time to adjust it. As if in response to my thought the next barrage began, and I could feel the whistling rounds working their way up the hill behind us. By now many of the marines on the forward edge of our line were returning fire from their prone positions, and because we were above the enemy soldiers, we could fire directly into the trees. Not long after the second barrage had begun, however, the tree line from which it was being directed suddenly exploded into balls of fire, and I belatedly realized that my own mortar team was laying down its own barrage of suppressing fire. Looking over my shoulder, I saw one of the team members on his knees holding the mortar tube against its baseplate while his two comrades were furiously shoveling rounds into its open end. Within seconds of our return fire, the enemy unit broke contact, and as we lay there in the stillness, I could hardly believe how desperate the situation had been just moments earlier. My mortar section's quick action had probably saved us from wholesale casualties, and I was horrified to realize that in the course of the firefight it had never occurred to me to order them to commence fire.

After it was over and we had regrouped, the squad leaders reported their situations. We had suffered only the one casualty, and Doc Ellis told me that the wounded marine would be able to complete the patrol with us and get further medical attention the next day, so we were spared the necessity of a nighttime medevac. By now the stars were sparkling overhead, but there was very little sparkle left in the third platoon as we abandoned our hilltop and gingerly advanced toward our nighttime position.

We dug in extra deep that night, and as Sergeant Leslie and I huddled in our fighting hole, we rehashed the experience we had just survived. Whoever had attacked us was well equipped and capable of laying down a volume of fire equal to our own. Because they had a machine gun and a mortar tube, they were probably North Vietnamese rather than Vietcong, and they definitely knew what they were doing. I shuddered to think what would have happened if their initial barrage had not overshot, if my own mortar section had not responded so well, or if the enemy had simply waited five more minutes and caught us spread out between

the two hills. The permutations for disaster were endless, and Leslie advised me not to think about it; but I could not get over how I had completely forgotten my own mortar. I had not felt fear, and indeed, at the height of the activity I had a strange sensation of being outside my own body, de-tachedly observing the activity around me, but I knew that my butt had been saved by some fast-thinking kids for whom my respect had just taken a quantum leap.

The next day, as we headed back toward Camp 413, we passed Lieutenant Zier and his patrol, who had taken sniper fire as they crossed the big rice paddy on their way out to replace us. We gave our respective platoons a ten-minute break as we paused to exchange intelligence and smoke cigarettes together. At one point in our conversation we simply looked at each other and said, as if on cue, "This shit has got to stop."

The words uttered simultaneously by two exhausted and harried lieutenants seemed ludicrous for a moment, and we both burst into laughter; but the thought behind them was deadly serious. I had already had several men who were making up excuses to get out of the bush, and Lieutenant Zier told me that he was experiencing the same problem. Morale was at an all-time low, and if what we were doing was the textbook response to small-unit skirmishes, I still wasn't sure I wanted to be a part of it or, indeed, if I could even handle it.

When we got back to base camp later that afternoon, word was waiting for us that Lieutenant Zier's platoon had just stumbled into a minefield. Two men had been wounded initially, and when their comrades went to their assistance, they had detonated another mine, and three more, including Zier, had gone down. All five had been medevacked, and although preliminary reports indicated that John Zier, the bull whom I had come to regard as invincible, was in no danger of losing his life, it was uncertain if he would ever return to his unit. His twin brother, another marine lieutenant, had been wounded a few weeks earlier and sent back to the States, and I thought that John could easily have picked a better way to visit his brother. The more I thought about John Zier, the way in which he had been wounded, and the

way in which we always seemed to be responding to an unseen enemy rather than initiating action on our own, the more depressed and frustrated I became. I finally wrote my wife a letter and went in search of Sergeant Leslie and a six-pack of warm beer.

Later in the day Captain Woods came over to the platoon commanders' hooch where Leslie and I were drinking beer and took a seat on Lieutenant Zier's cot. My spirits had been, if not lifted, at least dulled by the alcohol, and Leslie and I had to concentrate to make certain we were hearing the skipper correctly. At the end of the week my platoon was going to be temporarily attached to an ARVN company operating out of a compound just to the east of Marble Mountain, a klick or two farther inland.

Woods told us that we would be there for at least two weeks, and although he did not have any more information on the assignment. Sergeant Leslie and I barely managed to contain ourselves at the prospect of a change of duty. Captain Woods went on to tell us that the normal platoon rotation had been suspended until we returned from the ARVN company. My platoon would be patrolling for the next two days in the area to the northwest of the compound, and we would then serve as a blocking force along the main service road to the Tu Cau bridge for an ARVN sweep of the area adjacent to the road. We did not relish the idea of going back into the same area where I had lost two men less than a week before, but the realization that we were going to be able to avoid a return to the Riviera for at least a fortnight had us both dancing around the room as soon as Captain Woods headed back to the company hooch.

I had Leslie inform the platoon of our change of fortune, and when I went to the mess hall for chow that evening, I could tell by the broad grins on the faces of Corporal Turner, Cowboy, Barton, and some of the others that the news had not displeased them. We all realized that the next few days were not going to be fun, but the change in morale was remarkable now that we could get some respite from the Riviera patrols.

By the time we left Camp 413 the next morning, the sun was already well up, and it was obviously going to be

another scorcher. We did not need the cover of darkness to reach the northwest area, so I had given the men time to get a hot breakfast. Mindful of our two casualties thereabouts, Leslie and I decided to vary our pattern, stay out of the open, where snipers and booby traps were more likely, and instead make our daytime stopovers in the hamlets, where we thought the enemy might be less likely to engage us for fear of hitting civilians.

In keeping with this experiment, I directed the marine walking point in front of me to turn west off the service road after we had gotten several hundred meters out of camp. We headed overland toward a ville that we had skirted on our earlier patrol and maintained a westward azimuth for several klicks. The vegetation was somewhat denser than in the Riviera, but we tried to stay off the trails and footpaths along our route for fear of mines and booby traps. As a result, our progress was slow, and by the time we reached the outskirts of the village we were soaking wet from fighting our way through the foliage. I had removed my utility shirt to get some relief from the heat at mid-morning, but as a result my bare arms were covered with nicks and cuts from the vines and branches we had had to hack our way through. Because of our previous losses in the area, the platoon was in no mood to waste time winning hearts and minds, and when the villagers realized that we were going to be in their midst for several hours, they became inhospitable.

A cursory search failed to turn up any sign of Vietcong ordnance, but by now we had come to regard searches that yielded no results as evidence of good concealment rather than pro-American bias. As usual, there were no young males in the village, and the women and old men tried to ignore us, although their studied indifference bordered on overt hostility. When one of my men began unbuttoning his fly to relieve himself into a watering hole at the edge of the village, the shrieks of a couple of the locals almost precipitated an incident with considerable shoving on both sides until we realized that the stagnant-appearing little hole was the village water supply. I could not tell whether our hosts were more fearful of us or of Vietcong reprisals, but for the

time that we were with them, none of the usual thawing out common when Doc Ellis and Coswell treated the sick and when my men passed out C rations and cigarettes took place. We all were suspicious and on edge, and the watering hole incident, which might ordinarily have ended in laughter, now only heightened the tension.

Everyone sensed that something was different about this particular ville. Sergeant Leslie and I discussed the strange vibes we were getting and decided to exit the village at midaftemoon in the usual way, but then to double back under cover of darkness and set up a night ambush site at one of the hamlet entrances. I fully expected the platoon to be fired on as the last squad filed out of the ville, and in anticipation of contact I had instructed the lag squad to fire a rocket directly into the village if so much as one shot was fired in our direction.

We were allowed to depart in peace, perhaps because the villagers could sense our resolve and were reluctant to press their luck. I realized as we continued our patrol that I, at least, was becoming calloused and indifferent toward the very people we were supposedly trying to liberate, but it seemed to be the only way to assure our own survival. At any rate, I was relieved that we did not have to employ the rocket launchers, and I even managed a frozen smile in Sergeant Leslie's direction at the realization that fear and loathing from the people we were charged with protecting were more manageable emotions than indifference or scorn.

In taking our leave, we tried to make it appear that we had no intention of returning to the village, and Leslie and I made a pretense of poring over our maps, even studying them as we proceeded along our route. We traveled inland until we were well out of sight of the village, marched another five hundred meters as a precaution, and then tried to make ourselves as inconspicuous as possible while we holed up to wait for darkness. By now the platoon moved with a minimum of wasted motion and made its daytime base camp more or less automatically with little direction from Leslie or me.

The sky had darkened ominously in the hour or so it took us to move from the village to our stopping point, and

by the time we were in place a heavy rain and howling wind had blocked out the searing sun. The rain was a nuisance; but at least it alleviated the heat, and I knew that it would provide additional cover as we moved back into the area of the village. We ate a soggy meal of cold C rations, and I wondered why I was even bothering with the unappetizing mess as beads of water dripped from my nose and glasses into the green can of processed meat in my left hand. Despite my discomfort, however, the mood of the platoon was upbeat, and I knew that the additional charge was due to our anticipation over assuming the role of the hunter rather than that of the quarry.

Before we moved out, the men blackened their faces, and each squad leader checked his unit to make certain that the telltale noises of metal against metal had been eliminated and that all weapons were in order. We retraced our route quickly, as soon as darkness fell, and were able to make good time since the trail was familiar and the rain and wind obviated the need to avoid making noise. In addition, we were not worried about being ambushed or booby-trapped since we had given the impression that we would be patrolling in the opposite direction.

I knew from our previous visit that a patchwork of garden plots enclosed by hedgerows lay adjacent to the village along the path by which we had exited, and I had decided to have the platoon set up in the one closest to the path so that we would have good surveillance of anyone leaving or entering the hamlet. We slipped into place inside the hedge without being seen or heard, and the men took up positions facing outward with the natural contour of the hedgerow as the perimeter of our camp. The foliage provided good camouflage, and after checking the squad positions and emplacement of claymore mines, I was satisfied that I had selected well. We could hear through the rain the muted sounds of the villagers settling in for the evening in nearby thatched huts. The acrid smell of smoldering cooking fires let us know that the evening meal had been completed.

Although the normal activity indicated that our return had been undetected, I also knew that any contact, however incidental, would blow our cover and quickly reverse the

role of hunter and quarry. Throughout the next several hours the rain continued to fall, soaking both the men on watch and those trying to doze, but there was no sign of activity along the path. I had anticipated that the rain might cause the enemy to stay put, but I was also banking on the Viet-cong's being curious about our afternoon visit and using the nighttime to gather intelligence in the village.

When nothing seemed to be happening, I decided around midnight to send a squad into the village for a look around. I had no trouble getting two volunteers from each squad, and I had Ski and Corporal Turner lead the patrol. Ski, with his natural agility, was a solid choice for this kind of cat-and-mouse activity, and I knew that Corporal Turner would keep things from getting out of hand if there was a confrontation with civilians.

As my ad hoc squad noiselessly filed out of our perimeter, the remaining members of the platoon, sensing that we were on the offensive again, stirred momentarily from their lethargy before settling back in to await the return. I huddled next to Watson, my radio operator, to get the first situation reports; but we both knew that the radio could be a dead giveaway, and I had instructed Corporal Turner to call in only if he got into a situation he couldn't handle. I was always most uncomfortable when the platoon was split up at nighttime, and I dreaded the prospect of having to go after a squad in trouble in the dead of night. At least the dread kept me wide-awake despite exhaustion. An hour after they had left. Turner came up on the radio net to whisper that Ski had observed some activity around one of the village hootches and was closing in, and I could tell by the spacing of his words that the game had taken a deadly turn. I was suddenly aware of the beads on my forehead—either rain or perspiration. After fifteen minutes, an eternity, Turner radioed again to report that the squad had taken a captive and was heading back to our perimeter. Within minutes an excited group of marines, flushed with success, came hurtling down the path out of the village, pushing a young man whom they had gagged and blindfolded. They paused in the path only long enough to make certain that we did not mis-

take them for enemies and then plunged headlong through the hedgerow, where their captive fell in a heap at my feet.

Ski was out of breath and trembling with excitement, and the young pajama-clad man he had in tow quaked through his blindfold as if he'd known the ax was descending. Ski gasped for air as he recounted the events of the last hour. The squad had posted two men at the entrance to the village when they began their probe, and two others had quickly made their way to the opposite end so that both avenues of escape were covered. The remaining four men fanned out, looking for signs of enemy activity. Ski, Turner, and their charges had spotted their captive running into one of the huts. They had pursued him inside, found him feigning sleep on a straw mat, and taken him as a prisoner on the assumption that since he was running around the village in the middle of the night and had tried to avoid them, he must have been a Vietcong.

The young man appeared to be in his early twenties, and he had not been in the village that afternoon; but other than his suspicious behavior there was no concrete evidence to link him to the Vietcong. A search of his living quarters had not turned up any enemy ordnance, and he had a vaUd identification card, although that could easily have been forged or purchased on the black market. But I had the gut feeling that our captive was at least a Vietcong sympathizer, if not a cadre member, especially since his village had been so hostile to us and he was apparently doing a little intelligence gathering of his own at a strange hour of the night. Sergeant Leslie agreed with my assessment, and we therefore decided to keep him bound and under watch for the remainder of the night and then have a squad escort him back to Camp 413 in the morning for interrogation by an intelligence unit.

Ski made certain that our captive was trussed tightly, perhaps more so than was necessary under the circumstances, and we removed the blindfold but left him gagged so that he could not give away our position. Because I was worried about retaliation from his comrades, we staked him out in the open so that he would probably be the first man hit if he were part of an enemy unit that decided to fire mor-

tars or small arms. Several times during the remainder of the night Corporal Turner adjusted the young man's bonds to minimize his discomfort, although many of the men would have seized on the slightest provocation to end his mission permanently.

