Loon - Jack McLean [88]
It was horrifying.
The first person I came to was Wayne Wood. We had joined Charlie Company during the same week the previous November. He had been a machine gun squad leader. He wasn’t supposed to have been, but his predecessor had been killed shortly before we’d arrived and a replacement had been needed. Woody had gotten the job. If I’d been first into the command bunker that day, I would have gotten the job.
After that first week, the next time I saw Woody, he had an M60 machine gun carefully balanced on his right shoulder with seven bandoliers of NATO 7.62 ammo hanging around his shoulders. Put a knife in his mouth and he could have passed for Pancho Villa. He had just celebrated his eighteenth birthday and had a sixteen-year-old girlfriend named Jan back home in Iowa. At every opportunity over the seven months, he’d pull out Jan’s dog-eared picture and speak incessantly about their love and impending marriage. Occasionally we’d avoid him because of it. We could all recite the story almost verbatim.
Shortly after the first rockets hit on the fifth of June, the Skipper called for volunteers to bring the wounded up to the LZ to be medevaced. Woody jumped from his hole and ordered his squad to action. The next round killed them all.
Except Woody.
The rocket from Co Roc, Laos, exploded and sent a sickening monsoon of metal through the leaves and elephant grass. The larger pieces screamed by unaerodynamically until cracking into a tree trunk, thudding into a mound of red clay, or ever so quietly slicing off the skinny pink leg of a seventeen-year-old boy. The smaller pieces sounded like a downpour of rain, with every drop being lethal cargo.
Wayne Wood was thrown fifty feet by the explosion and became filled to overflowing with the full complement of large and small shrapnel. It is difficult to imagine a person alive with more metal in his body than Wayne Wood. His screams haunted me for years. Here he was now in the amputee ward of the Oakland naval hospital without a leg and filled with enough shrapnel to make his every breath a miracle.
I had been blown over by the concussion from the same round that June 5 and had been completely covered with dirt. The larger pieces had either missed me or stuck in my flak jacket. Hundreds of the microscopic ones had filled the unprotected area of my upper arms and neck. For nearly fifteen years afterward, tiny shards from that one round eventually rose to the surface of my skin. One by sickening one, I’d pull them out with tweezers.
That same round had also wounded Doc Mac Mecham, who had been providing field triage to the wounded that Woody and his squad had been ferrying to the LZ.
Incredibly, Woody spent the twenty-minute flight to Delta Med in Dong Ha fully conscious with more pain in more places than could ever be inventoried. He was immediately transferred to the hospital ship Repose off Da Nang.
Doc Patterson was there in the amputee ward as well.
Patterson had been hit by rifle fire on the morning of June sixth, with me close by. He’d been crouched over a wounded marine. I watched in horror as a bullet entered his knee, traveled up his thigh, and exited through his pelvis. His face was frozen in shocked disbelief. The expression haunted me for years. Doc Patterson had been in country for less than one week.
Here they all were, filling bed after bed of this ward and most of a neighboring ward.
This did not include boys who were sent to Philadelphia.
Doc Mac and I stayed for an hour and then headed back across the bay.
As he dropped me off, we vowed to get together again before I left.
We didn’t.
It would be thirty-seven years before we met again.
27
DAYS LATER I WAS DISCHARGED FROM ACTIVE DUTY. It was a beautifully bright early afternoon when I emerged from the out-processing center, clutching my DD-214 and drinking in the breathless view across the bay.
Freedom!
All seemed right with my world.
Hours away would be the homecoming in Boston of which I had dreamt for months.
I was wearing the summer khaki uniform that had been issued almost two years