Thanks all, but I feel a bit embarassed having all this posted on the bbs. It all started with my responding to Ripsnort with an Email.
It's important not to get the impression that I'm some kind of hero, or something special. Others who fought in similar situations will tell you that this is all really routine life in combat. Those with Silver Stars, and other important medals really earned them.
When I read my own stories I often wonder how I did those things, but I was a different person back then. The hardest part was getting through all that Ranger School training. You see, I could have quit that at any time, and be back in a warm bed in a few hours.
I wonder how many of us would have quit combat if we were actually allowed to? Getting out was something you had to earn for yourself. For example, I was wounded early on after arriving in country. That's when I was overrun and had to play dead. Naturally, I was horrified, and my courage was damaged by those events. While recovering for 2 weeks in a tent hospital, and light duty in the rear, all I could think about was staying away from the front. Then, I was tested. I was offered a job safe in the rear as an inventory officer at a transient base. After just one and one half days I had changed my mind, and I went AWOL back to my front line unit up north. I remember making that decision at night when I reasoned... I'm a Ranger, I wanted this all my life, those are my men without a leader, I can't accept this job in the rear, I couldn't live with myself if I took it before I've really earned it.
Upon arriving back I reported to the Colonel that I had just gone AWOL to get to the unit. He laughed and said, don't worry Lieutenant, nobody ever got Court Martialed for going to the front. He was right. I agonized over that decision for many a long jungle night. Many months later when I had earned my right to a rear job, I grabbed at the chance to live. (Lieutenants only had to serve 6 months minimum on line, because most of them never lasted more than a couple of weeks back then. It was sort off like the 25 mission minimum for early WWII B17 crews). Unfortunately, my so called rear job wasn't as safe as I had expected.
It's easy now to say I made the right decision to go back to the front. I lived, came home, and I'm in one piece. What would I be saying to myself right now if I lost both my legs, because of the decision to return to the front?
There are so many stories I could tell. Stories about men so close to each other, that only brothers like my friends on AH Apache and Commanche would understand. Stories of every day life so miserable you wouldn't understand. How would you like to get up each and every day, light a cigarette, and burn the leaches off your buddy. Stories of men so scared. Stories of a man that cried like a baby, while another held him in his arms like a mother would, and still others held his hand. A few days later that same soldier would be firing a machine gun, from his hip, in a daytime firefight, ammo belt dangling behind, like some John Wayne character. Stories about how each night before dusk a group of us would gather around a coffee, and each person would have a different night to answer the question, " what would you do if you could live to be 30 years old". To us that was a fantasy not likely to happen. Stories of a firefight while we were set up for the evening, with bullets zipping through the trees, my diving for the communal coffee cup to save that valuable water we had just used for coffee ( water and coffee are all you think about in a hot jungle), while we all laughed uncontrollably during the middle of this shooting match as one private yelled "it's ok the Lieutenant's got the coffee", as if it was more important than our lives, and in some ways it was.
It was an entire lifetime of lessons all experienced in one long year, and those lessons have been with me ever since those days.
The most important thing to remember is that I was not some hero. We all lived it together.
Ranger Bob
[ 11-18-2001: Message edited by: RangerBob ]
[ 11-18-2001: Message edited by: RangerBob ]