At daybreak I had Ski and the other men from the night squad except for Corporal Turner carry our prisoner back to battalion, with instructions to turn him over to the proper authorities and then wait for our return that night. I knew that he was probably going to be released and that my raiding party was going to be angry, and I at least wanted to give them a half day out of the bush as a reward for their initiative. Turner, of course, wanted to go too, but we both knew that the platoon could not afford to give him up at a time when the enemy was almost certain to make known its displeasure over the events of the night. My squad radioed back to us later in the morning that it had made it back safely. I never saw our prisoner again; but as I had predicted, he was released after interrogation, and if he had not been a Vietcong sympathizer before meeting us, he almost certainly became one afterward. If the incident were viewed one way, we had captured a probable member of an opposing force under suspicious circumstances and had dealt with him appropriately through the existing channels. From the opposite perspective, we had kidnapped a South Vietnamese civilian as he lay in his own bed and held him incommunicado for several hours.

Needless to say, our morning reception by the already hostile villagers was cool when we moved back into the hamlet. I had fully expected to be challenged to release a no doubt favorite son, but oddly the subject was never raised. Leslie and some of the men conjectured that the man had probably been a courier who was unknown to the village since there was no pleading wife or crying children to present his case, while another element of the platoon thought that the Vietcong grapevine had issued orders to ignore the situation and deal with it later.

At any rate, we all were uneasy, and I was especially nervous over the prospect of spending the rest of the day in hostile territory with a platoon that was now less than full

strength. Our strategy of staying close to the village and mingling with the local populace seemed to be working since we had not made enemy contact in the previous twenty-four hours, and I resolved, despite the strain, to stick to the same plan for the rest of the day.

There was another smaller ville of a half dozen thatched huts several hundred meters north of us, and Leslie and I thought it best to strike out in its direction, since we had pretty well worn out our welcome in our present location. Heading north, we were fired on by snipers before we had even cleared the ville, and although no one was hit, it was an unmistakable sign of worse to come.

Turner was so angry that he grabbed an old man and his young granddaughter and placed them in the column on the theor>' that the enemy would not risk firing at us with civilians in our midst. I made no move to stop him, and since the snipers stopped firing, I decided to keep our unwilling additions until we reached the next ville. The old man had lost an arm years before and waved his stump furiously at me, as if he thought that the missing limb would give me a change of heart, but the little girl seemed to realize that we were resolute and, taking her grandfather by his remaining hand, led us at double time into the smaller village. When we reached the outskirts, Corporal Turner removed his gold earring and gave it to the httle girl, who pocketed it without a noticeable change of expression, turned abruptly on her heels, and headed back in the opposite direction. The thought crossed my mind that I was losing whatever decency I had brought with me to Vietnam, but I was too tired and too frustrated to entertain it for long. Besides, just ahead of us there was another village that had to be disrupted and bent to my will if we were going to survive another day.

Watson, Leslie, Turner, and I set up our headquarters group in a partially bombed-out temple around which the other four or five structures in the ville were arranged. My now-undermanned squads fanned out around the perimeter of the ville and after the customary search staked out positions and assigned watches. The hamlet was small and afforded good vision in all directions. By the time we set up,

it was close to noon, and after Watson had radioed in our position, Leslie and I put our heads together to plan the remainder of the patrol that we had been improvising as we went along.

The village was almost empty save for some children and two pregnant women, and I assumed that everyone else was out tending the rice paddies, which were by now swollen with rain. The storm had passed, taking with it the cloud cover but leaving in its place a fiery sun and an excruciating humidity. The temple afforded some relief from the sun, and our presence there was less intrusive than it would have been if we had taken over someone's living quarters for a command center, but considering all the enmity we had aroused in the past day, the nuance probably went unappreciated. Leslie and Turner joked with the pregnant women about their big bellies, communicating with gestures what they could not with language, and the women were far more amiable than our earlier hosts. I thought ironically that they probably felt protected from a gang rape by my men because of their advanced pregnancies but shelved my flash of intuition as a symptom of growing paranoia.

The contour lines on my map indicated a large hill to the southeast of us and near the main service road that led back to camp. I had decided to stay put until dark and then make the hill our objective for a brief nighttime base camp. Leslie and I thought that we could reach it in about two hours and that it would give us a vantage point from which we could survey the road for another couple of hours before we headed into camp. In the meantime, there was nothing left to do but be alert for snipers, entertain the villagers, and try to catch some shut-eye to make up for what we had missed the night before. After a meal of beans and franks, I located a wooden pallet parallel to one of the walls of the temple and just inside the entrance and settled down for a nap. It was cooler in the shade, and just as I was dozing off, I could see Watson fidgeting with the radio on the dirt floor beside me.

Sometime later I was jolted from my sleep by the crack of rifle fire. The first round hit the wall beside me and showered my face and neck with plaster chips. I dived onto

the floor, and Watson scurried for cover as several other rounds buzzed like hornets around us. Just as quickly as it had begun it was over, and whoever had gotten so close to the temple was now long gone. Watson had taken a round across the seat of his pants so close that it had made a slit in his trousers and raised a welt on the cheek of his buttocks. After he recovered from the shock of such a close call, he wanted me to put him in for a Purple Heart, but when Doc Ellis told him the near miss didn't require medical attention and Leslie pointed out that he would become the butt of numerous jokes if the word got around the company, he recanted. I had been asleep for an hour when the shots came, but resuming my nap was now out of the question. I rapidly smoked several cigarettes to calm my nerves while Leslie went off to chew out the marines in the sector of our perimeter who had allowed the sniper to get close enough to kill their lieutenant and radio operator.

It was by now obvious that we had created a grudge situation by snatching our captive the day before, and any earlier doubts I might have had about his status were now dispelled. Unfortunately his interrogators back at battalion would make an independent determination based solely on his actions, and it would, I knew, be immaterial to them that his buddies were trying to settle the score. For the next several hours the village reverted to its normal level of activity, and I began to feel as if the sniping incident had taken place only in some sort of surreal daydream as I napped. By late afternoon the townspeople had begun returning from their errands and the women were preparing cooking fires for the evening meal. We would be moving out shortly, and as dark set in I decided to smoke one last cigarette before giving the order to saddle up.

As I struck the match and brought the flame to the Lucky Strike hanging between my lips, sniper fire erupted from a nearby tree line as if my action had been a cue. Leslie's dressing-down had had its intended effect, and this time my men were returning fire before I hit the ground. While rounds dug up the dirt around me. Turner suddenly appeared at my side and began firing a grenade launcher into the muzzle flashes coming from the tree line. I was at

first grateful that he had come to my assistance until I realized that the snipers had shifted their fire to focus on the muzzle flashes from the grenade launcher beside me. Before I could signal Turner to shift his position away from the headquarters group, our adversaries had realized that they were going to get the worst of the fracas and abruptly broke contact.

In the ensuing confusion the villagers had disappeared into the cover of their huts, and Leslie and I, sensing that our enemies were now regrouping, decided to get the platoon moving before their target practice resumed. My men were only too glad to get going, and within minutes we had formed two columns and were humping our way toward the hill southeast of us. A couple of the men wanted to fire a rocket back into the village as a thank-you for its hospitality, but since we had seen nothing to indicate that the villagers were at fault and we were not being fired on as we departed, I restrained them. We were not interfered with as we made our way toward the main service road.

While the straps of my pack dug into my shoulders, I breathed more easily, knowing that at least we were headed in the general direction of Camp 413. It had been a rough two days, and with only one more stop to go, I was looking forward to a hot meal, a cold shower, and a couple of beers. I had always thought that getting shot at while lighting a cigarette was something that happened only in the movies, and I could not believe that it had actually happened to me. For a few moments I considered giving up smoking, but since there were so few pleasures in the bush, I dismissed the idea out of hand.

Attempting to ride herd on a platoon during a night movement was always more difficult than it was during the day, and the rapidly descending darkness had its usual effect as we worked our way toward our objective. Fortunately the darkness also meant that the chance of encountering snipers was minimal, and my point man was able to concentrate on maintaining a true azimuth while Leslie and I policed the formation. It was also easier to control the platoon with a half dozen fewer men, and as I checked my watch an hour

into our journey, I realized that our time estimate for reaching the hill was just about right.

Fifteen minutes later the hill loomed into view, illuminated by a gibbous moon that had risen as the evening wore on. It sat alone and incongruous amid a flat expanse of greenery, and I raised a hand to halt our progress as we approached. It was unlikely that the hill would be occupied, but before I conmiitted the platoon, I had two men do a quick circumnavigation to make certain that we did not get caught in the open by a force that would have the advantage of the high ground. When my scouts returned, we moved directly into the high ground and set up in a rough perimeter around the crest of the hill.

As we had anticipated, the view was unobstructed in all directions, and I was pleased with my selection as our command group set in on the summit. Turning toward Sergeant Leslie to comment on our choice, I could see the marine nearest to me on the periphery slipping off his pack. Just then an explosion broke the silence and a red flash filled the darkness in front of me. The force of the explosion spun me around and to the ground, and as I scrambled back to my knees, I could smell smoke and hear the young man moaning. When I attempted to refocus my vision on the wounded marine, my eyes were blurry, and as I touched my hand to my face, I realized that my glasses had been blown off by the blast. My face was also wet where I had placed my hand, and when I again brought my hand back toward my face, blood trickled between my fingers. At first I thought I had been hit in the head, but when my hand began to throb, I realized that my luck had been much better and that I had only taken a piece of shrapnel in the hand.

The marine who had set off the booby trap had been much less fortunate, and his body had absorbed most of the impact. One of his legs had been broken by the blast, and a piece of bone protruded obscenely from his pants at mid-thigh. His arm on the opposite side was riddled with shrapnel, as was much of his side, and by the time I had recovered enough to work my way over to his position, Ellis already was working frantically over him. Within minutes he had applied battle dressings to stem the bleeding, immo-

bilized the broken leg, and injected the man with a dose of morphine. I ignored his offer to bind my hand, which by comparison looked like a razor nick, and turned toward Watson, my radio operator, who was already on the medevac net. When Ellis got our casualty stabilized, he informed me that there was a real danger of losing him if we did not get a prompt medevac, and I summoned the choppers as forcefully as I could. One of my men had a battery-operated strobe light, and as soon as we got the word that the medevac chopper was on the way, we set up a makeshift landing zone at the base of the hill in the center of which we dug a shallow hole for the strobe light. I had never called in a night medevac and was glad that we had the strobe light available to mark the spot for the chopper to make its pickup.

When the chopper came sweeping in ten minutes later, we activated the signal and informed the pilot how we were marking his landing zone. Four marines rolled our casualty into a poncho liner and carried him down the hill as the chopper made a direct landing on our marker. Within thirty seconds he had been placed on board and the helicopter lifted off. I watched for a few moments as the pilot arced his craft back toward Da Nang and was again seized by a desire to be on board and safely out of the dirty little war for which I was rapidly losing my enthusiasm. Leslie tapped me on the shoulder to bring me out of my reverie, and we had the platoon assume its original position at the top of the hill, where one more marine had almost lost his life for reasons I no longer seemed capable of articulating even to myself. It seemed fitting that I had lost my glasses and was losing my perspective on the war at about the same time, and although several men congratulated me on having earned my first Purple Heart, I was in no mood to respond to their remarks.

After another hour on our perch with no sign of enemy activity, I decided to call it quits and head the platoon for home. The loss of my glasses was far more disabling than the injury to my hand, and for once I took a position well back in the column as we paralleled the main service road into camp. As we entered the camp and headed to our com-

pany area, we passed a group of rear-echelon cooks and bakers who had just finished watching a movie on the outdoor screen they had rigged to help them with their boredom. The movie screen had been a sore subject with my men since it had first been erected because we had to troop directly by it on our way to and from the bush.

On this occasion one of the hapless cooks started to make a comment about grunts returning from war games, and several of my men pummeled him to the ground before he had finished his sentence. Leslie and Turner quickly ended the fracas, but even the most dim-witted among us shared the frustration that had triggered the outburst. We had just lost another casualty in defense of the domino theory, and there was nobody among us who was going to let a slight by a rear-echelon motherfucker go unanswered.

I went back to the officers' hooch, unloaded my gear, picked up my spare glasses, and then walked to the battalion aid station to have my hand bandaged. When I returned, the skipper and Sergeant Leslie were waiting for me with cold beer, and Captain Woods made small talk about my million-dollar wound while Leslie and I chugged several brews. Woods gave us the news that our casualty was going to live, but his time in the bush and probably in the Marine Corps as well was over. I felt like crying and wondered how my father had handled these kinds of situations. I sensed that I was going to have to get over feeling personally responsible every time one of my marines was wounded or I would go mad, but for now all I wanted was the oblivion that another gallon of beer would bring. Leslie proposed a toast to the green machine and its proud traditions, and after several more beers, I understood with remarkable clarity the meaning of the expression, "Eat the apple and fuck the corps."

The next day my platoon was to take up a blocking position, along the road and adjacent to the Tu Cau bridge, for a sweeping movement by an ARVN unit. We did not have to be in place until early afternoon and our destination was only an hour's march, so we had the luxury of a relatively free morning. Leslie and I started the day by nursing our swollen heads over breakfast in the mess hall, and I spent most of the meal trying to replace the fluids in my system

that the elixir of forgetfulness had exacted as its toll. Despite our aching heads, we were in a good mood since the day's activity would be a variation from our usual routine and since we would be going to our assignment with the ARVN company the following day. I had also gotten several more letters from my wife, reporting that our unborn child was waking her regularly in the middle of the night with some sort of prenatal exercise.

