Free Nam Sense by Jr. Arthur Wiknik Page B

with water as Anderson let out a painful howl. An enemy bullet had ripped through his leg and into a canteen of water he carried in a side pants pocket, causing it to burst. Like a sequence from an eerie movie, it seemed to happen in slow motion.
    “How bad is it? How bad?” he yelled. “I don’t want to look!”
    “It’s nothing,” I answered, as if it were nothing. “They just nicked you in the thigh. It’s all meat there, no bones to worry about. It’s hardly even bleeding.” I was lying some, because it looked like a serious wound and there was a fair amount of blood. Still, I saw no reason to scare the guy. I tried to apply my field dressing but he wouldn’t lay still. Our fearless medic Doc Meehan, who never carried a weapon, appeared out of the chaos to attend to Anderson.
    Now I was scared. A guy right next to me was shot. The Gooks really meant business! I didn’t know what to do. Dirt erupted again as more bullets hit the ground around us. I started firing back like a madman, not aiming at anything, just shooting wildly at the massive hill. I knew I had to get away because the three of us made too good of a target.
    When the next burst of firing stopped, I got up and ran twenty feet to the next hole. Debris flew as the enemy opened fire again. It seemed the Gooks had singled me out because the bullets followed me wherever I went. Perhaps that emotional GI from the 3/187th was right: the NVA were shooting at me because of my sergeant stripes. I quickly put it out of my mind and wormed up to the edge of the crater. Then, holding my rifle high over my head sprayed two more magazines at the hill. When I peeked above the mound for an escape route, something painful suddenly blinded me. When I reached up to protect my stinging eyes, a bullet slammed into my chest, throwing me backward. I was shot—they got me!
    Lying on my back with my eyes and chest in pain, I drifted off. So this is how I’m going to die, I thought, at the bottom of a pit in the middle of nowhere. But aren’t the battle sounds supposed to fade away like they do in the movies? I supposed I had to suffer first. The pain in my chest increased. I blinked my eyes a few times, and I could see again! I rubbed them clear enough to examine my chest and saw that my clothes were smoking. Jesus! I was on fire! I instinctively beat out the flames before any ammo caught fire and sent me into orbit. Then I checked my body for bullet holes but found nothing except the burn on my chest. “I’m going to live!” I kept telling myself. Maybe I even said it out loud.
    An NVA bullet hitting the ground in front of me had blasted dirt into my eyes. A second slug, apparently a tracer, had lodged in the bandoleers of ammo draped across my chest. The impact knocked me to the ground and the tracer caught my shirt on fire. The Gooks had me cold: I should have been dead. Maybe I was super-GI, but I didn’t feel like it. Since that day, the expression, “You’ve never lived until you’ve almost died,” took on a whole new meaning.
    I yanked the destroyed magazine out of the bandoleer and, forgetting that it had saved my life, cast it aside. I tried to decide what to do next but all I could think of was self-preservation. I jumped out of the hole and ran at full speed toward a tree-covered ridge. I held my weapon like a pistol, firing at the hill as enemy bullets nipped at my heels. As I raced past crawling GIs they yelled for me to get down, but my adrenaline drove me to the tree line. I hoped it was a safe place with no shooting. I looked back once yelling, “This way!” figuring that most of the GIs would surely follow me.
    The sparse cover thickened as I advanced up the hill, jumping over logs and recklessly pushing bushes aside. I don’t know what drove me to move at such a dangerous pace because I could easily have stumbled into an enemy position without knowing it. At the edge of a bombed-out clearing I tripped and then scrambled to a fallen tree to