised my m-16 and sprayed the room until they were all dead. Then I moved to the prisoner’s cell and broke down the door. Although I never got his name, he helped me to get back into the fight. We busted out the doors and tore across the field to the helicopters. We were being chased and shot at by ten or twenty soldiers, We jumped in the helicopter and soared of into the air. I was the pilot and he was my co-pilot. We headed north to find anywhere we could help.
We came upon a group of American soldiers being ambushed. I swung the chopper in low and sprayed the vegetation with machine gun fire. . Viet Cong were coming from everywhere, but I was mowing them down as fast as they could come. Then out of nowhere I got hit by an RPG, we bailed out but he didn’t make it. I continued the fight on the ground and the Vietcong started falling back. We gave them everything, grenades rockets, and when the men ran out of ammunition they picked up rocks and threw them. We thought we had killed every last one of them when all of a sudden a grenade soared through the air and landed at the feet of some new recruits. I made the choice to dive on the grenade to save those boys. As the grenade went of everything went black. When I woke up in the hospital I was told I was lucky to have survived. But the story doesn’t end here, after I healed I went back and served two more tours in Vietnam. I am retired and living in Montana.