After Leslie and I had force-fed ourselves breakfast, I went back to the officers' hooch and wrote Toddy a short letter to let her know about my first Purple Heart. There was an unwritten policy in the battalion, honored more in the breach than in the observance, that the second Purple Heart was supposed to be a free ticket out of the bush, but the policy, of course, did not apply to officers. At any rate, I knew that I would not be able to live with myself if I used the excuse of a couple of cheap wounds to try to avoid my duty, and I would certainly never be able to face my father again under such a cloud. Nevertheless, it seemed harmless enough to contemplate that under different circumstances I would already be halfway toward a job in the rear.

I wrote Toddy about my injury, mainly so that she would know how insignificant the wound was and before the rumor mill had time to magnify it out of all proportion. I had tried in my letters to shelter her from the more alarming experiences I was undergoing, but since she was the only emotional outlet I had available, my moods occasionally darkened the letters home. In this particular missive I told her that I had lost only a few drops of blood but that I wanted her to hear the news from me before she heard from some other well-meaning source that both of my legs had been blown off I closed with an admonition that she take good care of herself and our child and went off to round up the platoon for the march to the Tu Cau bridge.

Leslie was already waiting for me outside the enlisted hooches, and the men were milling about, making last-minute preparations for our venture, when I arrived. They were in the same upbeat mood that had prevailed at breakfast, and the marines who had started the fight the night before were basking in the new respect that their peers had

accorded them. I said a few words about this being our last mission before the Marine Corps cut us some slack, and we shouldered our packs and weapons and headed out of the compound.

The September heat, like the last time we had left camp, was scorching, but since we were coming back that evening, we were not burdened by full packs and an overload of ordnance and so made good time along the roadbed. The platoon marched in two columns, one on each side of the road so that traffic could pass between us, and Leslie and Turner flitted back and forth along the column, making certain that there were at least ten-meter intervals between the men. It was unlikely that we would detonate a land mine since the minesweepers from battalion had performed their daily sweep just before our departure, but we cautiously kept the interval anyway to avoid the loss of more than one man to the same mine.

When we reached the bridge, I had the three squads set up along the road facing toward the Marble Mountain area. There was a tree line across an open area at our backs, and I dispatched several men to give it a quick search to make certain that we would not be ambushed from the rear. The bridge was occupied by another platoon and was not our responsibility; but I set up my command post directly adjacent to it so that it was to my right, and my own platoon was fanned out down the main service road to my left. I also kept the machine-gun team with me and had it sight its weapon down the center of the bridge span. Because we were in the open and unprotected from the sun or the enemy, I was somewhat apprehensive, but most of the men attempted to solve the heat problem by draping poncho liners across tent poles or small shrubs and taking shelter beneath them. If enemy soldiers were flushed out by the sweeping ARVNs later in the afternoon, they were also going to be in the open.

For several hours the only traffic on the road consisted of civilians whose business necessitated travel across the

bridge, and my men amused themselves by flirting with the women and bartering with the merchants who passed their positions. As was often the case with South Vietnamese military units, the ARVNs never showed up, and late in the afternoon the word came down from battalion that their sweep had been scratched. There was a good deal of grumbling up and down the line about wasted effort and unreliable allies when the word was passed, but no one was disappointed at having avoided another enemy confrontation. We had hoped to be transported back to Camp 413 in six-bys; but when they, too, did not materialize, the grumbling intensified, and the platoon members repacked their temporary shelters and prepared to begin the journey home.

Just as we were saddling up, automatic-weapons fire erupted at the far end of the bridge in the Vietnamese section along the riverbank. The fire, which began sporadically from two or three isolated positions, quickly spread and intensified. Within minutes the platoon at the bridge was returning fire, and as we dived for cover from the stray rounds hitting around us, I realized that a full-scale firefight was developing. When the shooting started, the civilians on the road and bridge dropped their packages and other belongings and headed for cover.

As I tried to figure out what to do next, I reached into a sack that had been dropped in front of the conmiand post and pulled out a bottle of Vietnamese beer. By now my machine gunner and I could see North Vietnamese soldiers in green uniforms darting across the road at the f2ir end of the bridge, and while he tried to draw a bead on the fleeting targets, I broke the end off the beer bottle and sampled the product. Strictly speaking, it was not our firefight, but we were marines who after months of being harassed by an unseen enemy were anxious for some revenge. My gunner, rather than firing wildly, was squeezing off two or three rounds at a time, and after he got the timing down of the enemy movement across the road, he winged one of the soldiers, and they stopped trying to cross the road.

I passed him the beer bottle as a compliment to his marksmanship, but before we could celebrate further, a fighter jet appeared on station and began making strafing

runs at the cluster of buildings across the river where the firing had started. My platoon watched in awe, and several men actually stood up and cheered as the pilot skillfully maneuvered to fire his rockets into the embankment and the structures above it. His payload threw great clumps of black earth into the air, and for several seconds falling debris from his handiwork rained threateningly down on our position from all the way across the river. Several of the buildings collapsed like falling cards. Then smoke and dust filled the area as one of his targets burst into orange flames.

So intent were we on watching this display of aerial wizardry that I did not even notice that firing had begun behind us in the tree line that we had secured earlier, until several rounds screamed overhead and redirected my attention. The squad closest to my position reacted immediately and, after turning to face the threat behind us, laid down a volume of fire that saturated the tree line and badly damaged a house between it and our position. The enemy stopped firing as soon as our return fire began, and after both sides had stopped shooting, a woman emerged from the house, carrying a small child.

The little girl's arm had been blown off by one of my men who had fired into the house when he detected movement. We watched in horror as the woman made her way to the road with her little girl moaning in her arms. Both mother and daughter were covered with blood, and Watson began radioing frantically for a medevac as a corpsman went to their aid. The marine who had shot the little girl looked on in stunned disbelief and for the rest of the day was not able to respond to the simplest of commands. The little girl was not evacuated until half an hour later, when the enemy unit had retreated back through the cover of the partially destroyed village and when the platoon at the bridge had begun evacuating its half a dozen casualties and it was a simple matter to send the little girl and her mother with the wounded marines. My platoon had taken no casualties other than the young man who had shot the little girl. It was apparent that his psychic wounds would probably never heal.

After it was over, I was invited to view the bodies of

the ten North Vietnamese soldiers who had lost their lives in what came to be known as the battle for the Tu Cau bridge. They were laid out in a row along the road for the rear-echelon intelligence types to view at their leisure, but the invitation had no appeal for me after having just viewed the mess we had made of an eight-year-old girl. We still had a long march back to Camp 413, and my sole casualty lagged badly behind the rest of the squad; but I made only a token effort to hurry him along. When we got home, he asked to see the chaplain, and he never returned to the platoon. There were some who muttered that he had simply found a convenient way to get out of the bush, but he had been a competent marine before the incident at the bridge took the sap out of him, and I knew that there was no place in my platoon for marines who were unable to put their sensitivities on hold:

Somebody higher in the chain of command was pleased with G Company's performance at the Tu Cau bridge, and transportation was made available to my platoon for our move the next day as a reward for the ten kills. We boarded amtracs at midmoming and were driven north on the main service road toward Marble Mountain. Nestled at the foot of the mountain was the village of Nui Kim Son, which we passed through before turning inland toward the ARVN company, with which we would make our home for the next couple of weeks.

The amtracs followed a narrow dirt road bordered by open fields and rice paddies for the last leg of our journey, and by noon we had reached our destination, a makeshift compound in the middle of nowhere. The structure itself was circular with a ten-foot-high wall constructed of dirt, mud, and enough supporting substructure to keep it upright. It had one entrance that faced the dirt road we traversed in approaching it. The perimeter was surrounded by a network of barbed wire that, although laid out symmetrically, did not appear sufficient to withstand the assaults of a determined enemy.

As I disembarked from the lead vehicle with half the platoon, and Leslie did likewise from the other, we were greeted by the ARVN company commander, a man four or

five years older than I, whose command of the English language was remarkable. His uniform was freshly laundered, in contrast with my own. While my men gathered up their gear and slapped the dust from their uniforms, he invited his American friends inside his humble surroundings to share in the hospitality of his countrymen.

The inside of the compound was as squalid as I had expected, consisting of a small sandbagged command post. The very center was surrounded by a barren sort of courtyard of hard-packed dirt. The ARVN men had rigged crude shanties along the inside perimeter of the wall to serve as their own living quarters, and a few chickens and a dog roamed freely about the camp.

I was invited to share my ARVN host's cubicle in the command post, and I deposited my gear on a small bunk directly across from his. It was a five-foot-by-five-foot room with about enough clearance for an adult dwarf to stand comfortably. On the roof overhead his radio operator and senior enlisted men had fashioned their own living quarters, which were covered by a shelter half and some oddly rigged canvas. The two sets of quarters had the appearance of a box that had been placed on top of a box and tfien fortified with sandbags as an afterthought. Our area on the ground level was dark and damp with only a couple of openings in the sandbags for daytime light, but it appeared that at least I would be dry when it rained. There was also a small covered porch adjacent to the structure where we would take our meals and where a couple of enterprising ARVN soldiers had rigged hammocks that could be used at night and quickly taken down when we were eating or making plans. Watson installed his own hammock on the other side of the command post, and Leslie assigned my platoon positions by squad around the perimeter with the ARVN soldiers.

When everyone was settled in, the ARVN captain suggested that he, Sergeant Leslie, and I take tea together on his porch while he briefed us on the operation of his company. The tea was served lukewarm in C ration cans and was so diluted that it was barely amber-colored. Nevertheless, our Vietnamese host savored every drop, and Leslie

and I exchanged winks and complimented him on its excellence.

Captain Thanh began by explaining to us that he had started his professional life as a schoolteacher but that the draft forced him to abandon his calling. Unlike our own draft, with its short span of obligation, Thanh was committed for the duration of the war and had no idea when he could get back to teaching. He told us he had learned his fluent English at Hue University and was honored to be able to communicate with us in our native tongue. I told him that we were honored to be the beneficiaries of his skill at our language and apologized for my lack of knowledge of Vietnamese. I could not help noting to myself that his English was better than that of three-quarters of the men in my platoon. -

With the introductory amenities completed, Captain Thanh went on to tell us that he and his company had been in their present location for several months and were due for replacement within a week. The compound was their home base camp, and in the time they had been assigned to it, they had been frequently absent from it on two- to three-day operations with larger Vietnamese units. No doubt the new company would have the same sort of routine. In the meantime, he sent out one squad-size patrol at a staggered time each night, mainly to prevent an enemy unit from massing for an attack rather than to seek contact.

My sole assignments would be to send a squad from my platoon with his night patrols and to help out with the watches along the wall. He would give me the patrol route each afternoon when he received it from higher up. He closed by suggesting that the two of us could work through any problems that developed between his troops and mine but that he could tell by my obvious skills as a troop leader that such incidents would not be forthcoming. When the meeting ended, Leslie and I agreed that our Vietnamese host had the diplomatic skills of an ambassador and that his presence as the commander of a line unit was a bit incongruous.

After our session I briefed the squad leaders and weapons team leaders. The schedule was sinfully indolent compared with what we had become accustomed to. Each squad

would patrol only every third night, and our days would be free. There was a Seabee battalion situated near Marble Mountain and Nui Kim Son, about an hour's walk to the east of us, and I planned to divide the platoon into two groups and allow one at a time to make the trek there for a hot meal and a shower. Otherwise we would be brought food, water, and mail by amtrac from Camp 413 along with requested logistic support.

I planned to use some of our free time to get the men who had been specially trained to teach their specialties to the other platoon members. For example, if Doc Ellis could teach the mortar section some basic medical procedures, I reasoned that one man could take another's place if he became a casualty and no one would be indispensable. I also planned to acquaint Corporal Turner and a selected few of the other men with rudiments of my own job so that one of them could take over if both Sergeant Leslie and I were wounded.

The platoon got along well with Captain Thanh and his ARVN company for the week that we were together primarily because of his leadership. Although he was worlds apart from his troops in terms of social class and education, he cared deeply about them and about his country, and that concern translated into a loyalty from his men that bordered on reverence. I also learned more about Vietnamese soldiers in that week than I had in all my prior time in Vietnam and gained a new respect for their integrity.

While our own needs were met by a daily trek to the Seabee compound, where we could eat like kings and buy personal supplies in the small PX, the ARVNs seemed to live off the land. Several times a day Captain Thanh dispatched men on mysterious missions, and they invariably returned with bags of rice, fresh seafood and produce, and other local delicacies. He dispensed these supphes to his unit leaders, who had them prepared in large cooking pots over open fires. I was always asked to share his table, and in return I gave him C rations and some of the booty that arrived in care packages from home. He was especially fond of Lipton tea and the Italian sausage that one of the men had been sent by his brother, a deli operator in the States.

I in turn learned to eat snake, which was not bad once the bones were discarded, and I think on one occasion the hapless dog that had mysteriously disappeared after our third or fourth day there.

The Seabee compound where we received our daily hot meal and had access to showers was an oasis in the desert. Once again we were made aware of how luxurious life in the rear could be, but we dared not complain to the Seabees as long as they were willing to share their bounty. In the officers' mess steak and lobster were common fare, and on one occasion I even got frozen strawberries with my vanilla ice cream. Beer was also plentiful—and inexpensive—and I toted several cases back to our compound. The Seabees had free access to nightly entertainment and live acts that were part of the USO program, and they lived in air-conditioned comfort, which, though tantalizing after we had slogged in through the rice paddies and filth outside their fiefdom, was probably best left alone. In the course of one visit to the Seabees, a medical doctor in standard utilities stopped me to complain that several of my men had the beginning symptoms of immersion foot and that I should see to it that they kept their feet dry. He was a well-meaning sort who I am certain took his Hippocratic oath seriously, but he seemingly had no sense of life outside the wire. I knew that it would be pointless to explain to him that some of us involved in the war lived in the mud, bled in the mud, and would escape our fates only by surviving it or dying in the mud. I left him scratching his head as I excused myself without responding to his concerns and headed back to the bush, toting a case of warm beer.

