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Tam forced himself on, concentrating on the pack bobbing ahead of him in the dark. He’d never been so tired and scared. Keep going, don’t panic. Be a good soldier, don’t feel sorry for yourself.

Keep going!

They caught up with Charlie Company near Million Dollar Hill. Tam sank into the elephant grass, his brain whirling unfocussed. He was dimly aware of a prop plane buzzing overhead. A flare was dropped from it and night was suddenly day. Tam and everyone around him instantly jumped off the trail, rolling into the underbrush to escape the exposure of the glare. Twenty minutes later, they heard a single Huey bore in. It landed about a hundred yards away, on the crest of the hill.

It was 0200; this was the third and last medevac of the night. It was handled quickly, frantically before the NVA had a chance to open fire on the thumping rotors. Private Bleier was lifted inside the cabin and Captain Murphy came on next, the last one on. Bleier described the evacuation:

… Murphy almost fell out as we were taking off. The bottom third of his legs dangled outside the doorway. I held him by the shirt, but there was no room to pull him farther inside. The aircraft was jammed wall-to-wall. My admiration for Murphy at that moment was total. He had gotten to Million Dollar Hill about ten o’clock, and could have gone on the first medevac run. But he waited four hours while the rest of us straggled back, insisting that he be the last man evacuated. Now he was flying to the aid station with his shrapnel wounds exposed to the violent force of the cold winds. His legs banged against each other and against the helicopter door, buffeted by the air currents. The pain registered in his face was inhuman.

Bleier’s agony was overwhelming too. He could not believe the pain, the fire ripping at a million raw nerve endings, pulsing, consuming him. He faded in and out, thinking who am I, who is this happening to? It was a ten-minute flight to the 23d Medical Company, Americal, on LZ Baldy. The medics gave him the once-over in the med bunker, which meant clean bandages and, finally, a second shot of morphine. That did the trick. When they hefted his litter into the next chopper, he was feeling calm and drowsy, marvelling at the brilliance of the moon and stars from the cabin door.

By 0500, Bleier was being rolled into the 95th Evacuation Hospital, Da Nang. After he was admitted, a man approached him and said he was to store his personal belongings. All Bleier had was the wooden cross given to him by the priest; it had gotten him through WWII and, as far as Bleier was concerned, it had gotten him through Vietnam. Ten minutes later, a female Red Cross volunteer came to collect his things. She sighed at his story of having given the man his wooden cross; happened all the time, she said. Simply put, unknown persons were robbing wounded soldiers coming into the hospital. The combat infantrymen in Vietnam had a harsh acronym for support soldiers, too widely applied, but sometimes very appropriate: REMF. Rear Echelon Mother Fucker.

Bleier’s gurney was wheeled into a waiting room. Captain Murphy and the wounded survivors of his platoon were there. An orderly shaved his stubble but agreed to leave his handlebar mustache, the symbol of the draftee grunt. By 0600, Bleier was in surgery. He was put under and the Army doctors used scalpels to scrape away the skin burned by the sulfur-coated shrapnel. Then they removed the fragments from his feet and legs—there were more than a hundred pieces.

Fifteen minutes after the last medevac off Million Dollar Hill, Bravo Company was moving again. They walked back into the paddies atop a dike. It was dark. Private Tam fell, tumbling four feet down into the dry paddy. Not a bad fall, but when he stood up, pain shot through his right leg. He crawled back up under his pack and gear, figuring it was just a bad sprain, and kept humping, actually limping down the trail. The pain got worse. Tam faded into numb exhaustion, then sharp pain; each step was a