My last day in Vietnam
Don Tate writes in: “Here is a story about an ambush in the Vietnam War in which I was involved. It concerns one of your local residents, John Walker. (He drives a cab).”
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On my last day in Vietnam, my platoon walked into a Viet Cong bunker complex, and the ambush was sprung.
The first section of men- Corporal Andy Ochiltree's section - were cut down immediately. Private Ray Kermode, who'd swapped places with Ochiltree moments earlier, allowing the more seasoned Ochiltree to do the scouting, had worn rounds to the upper body. Ochiltree tried to drag him free from the jungle, but couldn't extricate him.
"I'm done for," was all Kermode said. "Look after yourself." Then, he died.
Ochiltree threw every grenade he had, and let loose a M72 rocket but he too, wore bullets. Machine-gun fire and rocket-propelled grenades poured into the killing field.
My section was ordered in to provide covering support. Only three of us breasted the small rise that led up the hill.
I stood up and ran forward through the mud. I threw a grenade towards a bunker, fired off a short burst aimlessly, and threw myself back into the mud.
Privates Greg Salmon- our machine-gunner, and John Walker, seemed to be running in slow motion, out to the right flank.
I stood again and started firing my armalite to create a diversion as I moved, thinking I’d be dividing the Viet Cong fire, because I was one of three targets coming at them.
After a few more metres, I dived to the ground again, and looked behind me. That was when I saw Walker go down.
He copped it in the shoulder, a splash of scarlet erupting from the wound. But as he lifted a belt of ammunition above his head, the rounds exploded in his hands melting his fingers. He slumped to the ground, his hands ablaze, smoking in the rain.
Salmon ran towards a sapling, carrying the M60 at knee level and firing off short bursts. Nothing was hitting him, either because he was a skinny bastard, or his luck was in. As my grenade exploded, I stood again and made for a largish tree, firing as I ran. It was the last time I’d ever run like a normal man again.
In the middle of a spectacular dive, a bullet thudded into my hip and sent me cartwheeling through the air.
Around me, the images evaporated, the sounds became muted and diminished, and the horror melted away in the closing darkness. My world was reduced to the immediacy of self. ‘A homer!’ I thought. It was instinctive, flashing in my mind like a neon sign on a dark night. ‘A homer!’
I had a wound severe enough to get me out of that madness completely, and an extraordinary feeling of exhilaration overwhelmed me. If I survived the night, I’d be getting home alive.
It was the last pleasant thought I had before the pain hit. It was such a terrible pain it took a few minutes to make sense of it. I lay there, grasping at my head, thinking it had been blown off, before the pain localised in my hip. I threw off my webbing. The bullet went clean through the grenade pouch without setting off the other grenades, I was astonished by my good fortune.
I pulled my trousers down just as a grenade exploded harmlessly to my right and another one exploded further down the hill. The earth shuddered and I bounced with it. Debris showered me.
I was shocked by the sight of the wound. A giant, purplish red sausage of minced bone and muscle hung from a saucer-shaped blackened hole. Steam rose from the melted flesh as the rain poured down on me.
‘Ammo! Get some ammo up here!’ Greg Salmon was screaming, in between short bursts. He was standing behind a skinny tree, every now and then letting loose a few rounds of what ammo he had left at the closest of the bunkers.
I pushed the sausage of meat and bone fragments away from me, off into the mud. I could see my hip bone then, inside the hole, all jagged and shattered, and slapped a handful of the same mud over the hole like I knew it was the right thing to do, or like I wanted to hide from it.
‘Davo! Davo!’ I called out to private Mick Davidson, rifleman in the platoon. He was also a stretcher-bearer, and should’ve been on his way up when the ambush was sprung. I called out to him because I knew, of all the others in that platoon, he’d come and get me. I’d only known him for a short time, but he was an impressive sort of man. He wasn’t one to let a fellow soldier down.
Surely he’ll come for me.
The feeling of desertion was palpable. I could feel my heart thudding inside my chest, echoing the thudding of the machine-guns all round. In that moment, I realised I was going to die on that lonely jungle hillside. It was like a sledgehammer.
‘You gutless bastards!’ I cried out.
But Davidson did come for me. He and Pte Peter Bunn, the medic- both men running into that ambush zone to help fallen mates. Davidson got to me first, and dragged me back using my body as a shield and my leg as a rifle mount; then Bunn threw me on his shoulders and bolted back down that slippery slope. Neither man got medals.
Around me, I felt the crunch of artillery rounds beginning to fall all around us, knew our boys back at the Dat were hooking in on our behalf as best they could from afar, and all the while the rain pelted down on my eyelids, drumming me into unconsciousness, even though I knew I had to stay awake in case the bastards came charging down at us from their bunkers.
But there came a point when I let it all pass over me. Try as I might to stay with it, to be ready for whatever was to come, there came a point when I let it all pass over me. I felt myself shutting my eyes and my mind to the whole lot of it.
Only Private Salmon stood between them and us.
See Saturday’s letters column for the conclusion of Don Tate’s story.