The evening before Captain Thanh departed he gave me a particularly sumptuous dinner. There was a dish of tender white chunks of backfin crab and a meat course consisting of thin strips of steak in a brown sauce with rice. I did not recognize the animal from which the meat came, but at least I thought I could tell that it was not dog. I contributed a pint of scotch, lovingly sent by Toddy. After the meal and several carefully rationed drinks, we sat on sandbags outside his bunker and enjoyed the coolness of the evening.

He seemed, as usual, remarkably serene for a man

whose country had been racked by war for such a long time, and as we smoked in the dark, I told him that part of my motivation in coming to Vietnam was to help his people have a choice of governments. I could see a smile play across his lips by the glow from his cigarette, but he did not respond for several minutes. Finally he told me that the Viemamese people would outlast whatever government happened to be imposed on them and that he and I were powerless to affect the Vietnamese destiny. He thanked me for caring and told me to think occasionally of him and of his people when the war was no longer a concern of mine. I felt for a moment as if I were in the presence of a very old man instead of someone in his late twenties; but the feeling passed, and we finished the remaining scotch before turning in. I never saw or heard of Captain Thanh after he departed with his company the next morning, but he was a jewel, especially when compared with his replacement.

The new company arrived later that day, and this time I greeted the incoming commander at the compound entrance as Captain Thanh had greeted me. In the interval between one company's departure and the other's arrival, my men had, of course, taken over the most desirable living quarters vacated by the first group, and my platoon made it clear that they were now the old boys. I had also moved my gear to Captain Thanh's bunk since the area above it was less susceptible to leaks during rainstorms, and Watson moved his radio and hammock to the porch area at the opposite side of the command post. Lieutenant Doan, Thanh's replacement, and his men had no inkling of the adjustments we had made, and we did not bother to apprise them; but I later got a laugh each time I watched Doan try to adjust his sleeping area to avoid the drips above his bunk.

Lieutenant Doan was a mustang, a former enlisted man in the Vietnamese army who had worked his way up to of-ITicer status, and as might be expected, he had none of the education or vision of Captain Thanh. He also spoke no English and made it clear from the start that he saw no need for anything beyond minimal communications between the two of us. He was a brutal man who beat his troops with a bamboo truncheon for the most insignificant infractions, and

before he had been with us two days, I despised him as much as his own troops must have. From the moment he arrived, he seemed obsessed with improving the compound's defenses. He assigned extra watches to the perimeter at night and doubled the surrounding concertina wire, and I agreed with both improvements, although I wondered if Lieutenant Doan was motivated by fear in making them.

Since Lieutenant Doan did not seem to care for me except as an adversary in the domino games he played invet-erately, I left him to his own men and began to take my meals with Sergeant Leslie or Corporal Turner. Despite the fact of the war and the necessity to send out the one nightly patrol and man the wall, after two weeks we had made no enemy contact and our routines had begun to take on the characteristics of garrison duty. The men had too much free time and were bored but were relatively easy to keep in check since we knew how fortunate we were not to be in the bush. The compound was located in a remote area surrounded by rice paddies, so the men had none of the diversions they had enjoyed at the Tu Cau bridge. I chose to ignore the daytime card games in which some of the poorer players lost the equivalent of a month's pay at a single session.

For my part, I became more reflective and passed the time reading, listening to the radio, and writing home. Among the books I read were The Chosen, by Chaim Potok, and One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, by Ken Kesey. I wrote my wife daily, along with a number of friends from my boyiiood days, and I looked forward to letters from home as my lifeline to the world. I also wrote my father a fifteen-page letter full of information about the military aspects of my tour and the life-and-death situations we had faced. Given this strong new bond, I could probably have gone on for another fifteen pages, but I stopped writing when I realized that my fifteen pages exceeded the combined length of all the letters I had written to him in four years of college.

As I wrote, I looked inward at the way I had responded to the biggest challenge of my life, and my soul-searching convinced me that I did not want a military career. As a

young man in college I had poorly defined but high expectations of myself, but now in the midst of chaos and uncertainty I developed enough insight to realize that I could be happy teaching school or plying a trade if only God would permit me to survive the war. I knew that I defmitely did not enjoy the mantle of leadership that had been thrust upon me, and I agonized over the life-and-death decisions regarding my men that I was forced to make. In the process I began to develop mixed feelings toward the Marine Corps and my country, alternately loving and despising both, and I was confused by the ambivalence of my feelings toward both corps and country. A part of me had already begun to regard the enemy as some sort of inhuman cannon fodder. I realized that my reaction was a defense mechanism that allowed me to accept and dispense death and mutilation more readily, but I also knew that I was going to lose a part of my soul if that thinking progressed much further

When I could no longer bear the reality of my own situation and the incivility of war, I took refuge in daydreams, and I spent hours fantasizing sexual liaisons with my bride and trying to recall every detail of the time we had had together. I wrote her of the all-consuming hominess of lonely warriors, and I looked forward to our reunion in Hawaii for R&R as if it were going to take place in the Garden of Eden. I also drank beer, usually in solitude and late at night, and although the alcohol did not raise my spirits as it had when I was a teenager, it freed me temporarily from the albatross of command. Corporal Turner noticed the amount of beer I was consuming and alluded to it briefly and good-naturedly, but I was running an efficient operation and paid no heed to his comments.

Sometime toward the middle of our stay with the ARVNs, my platoon was unexpectedly given a free after-.noon at China Beach, news that the platoon received with cheers. Now made famous by television, China Beach was a resortlike military area along the coast of the South China Sea where marines who had distinguished themselves were given in-country R&R. The beach was magnificent with a wide swath of dazzling white sand that gently sloped toward the emerald waters of the sea. The coastline formed an arc.

sweeping toward the north and with a backdrop of gorgeous mountains often shrouded in mist that was as breathtaking as a scene from South Pacific. The man-made structures along the beach, mostly corrugated tin Quonset huts, were far less appealing but catered efficiently to the demands of men temporarily at rest from the war.

My platoon hiked into the Seabee compound late in the morning of the day we were scheduled for our respite, leaving the ARVNs to fend for themselves, and we were then trucked to the beach area, where we checked our weapons into an armory before settling in for an afternoon of revelry. The surrender of our weapons made a few of the men uneasy, but it was a wise precaution, motivated by the same concerns that had required cowboys to check their guns with barkeepers in the Old West. Indeed, shortly after we arrived, we were told of a young marine who, unnerved by the pressure of the war, had sneaked his rifle into the beach area a few weeks earlier and opened fire on a group of sunbathers.

I had made two stipulations concerning my platoon's behavior: No marine was to act so outrageously as to be arrested by the military police, and at the end of the day each man was to be able to get back to the compound under his own power. Anything else was permissible, and the platoon, after its months of unremitting vigilance, quickly made it clear that it was going to approach, but not exceed, the limits of acceptable conduct. The recreation area contained both an officers' area and an enlisted area, and I had planned to drink with the men for an hour or two and then explore the officers' country. I had spent so much time living with the men, however, and was now having such a good time relaxing the normal barriers to fellowship necessitated by command that I quickly abandoned my original plan to go drink with some strange officers who meant nothing to me.

As Leslie, Turner, and I sat at a table in the canteen and quaffed beer after beer, my inhibitions lessened, and the other platoon members who had been drinking at tables around us gradually began approaching us and sharing our conviviality. Before long, several tables had been pulled together, and we luxuriated in the simple joys of cold beer.

greasy cheeseburgers, french fries, and jukebox music. Emboldened by the beer, several of the men became pot-valiant enough to ask me what it was like being the son of Chesty Puller, and rather than being put off by their inquiries, I tried to let them know that as well as being a legend in the Marine Corps, he had been a wonderful father. When someone proposed a toast to Chesty Puller, the marines' marine, every man in our group stood and downed his beer. I was so moved by the tribute that I had to move away to get control of my emotions.

When I returned, the by now drunken marines were busy lying to each other about the remarkable feats they had heard attributed to my dad. Sergeant Leslie, with more time in the corps than any of the others, naturally won the contest hands down, and I contributed to his victory by confirming the authenticity of every story, no matter how outrageous.

After several hours of drinking cold beer, eating cafeteria-style food, and swapping stories, the platoon was as disabled as if we had taken heavy casualties in a firefight. Several fistfights broke out between my men and some of the rear-echelon types, but the altercations were resolved without the MPs and so did not violate my admonitions on acceptable behavior. One of my more drunken marines decided late in the afternoon to swim back to the States and had to be forcibly retrieved from the South China Sea, but even he was forgiven.

When the time came for our departure, it took a herculean effort to round up the platoon and assemble it at the armory for the retrieval of our weapons. Even then I had to dispatch Corporal Turner to gather up several strays who had decided to spend the rest of their duty tour in the enlisted canteen at China Beach. Sergeant Leslie took upon himself the task of calling out the serial numbers of the riffles so that each weapon would wind up in the hands of its rightful owner, but the job, in his impaired state, proved impossible. I finally signed for the entire batch, and the men sorted out their weapons later, when they were able to remember their own serial numbers.

On the way back to the Seabee compound Leslie, Turner, and I debated how much our presence had improved

the class of people at China Beach, while several inebriated marines sitting beside us on the trunk bench shook their heads and wondered if the leadership of our platoon had lost its collective mind. By the time we hiked back to the ARVN, night was descending and the heat and exertion from the march had soaked the alcohol from our systems.

I called Lieutenant Doan over and tried to make him understand that we would post watches on the wall as usual that night but that my platoon had gotten a bad case of food poisoning at China Beach and that I would not be sending a squad on the nightly patrol. It was the first and only time during our stay that I did not provide a squad for the nightly patrol, but I saw no compelling reason to saddle up my men after such a pleasant day, and the squad whose turn it was to go was grateful. I left Doan protesting vehemently and waving a finger in my direction as I turned in for the evening, and the thought occurred to me that all Vietnamese, friend and foe, looked pretty much alike.

The next morning the amtracs resupplied us and also brought two new troops, who were casualty replacements. I was shocked at how fresh and green they appeared, but when I mentioned it to Sergeant Leslie as I turned them over for squad assignment, he smiled and pointed out that I had been in Viemam for only two months myself. I considered myself a seasoned veteran and felt as if I had aged at least ten years. At that moment I understood for the first time the legend appearing in Magic Marker on some helmets I had seen early in my tour: "A day in the Nam is an eternity." I wondered how many eternities I could survive before the pressures of command finally broke me. We were going back to the real war before long, back to the Riviera and the maimings, and although the dread was unarticulated, to a man we all feared it. The new men were, of course, primed with gross exaggerations about the viciousness of the enemy and the equally exaggerated bravery of our unit. Nevertheless, I sensed a kernel of truth in the description of our enemy and noticed that despite the humor accompanying these tales, the training our new troops received was rendered with deadly seriousness.

Lieutenant Doan tried unsuccessfully to postpone our

departure since he realized that my men were far more dis-ciphned than his own. A few days before we were scheduled to rotate back to our regular command, the ARVNs left us for a daylong operation with a Vietnamese battalion. When the company returned well after dark, there were several men missing from its ranks and several others who wore fresh bandages. Doan's men were sullen and uncommunicative, and it was some time before I was able to understand that they had gotten the worst of a scrap with an NVA unit whose strength ARVN intelligence had grossly underestimated. Two men had been killed, and several others were wounded badly enough to require hospitalization.

Lieutenant Doan was preoccupied with his own losses, and when I asked for the patrol routes for that evening, he lashed out at me. He had been given no patrol orders for the evening, he explained heatedly. His troops had just been defeated in battle through no fault of his own, and in any event, if orders were forthcoming, he would disobey them because it was the eve of a Vietnamese religious holiday. I could understand his feelings but thought it foolish to allow the enemy an opportunity to approach our position without being challenged, and I volunteered to make up my own patrol routes and send out a squad unaccompanied by any of his men.

When I pointed out to him that we owed him a patrol because of the China Beach fiasco, he was able to swallow his pride and agree to my proposition. I found it paradoxical that a man who always needed an excuse to save face with his own men was willing to humiliate them by administering public beatings, but I kept my thoughts to myself since I had gotten my way. My men were delighted to be able to patrol without Doan's men, whom they considered useless at best and a danger to their own safety at worst. The ARVNs often smoked cigarettes and talked while on patrol. On one occasion my men had refused to accompany them until a Vietnamese soldier agreed to leave his transistor radio behind.

Turner theorized that the South Vietnamese soldiers had an agreement with their North Vietnamese counterparts whereby the ARVNs would make enough noise while on

patrol that the enemy could locate and then purposely avoid them. He was never able to prove his preposterous theory, but it seemed a plausible explanation for the undisciplined behavior of Doan's company and for the fact that we had not had a single instance of enemy contact in all our nightly patrols.

Nevertheless, I was apprehensive about the nightly patrol both because it was going to be undermanned and because we had noticed an unusual and to me alarming amount of civilian activity in the rice paddies around the compound while the ARVNs had been out on their assignment. I decided to break the normal rotation and send Cowboy and his men since he was my most experienced squad leader, and although he complained about having to patrol two nights out of three, he understood my decision and was grateful for the absence of the ARVNs.

