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A Wounded Soldier Remembers Yesterday

Description:

“LOOKING FOR A FRIEND IN A GRAVEYARD”  

Approximately 2:00 am in early February of 1968, First Sergeant Tsekas came to my foxhole and shook me awake. He said “We’ve lost contact with your buddy Christos, “The Greek” on LP” (LP stands for Listening Post….this is where two or three soldiers go out approximately 100 to 150 yards outside of the base perimeter and “listen for enemy movement” to enable the company to have prior warning of an attack via radio communications.) 

“We don’t know whether they’ve lost radio communication capabilities, or something has happened to them. We are expecting an attack before morning, and we need to know their status. Will you take some volunteers and try to find Christos and his team?” I said, “sure Top (that’s what we called our First Sergeants because they usually were the “Tops” at whatever they did), but I want you to know one thing before we go out. Either “Charlie” is going to get us or Christos and his team are going to get us, thinking we are “Charlie”.” 

Tsekas knew this without me telling him, but there wasn’t really any other choice we could make. We couldn’t leave one of ours out there cut off from the rest of the company, and I know Christos would have done the same for me. We had shared too many foxholes and too many experiences together. 

I picked two “volunteers” from my Fire Team and exited the concertina wire perimeter of the base to begin the search for Christos and the two members he chose from his Fire Team. We were camped in and around a Vietnamese graveyard, which made the search in the partially moonlit darkness even more surreal. I led the way, and my two Team Members followed at a separation of about five yards back. We walked ten to twenty yards at a time then knelt on the ground, and I would call out in a low voice “Christos”? 

We continued the search for about an hour and a half (it seemed much longer) with no success. I radioed back to base that we were going to search for another thirty minutes and then make our way back to the perimeter. After I finished the transmission, we started out again. We had moved another twenty yards or so when I heard some movement and motioned everyone down. 

About that time a grenade went off, and then another. (I didn’t realize until we got back in to the perimeter base that I had been hit by two pieces of shrapnel and my M-16 had pieces of shrapnel in it as well.) After the grenades went off, I pointed my M-16 in the direction I had heard the movement and said “Christos”? He stood up about twenty yards away and said, “Georgia Boy”? 

It seems as though they had heard us moving around for over an hour, and thought we were “Charlie”. Their radio had gone out and they had lost all communications. One of Christos’ team members had panicked, and had thrown two grenades in our direction, then took off running back to the base perimeter. I radioed the base what had happened, and to be on the lookout for one of ours heading back in. 

We then received a radio transmission that he had run through the concertina wire and cut himself up pretty bad. He had gone into shock and was later shipped back to the States. When I had gone down on the ground before the first grenade went off, my arm hit something hard, but I did not think anything of it at the time. Later, when we were getting ourselves together to head back to base camp, Christos went out and gathered in a claymore mine in the location where I had been. 

I asked him when he had heard us moving around, why he didn’t trigger the detonation device on the claymore and he said, “something told me it wasn’t the right time. I had my hand on the device, but I just couldn’t trigger it”. 

God was looking out for us that night. Christos could have panicked when he lost radio communications, cut off from the base. He could have left his Listening Post and taken his team members back to the safety of the base perimeter, but he chose to keep his head and to maintain his position. He put the safety and well being of the whole before the safety and well being of himself. He could have panicked and set off the claymore mine, which would have killed me and my team members, but he kept his poise, ultimately saving the lives of many. 

If the claymore mine had gone off and they had started firing at us. The base camp would have erupted in protective fire as well, possibly killing Christos and his team members. We all made it back into base camp before daybreak safe and sound. 

On February 22, Christos, with his Fire Team, and me with my Fire Team, started across a rice paddy toward a village complex just outside the old capital city of South Vietnam, Hue. We were the first squad, in the first platoon, in the first company of a battalion for the 101st Airborne Division to cross the field. 

About half way across, we started receiving heavy enemy gunfire. We took off on a dead run toward a berm (a small mound of dirt which surrounds rice paddies) for protection. Bullets were flying by us and we were all yelling, firing and sometimes laughing in hysteria. Being scared can cause strange reactions. We all made it miraculously to the berm without anyone getting hit, then laid down protective fire for the rest of the company to come across. 

We were in this firefight most of the day. I raised up a little too high at one point during the firefight to see if I had gotten a particularly pesky sniper, and was hit with what felt like a baseball bat in my left chest. It knocked me for a flip, and when I gathered my senses (never had much to begin with at this age, and still working on trying to get some), it felt like a vice was pressing on my chest and that hot water was running through my body. 

What actually happened was, when I raised up to see if I had gotten the sniper, I got shot through my left arm and chest. The bullet went through my arm, into my chest, fractured five ribs, went through my left lung and out my back, about an inch or so from my spine. The pressure on my chest was my lung collapsing, and the hot water sensation was the internal bleeding and the blood filling my lungs. 

The doctor later said the bullet missed my heart by a “bullet’s width”. Again, God was looking out for me because I had just removed my shoulder holster to cross a river before we crossed the rice paddy. If I had left the holster and gun in place, they may have altered the bullets path, and gone through my heart. 

The first person to crawl up to me was Doc Edwards, one of our company medics. He started cutting my shirt off and applying pressure to my chest. I told him to look at my back because it felt like the bullet went all of the way through. He rolled me over and applied pressure to the exit wound as well. I had already lost a lot of blood, and luckily he had shown me how to give an IV a couple of months prior to this, so because he had both hands full, he asked me if I could give myself an IV. I did, but still have a scar from the sloppy job I did. 

Christos was the second one to crawl up to me and helped pull me back up close to the protection of the berm. He helped Doc Edwards bandage my wounds. I told Christos to take my backpack, which had all my personal belongings and my pistol and shoulder holster. 

Christos, Danny Bettencourt and I made a pact before we went to Vietnam, that if anything happened to any of us, we would get in touch with our parents and family to let them know what had happened, and to give them some comfort about the way things worked out if we didn’t make it back home. I asked Christos if he would give my parents and my girlfriend my personal effects, let them know I loved them, tell them about all of the good times and adventures we had experienced, and that I had not been in a lot of pain at the end (I had no doubt that I was dying). 

Christos told me I wasn’t going to die and stayed with me for over an hour until the medevac helicopter was able to get in to pick some of us up. He helped load me on my poncho liner and was one of four with Doc Edwards to carry me under heavy gunfire to the medevac. Bullets were flying all around us and hitting the helicopter as they loaded me in. After Christos gave me a farewell pat on the head and told me he’d be seeing me, he and the others ran back to the berm, still under heavy fire. 

As we were lifting off, the door gunner on my side was shot and killed. The guys in my platoon, twenty years later at a reunion, told me they thought it was me that had been hit again, and they thought I had died. 

Christos and I had not seen each other since that day when he risked his life to load a friend on the helicopter. We found each other twenty-two years later through our other friend’s mother, Mrs. Daniel Bettencourt. We found each other because we both kept our promise to Danny and to ourselves, in locating his family and giving them a little comfort in how Danny had spent his time with us. 

Tags

vietnam, soldier, army, 101st airborne, wounded, rescued, heroes, buddies, promises