The ambush site was on elevated ground alongside a trail. We found some food containers that led us to believe the enemy was using the trail. I set everybody into position, climbing, directing, and harassing. As I moved up on some large rocks to my place in the ambush, my knee gave way. I couldn’t straighten it. I had torn a cartilage wrestling before I joined the Marine Corps and that was the knee that collapsed. Throughout the night I kept hoping the knee would straighten itself out, which it had done before. Unfortunately, it didn’t, and ultimately, I called it in to the company commander. He sounded very skeptical when I told him.
However, when morning came and the knee still didn’t work, he called a medevac helicopter. It was rather humiliating to be carried on a poncho liner to the helicopter. Even worse, one of the Marines carrying me collapsed due to the heat and had to be medevaced as well.
I was flown to LZ Baldy, then to a triage facility in Da Nang. There, they make life-and-death decisions on the priority of treatment of the badly wounded—who can be saved and who cannot. Fortunately, none of it applied to me. I was flown from there to the hospital ship USS Sanctuary.
We landed on the ship’s helicopter pad. Corpsmen rushed me on a litter to a receiving room and cut off all of my clothes, including my precious jungle boots. They made a diagnosis and sent me into the bowels of the ship for treatment.
5
Guam
September 17, 1969
On a gurney, I was wheeled into the main treatment room on the ship. I could see seriously hurt people everywhere. The treatment of a Marine with a dislocated shoulder he got falling out of the back of a truck didn’t help my raising anxiety.
The doctor looked at him and immediately got on the phone and called another doctor and a couple of corpsmen. I was lying on a gurney waiting my turn for treatment, listening to the conversation.
“Hey, Jack, come and take a look at this!”
“I haven’t seen anything like it.”
“Have you ever had one like this before?”
“No, I haven’t.”
“Then we will let you have this one.”
The corpsmen, the doctors, and the young Marine all went into a curtained off room. All I could hear were the Marine’s pain-filled screams.
“Stop! Stop! It hurts! Stop! Oh my god. You’re killing me! Ah!”
The doctors came out. One was scratching his head. Over his shoulder, he said to the young Marine, “Next time, we will give you some anesthesia.”
All that pain! The screaming! No anesthesia! And the doctors hadn’t even gotten his shoulder back in place!
My anxiety peaked! I thoroughly expected the worst. I was lying in a main treatment room in the bowels of the ship, seriously considering various escape options. As it turned out, it wasn’t too bad. They shaved my leg, wrapped it up, and put a five-pound weight on the end of it to straighten it, then moved me to a small cubical I shared with a couple another officers.
I just had a great meal with real knives and forks and ice cream! I still haven’t gotten a bath, but I figure in a couple of days, they will have to give me a bath in self-defense.
In the ward with me are one guy who rode his jeep over a landmine and another guy who crashed in his helicopter, which leaves a real dilemma in my mind as to the safest way to travel.
The one real difficulty in being in traction is going to the head (bathroom). If I can survive waving to the mama sans while on the head, messing my pants in the field, or trying to find somewhere where no one is sleeping and Charlie (VC) isn’t around, then I can get this deal straightened out and down pat.
September 18, 1969
Another zenith reached! Another obstacle trampled beneath my feet! Another Mt. Everest climbed! I held out long enough so I didn’t have to use the bedpan! What starry heights will I reach next? My leg has been put in a cast. I got up a couple of times yesterday but hurt too badly and went right back to bed. Today, I got crutches, so I’ve ventured out into the world of the lounge, just outside the door of my sleeping quarters.
September 19, 1969
Good thing I came in from the field when I did; otherwise, I would have been one mass of jungle rot. It is terrible. I am covered with big ugly pus-covered sores. As it is, I have it on both arms and one leg with my cast on the other leg. At least I look like a veteran. Everyone comes up and says, “What happened, shrapnel?” I just kind of mumble and limp off. Saying, “No, jungle rot,” just doesn’t sound quite right around all these guys with serious wounds.
September 20, 1969
Right now, I am at the Air Force staging hospital in Da Nang. Tomorrow, I will be on my way to Guam where I will stay for who knows how long. It is a relief to be off the ship because it pitched and rolled so much. I am unsteady on crutches at best, even without the pitch and roll.
They just brought in a Vietnamese woman on a stretcher. She was covered in blood and gore. That is all I know. They just ran by. A plane crashed somewhere, and they expect more patients.
September 21, 1969
I am in Guam. No air-conditioning. What a bummer. We stopped off at the Philippines for about five hours while our plane was refueled and our radar fixed. The whole time we stayed on our litters in the airplane. I think it was a C147 rigged so that stretchers could be put in four tiers like bunk beds. The trip from Da Nang to Clark AFB was perhaps the most pleasant of my life. I was very comfortable, and I spent the journey in a dreamlike state. No doubt the injections we got before we took off had something to do with it.
However, after we took off from Clark, the trip was less pleasant. I was getting restless, plus I had to go to the bathroom. The nurses wouldn’t let me get out of my litter to use the plane’s facilities, and I was darned if I was going to use a urinal with all those Air Force nurses walking up and down the rows. So I suffered. I got to Guam and the nurses wouldn’t give me crutches, so I had to use a urinal anyway with nurses everywhere.
September 22, 1969
This morning, I was taken to the sick officers’ quarters. The first thing to greet me was a nurse whose face would stop a stampeding herd of water buffalo, and a smile filled with crooked little yellow teeth. That was a shocker. On top of that, I was put across from a wizened old man who was dying. He was gasping and wheezing and gurgling all the time. I was approached to join a pool on the exact time of his death. That was way too morbid for me.
Our ward is a long open bay with the beds next to each other. A curtain can be pulled to screen the next bed if necessary. Corpsmen, who do most of the work, and nurses walk down the middle of the bay checking patients on either side. There is no privacy.
The guy next to me is named Bill Farwell. I awoke from a nap to watch the bandages on his hand being changed. The doctor had Bill’s hand held up. I could see right through it. There was no skin or meat on his hand. It was a startling sight! Eventually, the doctor operated and sewed the hand to a flap of skin on Bill’s chest in order to regrow the tissue. He walked around the ward with his hand sewn to his chest.