As he and his men checked their weapons before filing out of the compound, I put my hand on his shoulder and told him I had purposely shortened the patrol routes so that he would not have far to go if he ran into trouble. Cowboy responded with his usual bravado, but I could see the concern in his face as I gave him last-minute instructions to call in at the first sign of anything out of the ordinary. Leslie and I spelled each other on Watson's radio as Cowboy called in his checkp)oints. After a couple of hours the patrol seemed to be proceeding smoothly, and I became less anxious. I decided to sleep for a while and instructed Sergeant Leslie to wake me when Cowboy radioed that he was coming back in through the wire.

About two in the morning Leslie shook me awake and, with a relieved expression on his face, informed me that Cowboy was a hundred meters outside the compound and had just requested permission to enter. Just as Leslie told me that he had given the go-ahead and had alerted the sentries on the wall, we were frozen in mid-conversation by the chattering of automatic-weapons fire. There were several long bursts, followed by some sporadic single shots, and as Leslie and I grabbed our rifles and moved toward the compound entrance, an excited and out-of-breath Cowboy ran through the opening and nearly bowled me over.

He was trembling and spoke wildly about sappers in the barbed wire. When I shook him quiet to ask if all his men were accounted for, he seemed not to understand me, but Leslie did a quick head count of the rest of the unit, all of whom by now had gotten in and were as shocked as Cowboy. I got on Watson's radio and called for an artillery mission of illumination rounds while Cowboy regained control and explained what had happened. In the meantime, Leslie had gotten the platoon on full alert, and all the men were scrambling to get to their positions in the wail. I cursed the artillery for taking so long as a terrified Lieutenant Doan, whom I had forgotten about completely, followed suit and began organizing his company.

Cowboy explained that the patrol had been a piece of cake up until the point where he had gotten permission from Sergeant Leslie to reenter the compound. As they approached the wire, they saw several almost naked bodies lying motionless in the concertina and assumed that the sentries had spotted and killed a squad of sappers (who would have removed their clothes to avoid being caught in the wire) trying to probe our lines. When Cowboy reached down to pick up the AK-47 rifle of the sapper closest to the entrance, the man jumped to his feet, and the marine behind Cowboy reflexively shot the rising figure in the chest and stomach. Cowboy lifted the red-hot barrel of the enemy soldier's rifle over his head as the dying man squeezed off a full clip of ammunition. As if for corroboration. Cowboy now showed me his burned hand.

At that point, he continued, all hell had broken loose as the other sappers got up and began trying to escape. Cowboy's squad exchanged fire with the fleeing men; but in the dark it was difficult to tell what was real and what was shadow, and he quickly broke contact and tried to get inside. The same survival instinct had motivated the rest of his squad, and within a minute or two they all were charging pell-mell through the concertina to the safety of the compound.

As he completed his story, an illumination round burst overhead, and I grabbed two men and headed through the wire to see for myself what was happening. I expected to

find the enemy soldier lying dead or badly wounded in the wire where he had been felled, and not knowing what to expect beyond one dead or dying man, I had switched my rifle to fully automatic and kept my finger on the trigger. While I searched the wire for the sapper, more illumination rounds burst overhead, and the suddenly bright landscape took on an eerie surreal glow of shifting shadows and dark spots. The ground was littered with signs of an enemy presence. I almost tripped over a satchel charge and an unexploded bangalore torpedo that was going to be used to blow a path through the wire, but there was no enemy soldier. Four or five blood trails led from the wire toward the outer edge of the area illuminated by the artillery rounds, and I followed the spotty red markings of one while the light from the descending rounds flickered and faded. At the end of the trail a soldier, naked except for faded shorts, lay on his side with an AK-47 rifle nearby. He appeared to move as I worked my way toward him, but the movement could have been an illusion caused by the shadows. I emptied a magazine from my rifle into his prostrate body from about ten feet away and watched his body jerk as the rounds impacted. I reloaded and watched for several minutes; but there was no further movement, and as the light from the fire mission ended, the two marines with me gathered at my side and reported that there were no more bodies where the other blood trails disappeared into the bush.

We cautiously approached the dead sapper, who had bullet holes in his chest, stomach, and one forearm, and I passed his rifle to the man behind me and prodded him with my foot to make certain he was dead. The other marine and I then grabbed him by his legs to pull him back toward the compound. As we did our ghoulish work, his foot separated from his leg where another bullet had entered his body and came off" in my hand. I got a grip farther up on his leg, and after several more minutes we succeeded in getting him through the wire, something he had been unable to do for himself while alive, and to the entrance of the compound.

We left our grisly trophy at the entrance and reentered the compound, where a furious Sergeant Leslie berated me for recklessly having gone outside the wire. Captain Woods

was on Watson's radio, and I tried to explain to him what had happened while listening to Leslie's tirade with my other ear. Lieutenant Doan in the meantime strutted about the compound as if he and his men had by themselves repulsed a full-scale enemy attack, and I finally cut him off without any pretense of civility. I lit a cigarette and for the first time noticed blood on my hands and uniform from the dead sapper. As I inhaled deeply, it occurred to me that I would never know if I had just killed another human being. There was no pride in the thought since he was lying helpless when I had found him, but I felt no remorse either. I acknowledged to Leslie that I had acted rashly in leaving the compound and further that I had violated a canon of small-unit leadership by not staying with the main body of my command, which was potentially under attack, but there was no point in lingering over the issue. Sleep, of course, was out of the question, and we talked until dawn about the activities of the night.

Lieutenant Doan was certain that the sappers' attack had been meant as a distraction and that once they had penetrated our position, a far larger unit was to have swept over the wall on the opposite side of the compound ahd chewed us to pieces. His explanation was both frightening and unprovable, and I acknowledged it tersely. I did know for certain that if I had not scheduled my own patrol that evening, the sapper, once inside our position, would have tossed his satchel charge into the command post where Doan and I lay sleeping and it would have required a strainer to separate our mangled body parts. I made a conscious effort to steady my hands as I realized how close I had again come to being killed, and I understood exactly how Cowboy felt after his brush with death.

When the sun came up. Cowboy and I ventured outside to survey the skirmish site. The dead soldier was quite large and heavily muscled by Vietnamese standards, and we surmised that he must have been part of an elite unit with special physical requirements. As we admired his physique, Cowboy told me that he would not mind dying almost naked but that he would prefer to be engaged in a different sort of activity, and I was glad to see that he had regained

enough composure to attempt levity. The landscape around the perimeter of the compound was littered with paraphernalia that the sappers had left behind as they fled, including several articles of clothing, a manual of some sort written in Vietnamese, and a North Vietnamese belt and buckle, which I picked up as a souvenir. We gathered up the items, including the torpedo and the satchel charge, and carried them back inside, and I gave the clothing and the belt to Cowboy's squad. To judge from the blood trails, his men had seriously wounded several of the escaping sappers, and I felt they deserved the trophies. I knew that we would be required to turn over the AK-47, the most desirable trophy, to intelligence and that it would wind up in the den of some rear-echelon officer who had never experienced the smell of death; but that was just the way the system worked, and there was no point in trying to buck it.

Sometime later that day, as the dead soldier began to stiffen and bloat, someone placed a cigarette in his mouth and an empty beer can in his hand. We left him in that state until the next day, when Lieutenant Doan came to me to complain that some of his soldiers were upset at our lack of respect for a dead Vietnamese, be he friend or foe. I had Leslie dispatch a burial party. Several days later I learned that my gravediggers had decapitated the body before burying it and had placed the head on a stake at tiie junction of two heavily traveled Vietnamese roads. I was angry that my instructions had not been followed, but I had none of the outrage over the desecration of the corpse I had experienced on first arriving in Vietnam, when one of my new charges had tried to urinate on a dead soldier. I justified the difference in my reactions on the grounds that this particular soldier had actually tried to kill me, but I knew inwardly that ice was forming in my heart. By week's end we had a firm date from Captain Woods for our return to our regular TAOR, and I knew that at least in the Riviera I would be too busy to take time to brood about my moral state.

The day that we traveled back to Camp 413, the am-tracs arrived at midmoming with our replacement platoon, and its lieutenant and I exchanged intelligence about the commands we were each vacating. I advised him not to be-

come complacent in light of what had happened to us and to rely on Lieutenant Doan as little as possible. He in turn told me that the VC had stepped up its level of activity in the Riviera, if such was possible, and that booby traps and snipings had become an almost daily encounter whenever a platoon ventured into the area. His platoon had suffered several casualties in the last few days alone. He strongly recommended that we use our probe sticks even in terrain that appeared safe. He also told me that the VC had succeeded in partially blowing up the Tu Cau bridge, which was now impassable for vehicular traffic.

As we traveled the dusty roads through Nui Kim Son and on toward Camp 413, I tried to sort out the information I had just received. The two weeks prior to our posting to the ARVNs had been a living hell, and it now appeared that we were headed back to more of the same. I knew that it was going to require extraordinary leadership to keep my men from becoming completely demoralized.

In anticipation of our return, my junior corpsman had already gone to regimental medical and told the doctors there that he could not take the pressure anymore and wanted to be removed from the bush. I was furious when his request was honored, but I was unable to reverse the decision since he was technically not in my command. Furthermore, we had no use for a man who had acknowledged cowardice, and I consoled myself with the thought that if the corpsman had remained, he probably would have cost us lives in the long run. His example, however, I knew well, could become contagious within my conmiand.

During the last week we were with the ARVNs, one marine had come to me and complained of a mysterious foot ailment that he claimed made patrolling impossible, and there had been other isolated instances of malingering by a few of the men. I had Doc Ellis check out the complaining marine's feet, and when he informed me that our man was faking it, I offered the marine a choice. He could forgo the daily trip into the Seabee compound for hot chow and I would set up a night listening post outside our perimeter that he could man alone while his feet healed, or he could continue to patrol with his squad and I would forget

the matter. After he had considered his options, he chose the latter course. The harshness of my response seemed to discourage further malingering.

Captain Woods confirmed the reports of increased enemy intensity when he briefed Sergeant Leslie and me that evening. He welcomed us back to the war, but the picture he painted was so bleak that Leslie and I could only shake our heads in dismay. There were rumors of a big shake-up in the battalion, including a possible change of command by the battalion commanding officer. In the meantime, we were to continue as before. Woods gave me my assignment for the next day, and I could only nod grimly at the prospect of leading my platoon once more through the big paddy of the Riviera. Almost by way of apology, he told me that one of the options being considered involved permanently moving a company into the area of the leper colony so that the passage problem could be minimized, but that, too, was for later.

As the skipper left to return to his own hooch, and I dispatched Leslie to pass the word to the men, he paused at the door to tell us that Lieutenant Zier had mended sufficiently that he would be returning to the company in a couple of weeks. I was delighted that my old stablemate was on the mend, but his recovery was the only bright spot in an otherwise dismal briefing.

For our first venture back into the Riviera, Captain Woods had decided on a company-size operation of one day's duration. My platoon and I were thrilled since the presence of two additional platoons, besides decreasing our chances of being overrun, would discourage snipers and small-scale ambushes. We felt right at home, if a bit apprehensive, as we waded across the big rice paddy before dawn, and as usual at that dark hour we crossed without incident. The skipper's plan was to move quickly to the coast, travel north until we reached the little fishing village, and then come back inland and complete the mission by retracing the route we had used earlier along the hilly area farthest from the sea. The operation was, in effect, a show of force during which we would cover a lot of ground and reorient ourselves to the area.

We stopped for a couple of hours in the woods adjacent to the leper colony, had a meal, and waited out the hottest part of the day, but the skipper, even during the break, seemed anxious to continue the march. Toward late afternoon, after we had crossed over to the hills and almost completed the last leg of the operation, I began to think that the earlier briefings I had gotten were in error since we had not seen one sign of enemy activity during the entire day. It was almost as if the VC were watching us but allowing us to move freely, and most of my men and I could not help feeling that when we returned as a smaller force, there would be hell to pay.

As we crossed through the last hedgerow before beginning our ascent into the big paddy, I heard a loud pop and thought that Vietcong snipers were finally making their presence known. The first pop was quickly followed by two more and the familiar cry of "Corpsman, up!" As I retraced my steps to see what had happened, I could see a fallen marine on the opposite side of the hedgerow. Approaching him, I realized with a sickening feeling that it was Sergeant Leslie, but though he was down, he did not appear to be seriously wounded. By now the entire company had backed up behind us, and the skipper made his way forward to Leslie's position just as I reached him from the opposite side.

Leslie explained to us that he had detonated a small booby trap in crossing through the hedgerow, and he turned sheepishly on his side to show us the hole in his pants where a shrapnel fragment had entered his buttock. Two other marines had also detonated booby traps, but the loads were weak and poorly placed, and they had escaped injury. Ellis by now had begun applying a battle dressing to Sergeant Leslie's damaged butt, and as the skipper and I prepared to call in a medevac, Leslie insisted that he could make it on his own back through the paddy and into camp. We acquiesced after Ellis assured us that a short walk would cause no further damage, and within minutes the company was up and moving again. Sergeant Leslie limped badly all the way in, and as soon as I had seen to it that my men were

safely inside the wire, I had Doc Ellis take him to the battalion aid station.

An hour later the two of them appeared at my hooch with the worst of all possible news. My platoon sergeant was to pick up his gear and report back to the battalion aid station for medical evacuation. By now his leg had completely stiffened and Ellis had to support him as he attempted to walk. Despite the seriousness of the wound and the diagnosis he had been given of a four- to six-week recovery, he felt even worse that he was abandoning me and the platoon. I assured him that there was no other option, clapped him on the back with all the firmness I could muster, and jokingly reminded him to remember his buddies while he was drinking cold beer in the rear. As he hobbled off to pack his things, I felt that I had lost a brother. I was suddenly all alone, and though I knew he would return, the weight of command, already heavy, became crushing. I smashed my fist into the side of Zier's footlocker and swore at the emptiness around me until the pain subsided.

