Walding was in severe pain.
After his leg was hit, his adrenaline kicked in and kept him going. He believed if he kept shooting or told the others where to aim, he would forget about the pain. And it had worked for a while. Not anymore. The pain was overwhelming. He needed morphine.
He pulled a morphine injector needle from his rucksack but was unsure how to use it correctly. He couldn’t remember which side of the injector to place against his thigh. With the pain and chaos, it was confusing, and Walding wanted to make sure he did it right. Shurer was busy taking care of Behr and Morales. He hadn’t made it to Walding, who was about twenty-five feet away.
Walding placed the purple side of the injector on his thigh and exerted pressure on the device. But to his surprise, it was upside down and the needle jabbed into his thumb.
“Aw shit,” he shouted, loud enough for everyone to hear.
The soldiers all looked at Walding, and when they realized what had happened—that Walding had injected the morphine into his thumb—they broke out laughing. It was a funny, almost surreal moment in the middle of disaster. While Walding didn’t laugh, he understood why the others were cracking up. It was a dumb mistake. Shurer screamed something about turning the needle around and trying again. But Walding knew it was too late. And he was upset. He needed something to relieve the agony.
Even after the morphine mix-up, Walding kept returning fire. Keep it up, he told himself over and over. I can’t give up. But he was at the breaking point and becoming light-headed. Was he going into shock? He didn’t know. But things were getting bleak.
Walding began thinking about his wife and children. He wasn’t giving up. That would be out of character. Growing up on his grandfather’s Texas farm, Walding had experienced pain. Once, he fell out of a second-floor window in his house and broke his arm. He didn’t cry or even say anything. He just walked around with a broken arm for days. As a linebacker on his high school team, he loved to hit people. Running backs catching screens out of the backfield. Or fullbacks trying to run up the middle. He never gave up. But now his mind was playing tricks on him. He hated thinking that his children might not have a daddy. He was a family man, and they were his life. And what about his wife? What would she do without him? Who would tell her? Damn, stop it, he thought. If he continued to fight hard, at least he’d be able to hold his head high and know that he’d never given up. At least if he kept shooting and directed his team where to shoot, he would stop thinking about his family and the physical pain.
But as the battle wore on, the physical suffering nearly crushed him. Sometimes he would just lie back, put his head down, and say, “This freaking hurts.” Worse, he hadn’t been examined by Shurer. He knew the medic had his hands full, but this was ridiculous. I’m just an old country boy from Texas and I don’t know shit about medical stuff. My tourniquet is tied real tight, but come on, man. I need help, he thought. As much as he hated to do it, he shouted to Shurer, “Ron, you want to check me out, man?”
The medic just poked his head up from working on Behr and Morales and gave Walding a thumbs-up. “You’re good,” he told him, too busy with Behr’s injuries to minister to Walding.
“Are you kidding me?” Walding replied angrily. “That’s bullshit. Don’t tell me I’m good. Fuck you, I’m good. I have no fucking leg!”