Death Valley_ The Summer Offensive, I Corps, August 1969 - Keith Nolan [146]
It was black as pitch and blood was in his eyes. Schuler could make out only a few of the faces around him. Sweathog, his radioman, was wounded. Newton, one of Schuler’s fire team leaders, was clutching his leg; it was almost severed. Rivera, his sniper, was slumped beside him in the trench. He was dead. No fire followed the shelling, so Schuler took the radio. He told the company commander they’d taken a direct hit and, in short order, personnel from the company headquarters hustled over to help carry casualties to the LZ.
The landing zone was chaos. Schuler staggered to a spot in the elephant grass, sat down, and mumbled to the corpsman bandaging his head, “I ain’t leaving.” He had shrapnel lodged in his skull, face, shoulders, and back. But he didn’t want to leave his platoon if there was an attack that night and, remembering the ring of 12.7mm guns, he didn’t want to be a sitting duck in a big, lumbering Sea Knight. Colonel Lugger stopped briefly to check on him. A mustached officer came by minutes later, talking hatefully about fragging Lugger. He said the colonel didn’t know what the hell he was doing, and he was collecting a bounty to get rid of him.
It took thirty minutes for the first chopper to arrive.
Five Cobras rolled in first, one right behind the other, pumping 2.75-inch rockets and 40mm rounds around the perimeter, covering the landing of the medevac. The firepower eased Schuler’s fears—like the cavalry in a war movie, he thought—and he allowed a couple of his grunts to help him aboard. Spooky came in after the Cobras and the two Sea Knights made it in and out without drawing a shot. The interior of his bird was dark, vibrating, and crowded. Schuler noticed one of the chopper crewmen looking at the wounded with tears running down his face. He couldn’t see what that man saw until they unloaded on the flood-lit tarmac of the Naval Support Activities hospital in Da Nang. They were all bloody. Their forward observer stood with a bandage around his face; a corpsman unwrapped it, exposing a hollow, red eye socket with tissue hanging from it onto his cheek.
The wounded were carried or helped into a large room with rows of stretchers over sawhorses. Schuler ended up on one, still dizzy, blinking at the caked blood and the bright lights overhead, hearing screams, crying, orders being shouted. He faded out, then woke up as a corpsman used long surgical scissors to cut away his flak jacket and fatigues. He began shouting when the man clipped the laces of his prized, battered jungle boots. He suddenly started shivering in the hot box, and a corpsman hooked up an IV. Then he realized he was waking up and a Navy chaplain was beside his stretcher, giving him last rights.
“Get the fuck outta here. I have no intention of dying.”
The aid station became so crowded that Schuler and several others were transferred to the Army’s 95th Evac on the other side of Da Nang. He walked to the Huey, naked, freezing, carrying his own IV.
In the 95th Evac, an Army medic gave Schuler a shot of novocaine, then an Army doctor used pliers to dislodge the fragments in his skull. Another doctor complimented him on his twist; uh-huh, Schuler thought; he must be talking about a good tennis backhand. When the medics were finally done, Schuler looked in a mirror. His handlebar mustache and chest were caked with dried blood, half his head was shaved and marked with stitches, bandages were around his shoulders. All he had on were some pajama bottoms which didn’t fit, perhaps because he’d lost almost