With Leslie incapacitated, I moved Corporal Turner to acting platoon sergeant, a position he was reluctant to assume, although he was clearly the only choice. Turner had almost as much time in the bush as Sergeant Leslie but lacked the training and the rank to take over the higher billet. He did, however, have obvious leadership potential and an abundance of courage, which I had come to realize were far more valuable than any lessons he could have learned in NCO school. When I summoned him to my hooch to advise him of his new status, I could tell that he was questioning his own ability to handle the job, and I ended his protestations by asking him if there was any other man in the platoon from whom he was prepared to take orders. With that out of the way I offered him a beer; but he was not yet ready to enter the familial sort of relationship that Sergeant Leslie and I had enjoyed, and he declined my offer. It was one thing, I knew, to acquiesce to a proposition that he could not refuse. It was something else for a black corporal to sit down and drink beer with a white lieutenant whose perspective up until now had been light-years away from his own.

Turner and I were to become much closer after we had been shot at a few more times; but for now he was keeping his distance, and I respected him for it. When he left my hooch to tell his buddies that he could no longer be one of them, I sympathized with his plight, but I knew that I had made the right decision for all of us. Fortunately we had come back into the platoon rotation at a point where Corporal Turner and I got a shakedown patrol in an area other than the Riviera, and I watched him closely for the two days we were out as he attempted to get used to his new role. I heard rumors that one of the black marines had accused Turner of selling out to whitey, but I didn't bother to investigate further since I knew that my new platoon sergeant would have his own way of putting an end to that kind of talk. It also seemed to have little effect on the way Turner took over his new responsibilities. As we reentered the compound after being out for two days, I jokingly told him that if he kept up the good work he was destined to wind up being a lifer in the white man's corps.

In early October, as I was beginning my third month as commander of the third platoon, we returned to the Riviera for a two-day, one-night patrol. Barton, the young lance corporal who had saved my life earlier, had been acting strangely for several weeks. His bizarre behavior continued as we made our way into the area through the hamlet of Viem Dong at the southernmost edge of our TAOR. I knew that Barton had been trying to get reassigned out of the bush, and his comrades thought that the incident during which he had saved my life had so unnerved him that he Jiad lost his usefulness as a marine. The explanation was plausible; but I owed him, and I had been trying especially hard to restore his self-confidence and his self-respect. Nevertheless, as we began our dreaded return to the Riviera, he complained of headaches and cold chills. Turner and the others thought that he was continuing his sandbagging act. Ellis could find nothing wrong with him, and after we had cleared Viem Dong, I pulled him over to the side of the trail

and dressed him down for being a discredit to the unit. He stopped complaining for the remainder of the day, and by the time the sun was going down I was in an upbeat mood both because my talk with Barton had apparently worked out and because we had not met any enemy resistance.

That night we set our base camp up on a high bluff overlooking Viem Dong, and by the time darkness had fallen we were dug in and ready to send out squad patrols. Viem Dong was bad news, but we held the high ground above it and I was half hoping that the Vietcong who controlled the ville would try to provoke an altercation. My two-month "eternity" and sense of the enemy left me feeling that an altercation was inevitable, and I preferred its onset where the terrain was favorable.

Around midnight, when I was readying a night patrol for a quick loop around the outskirts of the village below us. Barton began to moan softly from his fighting hole. At first the sound was barely audible, but as the night wore on, it became loud enough to give away our position. Once again Ellis could find no reason for his behavior, but by now Barton was not responding to us and seemed to be having convulsions. I canceled the squad patrol and put the platoon on full alert since it seemed that every Vietcong in the area would by now be homing in on Barton's outbursts. I also radioed Captain Woods, who instructed us to try to keep Barton quiet until daybreak. The men were ready to kill him for endangering their lives. Finally Corporal Turner and I laid him out in the bottom of his fighting hole and covered his mouth with a towel each time he began his routine. Barton was semi-lucid between convulsions, but the attacks were coming closer together and were increasing in strength.

By dawn we all were exhausted. I had the platoon prepare a landing zone in the nearest flatland and called in a routine medevac. I half carried and half dragged Barton to the zone and dropped him in the shade of a small tree as the sun worked its way up in the sky. Spittle dripped from his chin, and we both were covered with dirt from wrestling in the fighting hole all night; but at least he was in place to be boarded when the chopper arrived. After several hours and several more convulsions we changed the medevac to a tac-

tical emergency, and the bird finally arrived. Medevac procedure necessitated sending another marine with our casualty since he was in no condition to explain his peculiar symptoms, and I selected a man from Barton's squad who was familiar with his situation. I had been holding Barton in my arms for much of the morning, and as the chopper set down, he seemed to stiffen in my arms and then relax. He had smiled up at me when I told him that his time in the bush was over. I wiped the saliva from his face in a last-minute gesture as we piled his body onto the chopper. As it lifted off, I was overcome with relief and the platoon was elated to be done with a man who had almost doomed us. I did not know until we got back to Camp 413 later that night that George Barton had died in my arms. Until the very end I thought that he was faking a medical condition to get out of the bush, and I shall carry to my own grave the guilt from the way I misread him in his last hours. With Barton gone and our patrol a full four or five hours behind schedule, I got permission from Captain Woods to alter the route in a way that would permit us to hit only one or two of our checkpoints and still make it back before dark. It was by now almost noon, and I decided to advance the platoon northward along a dirt road that ran between the woods abutting the beach area and the leper colony. On earlier patrols we had always used the cover of the woods, but we could make better time along the road. Since the enemy already knew where we were, I was gambling on speed and the fact that we had never used the road to neutralize the enemy's strategic advantage. The heat of the midday sun and the increased pace made for a demanding march, but the men were motivated by a desire to reach camp before dark and did not complain.

By the time we had completed the northern leg of the patrol, we all were out of breath and our uniforms were soaked with sweat, but we had met no resistance and had made up valuable time. Watson called in our first checkpoint, and I gave the men a fifteen-minute break, after which we moved inland across the open area toward the spine of hills we needed to traverse in the opposite direction. I had always felt naked in crossing this open area, and

as we approached the first hill, I began to breathe more easily. The point man had gotten thirty meters in front of me by the time we reached the foot of the hill, and I knew that once we had reached the crest, we would be back in control.

As I called to him to slow his pace and allow the rest of us, who were strung out behind him, to close the gap, an automatic weapon opened fire from the top of the hill. The point man dropped immediately, as we all did, but I could see, as the enemy fire raked the sandy area between him and me, that he had taken a round in the leg. He lay there exposed and vulnerable as the fusillade tattooed the earth around us, and in the confusion I realized clearly that he was going to die if I could not alter the pattern of fire. I pulled myself to my feet and headed toward him; but the enemy gunner shifted his fire to meet my charge, and I dived behind a rotting log only ten or fifteen meters from where I had begun and then abandoned my only John Wayne-style feat of the war.

My movement had distracted the Vietcong soldier on the top of the hill from the wounded point man, and he poured round after round into the base of the log shielding my body. As I attempted to burrow into the sand behind the log, I looked down and saw a colony of red ants going about their business as if nothing were happening. I was fascinated by the little creatures only inches from my nose and knew that I must be losing my equilibrium to be thinking about ants while the terrain around me was being pockmarked with lead. I forced myself to refocus on the threat on the hill, and by now the marines behind me were returning fire.

Within minutes it was over, and the enemy gunner used the reverse slope of the hill to make his getaway while one of my fire teams scrambled up the near side. When we had secured the hill, I hurried over to the point and watched helplessly as Doc Ellis administered an injection of morphine and Watson called up the second hehcopter medevac of the day. Our casualty had actually taken a round in the heel that had entered through the back of his boot. Ellis assured me that the wound was not life-threatening and that he would not lose the leg, but he could not walk and was

in excruciating pain. I shared a cigarette with the wounded marine and made small talk while the narcotic worked its way into his system. Ellis filled out a medevac tag and tied it over his knee so that the attending doctor would be aware of the morphine injection. This time the chopper arrived within minutes of the time we had summoned it, and I helped load our casualty aboard in what was by now becoming a gruesomely routine maneuver.

After they had lifted off, Turner and I got the men back into formation, and we double-timed down the hilly route to the big paddy. The platoon was sullen as the darkening shadows lengthened around us, and in a funk of my own I made no effort to revive their flagging spirits. By the time we reached the paddy it was dark, and I signaled the patrol to follow me across without any pause. The darkness at least meant that the snipers had retired for the evening, and we waded abjectly across in silence. As always, I waited at the entrance to Camp 413 to check the men's weapons, but while there was relief in our return to a safe haven, there was no joy.

Back at my hooch I sank wearily onto my bunk without removing my boots or water-soaked utilities, and within seconds I was asleep. After what seemed like hours but was probably only twenty minutes, I was shaken awake by Captain Woods, who had dropped in to tell me of Barton's death. No one knew yet what had killed him, but Woods was careful to tell me that I was not responsible. At first I could not believe that he had actually died, but as my disbelief gave way to acceptance, I knew that Captain Woods's kind words would in the long run be irrelevant to the way I came to terms with the death of a man who had saved my life. I knew only that I had not been there when Barton ^needed me most, and I loathed myself almost as much as I loathed the war and the Marine Corps that were forcing me to serve in an increasingly repugnant role. We never did find out the cause of Barton's death.

Woods snapped me from my reverie by telling me that we all had had enough of this nickel-and-dime war of attrition in the Riviera and that he was planning an operation within the next several days. That would give me no solace

tonight but would at least allow the score to be evened the next time we were the guests of Victor Charles. He patted me on the back and left me to my misery. I decided to get some chow and a six-pack of beer before writing Toddy a long letter. I badly needed to purge my soul, and for a moment I thought how comforting it would be to wallow in self-pity for a few pages. Instead I wrote a brief note telling Toddy I was fine, and I settled for part of the six-pack and an unappetizing meat sandwich that I scrounged from the mess hall. As I finished the letter and two of the cans of beer and setded down for a few hours of sleep, it occurred to me that I could not remember the color of my wife's eyes. I hoped that she would not see in mine what I had seen in the eyes of other battle-scarred veterans when next we met.

True to his word. Captain Woods devised an ambitious operation as a way to settle the score in the Riviera. He knew that it would be unacceptable from a political standpoint simply to level Viem Dong, the hamlet at the edge of the Riviera, a known Vietcong stronghold, from which we had been taking increasing amounts of hostile fire, but he also knew that our South Korean allies were free to operate without the political constraints that figured so heavily in all our planning. He therefore seized on the idea of a joint operation in which our company would be lifted at first light into the Riviera. We would then form a cordon around Viem Dong, and a South Korean company would sweep through the village and drive the unsuspecting enemy into our field of fire. Whatever else the Koreans did in the village was their own business, but with their reputation for brutality, we all knew that the village would be loath to support the Vietcong so openly in the future.

As Woods outlined the plan, in effect a cordon and search operation, for his platoon leaders and platoon sergeants a few days after our earlier conversation, I could see several of the men nod their heads and murmur approvingly. We could not be certain of engaging any of our enemies, of course, but our own risk was minimal. If our timing was right, the operation could turn out to be a turkey shoot. Beyond that we would be on the offensive for a change, and

the morale boost to the troops would be of inestimable value. As I congratulated the skipper on his concept after our briefing and assured him that my men would do their part in its execution, I realized that my commander was savvy enough to use whatever resources were at hand.

The idea of a cordon and search was a fairly simple textbook maneuver with which any company commander would be familiar, but the expedient of using the Koreans to do our dirty work was the selling point of the operation that I knew convinced higher command to give Woods the green light. If we got our kills, we could take full credit, and if the ROKs became overzealous, we could plead our lack of control over an allied force. At any rate, the effect on Viem Dong was going to be devastating, and I felt ready for revenge as I hurried back to brief my squad leaders on the forthcoming activities.

The night before the operation was to take place the rain came down in great gusting sheets, and my men looked forward to remaining in their hooches and preparing for the next day. Instead we were given orders to commence a patrol so tiiat our adversaries would not become suspicious because of our lack of activity. The men were not happy at the idea of trudging out to a meaningless ambush site, sitting in the rain for half an hour, and then returning to our starting point solely to satisfy the whim of some safe and dry intelligence expert, but as usual we grudgingly did as we were told. When we returned an hour and a half later, we were as wet as if we had sat all night in the squall outside, and instead of having a chance to get dried out, we were now going to march for another hour to the nearby army camp from which the operation would begin the next morning.

As we filed out of camp for the second time in the same evening, the men were grumbling loudly, and only the thought of the next day's payoff kept their complaints in bounds. We were cold and exhausted as we made our way through the wire into the base camp, and I could tell by the number of trip flares that the platoon set off (safely, since the other unit knew we were arriving) in clearing the wire that they were past the point of caring. Once inside, we were escorted to the helicopter pad from which we were to

lift off in several hours. We settled down around its perimeter and huddled inside our ponchos as the rain pelted our helmets and hunched shoulders. The everyday tribulations of an infantryman were at best an ordeal, I recalled from some Basic School graffiti, and Turner and I shook our heads knowingly and tried to keep our cigarettes going in the rain. After I had made certain that my platoon was ready for the morning and that the squads understood the order of embarkation and their assignments once we deplaned, I slipped off for a last-minute briefing in the command center where the skipper had set up temporary shop.

It was dry inside the sandbagged bunker, and though not a coffee drinker, I gladly accepted a steaming mug and used its warmth to dry my chapped hands. We had gone over our operational plan in detail previously, and there were no last-minute changes; but the lieutenants listened attentively as C^tain Woods retraced his five-paragraph order. Though it was not discussed, we were keenly aware that our men were outside in the rain while we had the luxury of hot coffee and a dry bunker, and our attentiveness was in part a reaction to the guilt we felt over our differing circumstances. Beyond that, however, the air was charged with the electricity common to the ritual of preparation for a kill, and the adrenaline pumping in our veins masked our weariness.

Somewhere in the background a radio cackled and sputtered. A World Series game was in progress. Mickey Lolich was on the mound for the Detroit Tigers, who were in the process of taking a seven-game series from the St. Louis Cardinals, in the culmination of a season that would assure baseball immortality for a young right-hander named Denny McLain, with his thirty-one games. Our minds, however, were on a different sort of contest.

When Woods finished his briefing and answered what few questions there were, we reluctantly made our way back to the helicopter pad to wait for the first signs of dawn. The rain had stopped by then, and most of the men were dozing fitfully and using their packs or helmets for pillows. An hour before liftoff I had Turner wake my sleeping marines, and we ate our C rations. By the time we had finished the

mindless routine of heating, eating, and policing, the word came down that the choppers were on their way, and I smoked one last cigarette before assembling the men by squads in their staging area.

As soon as our chopper alighted, the men raced to its yawning tailgate and piled aboard. I made certain we all were accounted for before taking a seat beside the door gunner and giving the crew chief the thumbs-up. As we lifted off, I felt the familiar pull in the pit of my stomach caused by our rapid ascent, and when we leveled off, I relaxed my hold on the side of the craft and watched the blur of foliage passing just beneath us. The sky was streaked with the red of the rising sun, and I realized, as I watched its reflection on the glassy surface of the South China Sea, that at least for today the rain was finished. The pilot nosed down in a clearing between the beach and Viem Dong after only a few minutes aloft, and we scrambled down the gangway and fanned out to take up our positions as he reversed his direction and banked up into the sky.

I concentrated as best I could on making certain that the two squads to my left were on line and in position to hook up with the platoon adjacent to them, but in the confusion and noise from the other helicopter around us, control was almost impossible. The skipper's position was to be atop the high bluff to our right, overlooking Viem Dong, where we had camped the night before Barton died. After I had gotten my men on line, my next assignment was to connect with his location. Watson followed closely in my tracks with the radio, but the two nearest men to us were at least twenty meters away on either side and for all intents and purposes out of hearing range. As we maneuvered, I scanned the area to my immediate front, which I had been neglecting in my effort to maintain platoon integrity.

Suddenly I saw a squad of green-uniformed North Vietnamese soldiers begin running out of the village and in my direction. They had apparently panicked when the helicopters began landing and were now probing for a way out of the noose we were drawing around them. As they advanced toward me, I was unable to get the attention of the marines near me, and it dawned on me, to my horror, that

I was the only obstacle between them and freedom. I raised my rifle to my shoulder and attempted to draw a bead on the lead soldier; but my first bullet was off the mark, and when I pulled the trigger the second time, my rifle jammed. By now the North Vietnamese soldiers had spotted me, and several of them fired wildly in my direction until they abruptly altered their advance and veered off to my left. Standing alone with a malfunctioning weapon and seven enemy soldiers bearing down on me, I was at once seized by a fear that was palpable and all-encompassing. My throat became as dry as parchment, and beads of perspiration popped out on my forehead before coursing down my face. I turned abruptly, with Watson in tow, and ran as fast as I could toward the safety of the bluffs above Viem Dong, where the company headquarters party was to be located.

A narrow trail led up the hill to the headquarters group, and as I approached, it never occurred to me that the thirty meters between my course and the conmianders' position had not been secured. I knew only that the firepower advantage of the NVA squad I had just encountered would be neutralized if I could reach the men milling at the crest of the hill. With only a few meters left to cover in my flight, a diunderous boom suddenly rent the air, and I was propelled upward with the acrid smell of cordite in my nostrils.

When I landed a few feet up the trail from the booby-trapped howitzer round that I had detonated, I felt as if I had been airborne forever. Colors and sound became muted, and although there was now a beehive of activity around me, all movement seemed to me to be in slow motion. I thought initially that the loss of my glasses in the explosion accounted for my blurred vision, and I had no idea that the pink mist that engulfed me had been caused by the vaporization of most of my right and left legs. As shock began to numb my body, I could see through a haze of pain that my right thumb and little finger were missing, as was most of my left hand, and I could smell the charred flesh, which extended from my right wrist upward to the elbow. I knew that I had finished serving my time in the hell of Vietnam.

As I drifted in and out of consciousness, I felt elated at the prospect of relinquishing my command and going home

to my wife and unbom child. I did not understand why Watson, who was the first man to reach me, kept screaming, "Pray, Lieutenant, for God's sake, pray." I could not see the jagged shards of flesh and bone that had only moments before been my legs, and I did not realize until much later that I had been forever set apart from the rest of humanity.

For the next hour a frantic group of marines awaited the medevac chopper that was my only hope of deliverance and worked at keeping me alive. Doc Ellis knelt beside my broken body and with his thumbs kept my life from pouring out into the sand, until a tourniquet fashioned from a web belt was tied around my left stump and a towel was pressed tightly into the hole where my right thigh had joined my torso. My watch and rifle were destroyed by the blast, and my flak jacket was in tatters; but I did manage to mm my undamaged maps and command of the platoon over to Corporal Turner during one of my lucid intervals. I also gave explicit orders to all the marines and corpsmen hovering around me that my wife was not to be told of my injuries until after the baby was bom. There was, of course, no possibility of compliance with my command, but the marines ministering to me assured me that my wishes would be honored.

Because we were on a company-size operation, there were six corpsmen in the immediate area around Viem Dong, and each of them carried a supply of blood expanders, which were designed to stabilize blood pressure until whole blood could be administered. As word spread of my injuries, each of the company's corpsmen passed his expanders to Doc Ellis, who used up iie last of them while my men slapped at my face, tried to get me to drink water, and held cigarettes to my lips in an attempt to keep me . awake. When the chopper finally arrived, I was placed on a stretcher and gently carried to its entrance, where a hel-meted crew chief and medevac surgeon helped me aboard. Someone had located my left boot which still contained its bloody foot and that, too, was placed on the stretcher with me.

As the chopper began its race toward the triage of the naval support hospital in Da Nang, I was only moments

from death, but I remember thinking clearly before losing consciousness that I was going to make it. I never again saw the third platoon of Golf Company, a remarkable group of young men with whom I had had the most intense male relationships of my life, and I felt guilty for years that I had abandoned them before our work was finished. I was to feel even worse that I was glad to be leaving them and that, in my mind, I had spent my last healthy moments in Vietnam running from the enemy. I came to feel that I had failed to prove myself worthy of my father's name, and broken in spirit as well as body, I was going to have to run a different gauntlet.

In the navel support hospital triage in Da Nang, located just down the road from the Seabee compound where I had feasted on frozen strawberries and ice cream only a few days earlier, the remainder of my clothes were cut away, massive transfusions were started directly into my jugular vein, and my severed foot was discarded. On arrival, my blood pressure had failed to register, but once it was restored and I was stabilized, I was wheeled into the operating room, where my left stump was debrided and left open, and the femoral artery, which was all that remained of my right leg, was clamped shut. The procedure was fairly simple because there was so little left to work with. I remember thinking, before I succumbed to the anesthesia, how clean and shiny the tiles in the operating room appeared, how cold the room was, and how worried the eyes all seemed above the green masks of the doctors and nurses who labored over me.

When I regained consciousness, I was in a clean bed with white sheets. An assortment of tubes carried liquids to and from my body, and when I reached up to remove the annoying one affixed to my nose, I found that I could not do so because both my hands were wrapped in bandages the size of boxing gloves. I understood the reason for my bandaged hands because I had seen my right hand with its missing thumb and little finger earlier, and I also knew that my left hand now retained only a thumb and half a forefinger. The word prehensile no longer applied to me. I did not yet know or knew only vaguely that I had lost my right leg at

the torso and that only a six-inch stump remained of my left thigh. In addition to the damage to my extremities, I had lost massive portions of both buttocks, my scrotum had been split, I had sustained a dislocated shoulder and a ruptured eardrum, and smaller wounds from shell fragments peppered the remainder of my body. Only my face had been spared. It remarkably contained only one small blue line across my nose from a powder bum.

Back in the United States, where the attention of most Americans was occupied with the outcome of the World Series, the assistant commandant of the Marine Corps, General Lewis Walt, who had been one of my father's company commanders in World War II, called Saluda, Virginia, with the news of my wounding and followed up his conversation by coming down from Washington. A young marine officer was dispatched to Fort Belvoir to break the news to my wife. There was no one home at the Todd quarters when he arrived, but he alarmed neighbors, who alerted my father-in-law as soon as he returned home. He called and through official army channels was able to ascertain roughly what had happened.

Communications from both the army and Marine Corps were badly garbled in the first days after my wounding. My wife was at first told that I had lost only one leg and later that I had lost one leg below the knee and one above the knee. When she got the first message, she went straight to her father's pantry, poured a double shot of bourbon, and tossed it off in one motion. Already furious that she had been the last to receive the news, she spent a sleepless night after Walter Cronkite reported my injury on the "CBS Evening News." The next morning she traveled to Saluda to be with my parents. By the time she arrived, they had received .a more accurate assessment of my injuries, and my wife was soon to discover that if I survived, as was doubtful, I would do so with "a bilateral above the knee/hip disarticulation." Numb with fear and exhaustion and seven months' pregnant, she took solace from the only male Puller who was still capable of standing on his own two feet.

Sometime later that week, before I was medevacked to Yokosuka, Japan, in the first stage of a painful journey

home, a marine general and old family friend. Tommy Tompkins, made a special visit to my bedside to pin a Silver Star and Purple Heart on the pillow cradling my head. For the photo opportunity that accompanied the presentation and reading of my citation, the tube was removed from my nose and the photographer was careful to frame his shots of me from the waist up. Even in my delirious state I did not feel that I had earned a Silver Star, and I expressed my reservations repeatedly to Colonel Tom McKenney, another old family friend who spent most of those first few critical days in Da Nang at my bedside. There was no such reservation about my eligibility for the Purple Heart, and while my first one may have been cheap, the second award could hardly have been paid for more dearly.

While I was still in Da Nang, a parade of young officers who had been my peers in Basic School made the obligatory trek to the hospital to see me, and the concern on each of their faces so alarmed me that I finally requested and was given a bottle of whiskey to help them through the experience. For my part, I was becoming dependent on massive injections of morphine to quell the phantom pain in my missing limbs and postpone the inevitable acceptance of my loss, so my visitors were forced to drink alone. Mike Downs, my future brother-in-law, who was on his way back to the States, rerouted his homeward path to spend a few minutes with me, and he told me years later that he had resigned himself to never seeing me alive again after he had completed his visit.

For the most part the medical personnel who attended me while I was in Da Nang, as well as those who treated me in Yokosuka, were dedicated professionals who worked tirelessly every day in a world of blood and gore that would have broken men and women of lesser stature. There were also Red Cross volunteers who spent hours at my side as I began, through a narcotic netherworld, to assimilate the magnitude of my physical loss. Several of these "doughnut dollies," as they were affectionally labeled, helped me with letters to my wife that I do not remember dictating but that she saved, along with all the other letters I had written as a virile young platoon leader, the youthful optimism of a new-

lywed just separated from his bride contrasting with the stark terror of a shattered war casualty who had as yet no frame of reference for a Hfe without legs.

There was one exception to the caring individuals who nurtured me in those first days as I clung precariously to life, whom I was told about by Tom McKenney a year after I had returned to the States. A young doctor who objected generally to American involvement in the war, and specifically to the fact that he had been drafted, entered the triage shortly after I was carried in and began taking pictures of me. It was assumed that he was documenting the effects of trauma on newly wounded combatants, so no effort was made to stop him until later in the week, when he announced to some of his colleagues that he had gotten some great pictures of the Puller kid that he was going to use in antiwar lectures after rotating. His pictures were confiscated inmiediately. I have often wondered if he was ever able to separate his views on the war from his Hippocratic obligation toward the warriors who were fighting it.

My journey home was begun against the best medical advice, but because my father, who was himself in poor health, had begun talking about flying to Japan to meet me, a decision was made to send me home early. In Yokosuka I developed a stress ulcer as a result of the shock of being wounded, and two-thirds of my stomach had to be removed. The pain was excruciating, and I was not expected to survive the operation, which exposed a second ulcer once the surgeons got inside. In my debilitated state the second ulcer was considered inoperable, but remarkably it stopped bleeding on its own, and I was again stabilized. When we got under way again, I was assigned a nurse whose sole duty was to be available in case the exposed femoral artery in my right side ruptured.

A day later my plane set down at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington, D.C. I had, in keeping with the parable of the Spartan soldier, returned on my shield. My temperature was 105 degrees, and I had not had a dressing change since leaving Japan. I was transferred to the base hospital near the terminal, where my wife and family had gathered and had begun steeling themselves to meet me.

There were no brass bands to greet me, no rousing renditions of "Stars and Stripes Forever," and no politicians to offer their support for a job well done. I was home, though, back in the United States after a splendid overseas tour that had not quite reached its third month. And I had avoided, for whatever reason, the fate of those casualties who were returning home in aluminum boxes.

I

I

I

By the time I had been made as presentable as possible it was late in the evening, and a nervous hospital commander, justifiably concerned that I might die on his watch, reluctantly agreed to let me receive visitors. In my precarious state it was decided that I should see only one family member at a time, and my father was the first to enter the room. He stood quietly at the foot of my bed for a few moments, surveyed the \^'reckage of his only son, and then, unable to maintain his stoic demeanor, began weeping silently. He moved to my side and grasped my shoulder as if that simple act of communion would stay the convulsions that now racked his stooped frame, and I in my helpless state was unable to reach out or otherwise console him. It was only the second time in my life that I had seen my father cry, and as the nurse led him from my room. I felt an aching in my heart that all but eclipsed the physical pain from my wounds.

After I had regained my own composure, my wife was allowed to see me, but having spent my emotional load with my father, my meeting with Toddy was, at least for me, less wrenching. When she bent to kiss me, the warmth of her lips against mine eased my grief, and I was mercifully unable to read the anguish and uncertainty that she hid behind

192

a mask of grim determination. With the ice broken by the kiss and my inhibitions diminished by morphine, I asked her to raise her skirt so that I could assess the state of her pregnancy, and when she compHed, we smiled at each other conspiratorially over our handiwork. Years later she told me that she had prepared herself as best she could for the sight of my mangled body, but that the nose tube that pumped secretions from my ulcerous stomach had almost unnerved her.

After I had spent a few minutes alone with my wife, my nurse and doctor decided to permit the rest of my visitors to enter as a group. I was exhausted from the long flight, the unremitting pain that was by now a constant companion, and the effort required to talk to my wife and father, so the group's visit was a quick one. I was also receiving injections of morphine every three or four hours, and my memory of the remainder of the visit as well as of the events of the next several weeks remains clouded. My mother could not bear to look at me and as a defense mechanism tried to steer the conversation to the Detroit Tigers' victory in the World Series but stopped when I made it clear that I was not interested in baseball. I did, however, manage to exact a promise from her that she would give me my grandmother's diamond engagement ring to add to the solitary band I had given Toddy when we married, and although Toddy's embarrassment was acute when I broached the subject, I must have known that for once in my life I had the upper hand in bargaining with my mother. After our reunion was concluded and my family and in-laws retired to try to assimilate the magnitude of my injuries, I was given another injection of morphine and slept fitfully until another onslaught of pain cut through the narcotic.

In the morning my twin sister, who had stayed at home the previous evening because she had been assured that only my wife was going to be permitted to see me, came to the hospital with Toddy and my brother-in-law. She was furious that she had missed the earlier visit but was so unnerved at the prospect of seeing her closest blood relative in extremis that she talked incessantly. In anticipation of her visit I had asked my nurse to fashion a bra from two surgical face

masks, which I then gave her as a continuation of a running joke commentary on her less than ample endowment. She managed a flicker of a smile through her tear-stained face as she accepted my offering, but her agony could not be concealed as she contemplated my near destruction. Later she confessed to me that her initial impulse on seeing me was to pray for my death and that she was ridden with guilt over that reaction. With Martha's visit the circle of family reunions was completed, and while none of us realized it, successive visits eventually became less strained, although my little joke with the bra was the last bit of levity I felt up to for some time, as my despair over my situation began to take hold.

I had been scheduled for transport to the Philadelphia Naval Hospital by ambulance later that morning, a trip of several hours' duration, but my pain was so intense and my energy so depleted that I recoiled at the thought of the long ride and begged for a helicopter. My request was agreed to by the base commander, who wanted nothing so much as to send me on my way and relinquish the responsibility for a level of medical care that his hospital was ill equipped to provide, and by noon I was flying north toward Philadelphia with my wife and family following by car. On arrival at the Philadelphia Naval Hospital I was taken immediately to the operating room and given general anesthesia while my wounds were debrided and my dressings changed. When Toddy arrived, the procedure had been completed and I had been transferred to the hospital intensive care unit, which was my home for the next month. Because of my father's reputation, the hospital commander made a point of welcoming my family to his facility, but he pulled no punches in conveying his assessment of my condition. According to him, my chances of survival through the critical next ten days were about 50 percent unless I contracted pneumoniei, in which case I would almost certainly die. The good news was that if I survived, his surgeons would do an excellent job of putting me back together again.

In the fall of 1968 and throughout my hospitalization in Philadelphia, the government had given no thought to temporary lodging for the families of wounded servicemen, and

my family checked into a motel near the hospital for that week, in what was the first of many agonizing and expensive stays. They were so concerned initially about my condition that the expense of the accommodations was simply regarded as a nuisance; but as time wore on, the economics of the situation became intolerable, and they began to double up on rooms or plan day visits from Washington. Later in my hospitalization, when I had recovered sufficiently to take an apartment near the hospital grounds, my wife remembered her early problems with costly motels and invited the wives of severely wounded patients to sleep over with us. It was bad enough to be shot to pieces in the service of your country; but it was outrageous then to be expected to sustain heavy outside costs associated with recovery, and Toddy and I were doubly sympathetic to the plight of the enlisted wives, for whom the extra costs were often an unbearable hardship.

At the end of that first weekend Toddy and our families returned to Virginia while my older sister remained at the hospital and began a five-day vigil at my bedside. I was out of my head from pain and morphine most of the time, and the doctors assured my family that there was no purpose to be served by their staying. In addition. Toddy was nearing the end of her pregnancy, and there was a very real danger that her anxiety and the shock caused by my wounding would precipitate an early delivery. She promised to return as soon as possible and even then left reluctantly, but I was too absorbed with my own suffering to enjoy the company for long of even those I loved most dearly. Because I was completely helpless and my hold on life was so tenuous, some unusual arrangements were made to accommodate me. I was placed alone in a windowless room near the nurses' station of the intensive care unit, and I was assigned three corpsmen, each of whom worked an eight-hour rotating shift.

One of the corpsmen, Ernie, was a compulsive liar who stole medications from the nurses' station and from the patients. He was finally court-martialed and given a bad-conduct discharge when his drug use became flagrant, but while he tended to me, my judgment was so impaired and

my dependency so total that I was completely taken in by his dissembling. The second corpsman, Jack, was a manic depressive who even to me appeared so close to the verge of a nervous breakdown that it came as no surprise when he tried to slash his wrists and became a patient himself. Finally, there was McMonagle, a bear of a man who had absolutely no respect for any form of authority and who was uniformly despised by all the doctors and nurses. I liked him inmiediately, and his dedication to my care was a Ufe-line in the early desperate days of intensive care.

By the end of my first two weeks in the intensive care unit, the odds favoring my survival had improved considerably, although to the unpracticed eye the reverse must have seemed the case. Several times a day my bandages had to be changed, and without morphine the ordeal was so painful that I was quickly reduced to the level of a snarling animal. For a period of time I became convinced that the staff as well as my family had entered into a conspiracy designed solely to increase my torment, and I lashed out at all who dared enter my room. Because I threw up so much of what the corpsmen tried to spoon into my mouth, I simply began to refuse food, and when my weight dropped to less than sixty pounds, orders were issued that I be fed through the tube in my nose. I was also completely immobile and had to be rotated from my back to my stomach and vice versa every three hours in a special bed that employed two thin mattresses on a circular track and resembled a sandwich board more than a resting place. Despite the constant mm-ing, I developed bed sores from the pressure and the perspiration with which I was constantly soaked, and by the time I had completed my stay in intensive care I had open sores the size of quarters along my backbone and pelvis.

At some point toward the end of the second week I was carried back to the operating room, where split thickness skin grafts were taken from my upper torso and used to close the gaping hole where my right leg had connected to my body and to patch the wounds to my buttocks. The plastic surgeon assured me after several days that the grafts were taking and that I was recovering nicely despite my best efforts to thwart his efforts by refusing to eat. For my

part, I knew only that the operation necessitated a whole new area of bandages across the donor sites on my upper body, and I cursed him for joining the conspiracy against me.

Toward the end of my stay in intensive care I was moved from the windowless room near the nurses' station to a more remote but more cheery end room that my corpsmen referred to as the solarium. I was its sole occupant, so remained as isolated in my new setting as I had been in the old room. The few visitors who came to see me in both rooms were required to don white dressing gowns to maintain a sterile environment, an unintended result of which was that for weeks I hved in a world without color. My principal contact with the outside world was through a transistor radio that played pop music from the nightstand beside my bed, and I still get goose bumps when I hear "Abraham, Martin and John" and "Little Green Apples," songs that the disc jockeys in Philadelphia played over and over in the fall of 1968.

Once I was in my new surroundings, a decision was made to wean me from the morphine, on which I had become psychologically, if not physically, dependent, and I begged and then screamed for my shots as the time between injections was lengthened and the dosage was decreased. Without the morphine to dull my senses, I had to face both physical pain and the reality of my loss, and for several days I was nothing more than a bundle of jagged nerve endings as my wife and McMonagle stood by to mop my brow, feed me lime Life Savers, and hold cigarettes to my lips. It was a period of my life during which I lost all self-respect for not having the strength to carry myself with dignity, and I loathed my country and the Marine Corps for having brought me to such depths.

During the first month of my hospitalization I was confined to the electrically powered bed that rotated me as if on a roasting spit, and the combination of my injuries and lack of mobility left me as weak as a newborn baby. I was deteriorated to the point where I could not lift my head from the pillow, and I developed a dangerous-looking bald spot on the back of my head where a bed sore was beginning to

form. By the time the boxing glove-size bandages on my hands were removed at the end of the month, the muscles in my arms had atrophied to the extent that my elbows appeared huge in comparison with my forearms and biceps.

There were signs of progress, however, and a major improvement was the new freedom made possible by getting back what was left of my hands. Without the bandages I was at least able to scratch a few itches and mop my own face, although I was appalled at how badly my hands had been mangled. At first my fingers were so stiff and swollen that I could not manage a cigarette on my own, and an exasperated McMonagle, tired of catering to my need for nicotine, finally bought me an ivory roach clip that allowed me to smoke on my own but made the doctors and nurses suspect that we were smoking marijuana on the sly. He, of course, delighted in their suspicions and even increased them by introducing incense into my room to string them along further. The tube was also removed from my nose sometime during the month. That greatly cheered up Toddy and, more important, ended the staff's capacity to pump gruel into my stomach when I refused to eat.

In early November I was taken off the critical list and moved to the twelfth floor of the hospital. SOQ 12, sick officers' quarters 12, was the area of the hospital set aside for officers undergoing long-term hospitalization. The majority of its patients had been seriously wounded in Vietnam and would eventually be boarded out of the service, but there were also a few terminally ill cancer patients and the usual assortment of malingerers and misfits looking for a place to hide. McMonagle wheeled me up to my new quarters in the electric bed on which I had lain for the previous month, and it was a close call as to whether the intensive care unit personnel were more relieved to be done with the two of us or we with them. In any event, our reputation for obstreperous-ness had preceded us, and the head nurse, a Commander Zatzerine, met us at the entrance to her domain and made it clear that she allowed no shenanigans on her ward. McMonagle, in keeping with his style, adopted his best supercilious pose during her tirade, but after she had finished.

we decided to give her the benefit of the doubt for the present.

I was moved into the room across from the nurses' station, a by now familiar locale, but since the move was carried out on a weekend when my roommate was on liberty, I was not to meet him until Monday morning. One of the other patients had placed a sign on the door to my room that read dumb grunt is feeling grcx)vy in anticipation of my arrival, and while McMonagle howled at this comment on my attitude, I did not find it the least bit amusing.

That evening, after I had been installed in my new room, Nurse Zatzerine paid me another visit. When she realized that I was still too absorbed with my own misery to want to engage her in conversation, she respected my mood and did not attempt to draw me out. Instead she fetched a bottle of Lysol and scrubbed my bed, an action that she could have ordered one of the corpsmen to perform. I was so impressed and so shocked by that simple gesture of humility that when she next took my hands in hers, I made no effort to protest. She studied each hand in some detail, gently tracing the cracks in the parchmentlike skin with her forefinger, and she then announced that we both were going to have to get to work on getting my hands back in shape.

From that moment on I was as meek as a lamb when dealing with this angel of mercy, and I even came to look forward to those occasions when she would bathe my mutilated hands in mineral oil and work loose the dead skin that made them appear even worse. I now understood why the other patients all loved her and why she was so frequently asked to join those who could get liberty for happy hours at the nearby officers' club. It was typical of the navy, however, that after she had established such a marvelous rapport with SOQ 12's patients, she was transferred to a job that limited her contact with patients.

On the Monday following my transfer to SOQ 12, many of the patients who were far enough along in the recuperation process to get weekend passes returned from liberty, including my roommate. Lieutenant Paul Barents, a double above-the-knee amputee. Lieutenant Barents had been raked across the knees by automatic-weapons fire

while setting up an ambush in Vietnam eighteen months earher, and his wounds were so severe that both legs had been amputated surgically. He had made remarkable progress, however, at adjusting to the wooden prostheses with which the hospital's limb and brace shop had outfitted him, and when he walked into our room that first Monday morning with only a cane to steady his balance, I was amazed to discover that a man with so little remaining of his legs could ambulate. He was a tall, wiry man with a neatly trimmed mustache and a deep, booming voice, and when I ignored the cheerful salutation with which he greeted me, he quickly realized that I was not yet ready to talk and he did not press the issue. Instead he took a seat, slipped his stumps out of the sockets of his prostheses, and transferred himself into the wheelchair beside his bed. He then placed his legs in a comer of the room, donned a pair of hospital pajamas, and, without another look in my direction, wheeled out of the room in pursuit of more congenial company.

After Paul had gone, I turned my head toward the corner of the room where he had left his legs and stared curiously at them for several minutes. They retained shoes, socks, and trousers, and it suddenly dawned on me that the proper procedure in saddling up with artificial limbs was first to dress the legs and then put them on. The pants had slipped down a bit around the thigh area of each leg after Paul had stacked them in the comer, and I could see expanses of shiny pink plastic above the knees where the trousers had come to rest at the knee joint. I remained despondent and withdrawn for the remainder of the day over the totality of my pain and helplessness; but a new emotion, hope, reentered my life when Paul Barents walked through our hospital room door that Monday moming, and while I despised his good humor and envied his freedom to come and go as he pleased, I knew that there was much to be leamed from him.