This is one of those stories that I have shared with my girls and just a few others. Sometimes it seems more like a dream. Last year I shared the story of how I was wounded on the same day our astronauts walked on the moon. As I said, after the field medic worked on the wound, I was carried first by stretcher to an ambulance, I think, could have been just a truck, to the local field hospital. There they determined that the wound was too bad to work on there, and ordered a copter to fly me to a landing strip, I remember the copter ride, I was on a stretcher just inside the door and could see the jungle flying past me. Did not seem like too long a ride, but could not say for sure as it all kept fading in and out. At the landing strip they put me on a C-130 cargo plane to Bien Hoa Hospital. I remember walking off the plane at Bien Hoa with blood soaking the bandage around my leg and the doctor chewing out the crew because I was walking and not on a stretcher. Apparently someone messed up and listed me as ambulatory, which meant I could walk. They put me in a bed and a nurse came in to clean the wound. I have a pretty high tolerance for pain, but when she started to work, all I could do was just grit my teeth and hold the bed rails. In Vietnam they have many strange creatures, one of which was a lizard that when it screams seems to say a four letter word followed by "you". There was one of those lizards in the window above my head screaming its head off, and as I laid there below while the nurse worked, I thought, "You tell her buddy!"They said I could shower which I really wanted to do, but it was an interesting prospect because they said I could not get the leg wet. I finally figured out a solution and taped a trash bag around the wound and stood in the shower with that leg outside propped on a bench that was outside the shower.
Not sure how long I was there before they operated and got the shrapnel out. Don't think it was too long. I remember they gave me a shot that numbed me from the waist down, but did not put me to sleep. Part of the way through the operation the numbness wore off just as they cut something, I said, "Hey, I felt that!", so they numbed me again. They said I was lucky and only lost three inches of muscle, the shrapnel missed the bone, otherwise they said I would probably have lost the leg. The shrapnel going in made a hole the size of a quarter, but stopped just before coming out the other side. Again in this I was lucky, had it come out the back side of my leg the damage would have been greater as it would have blown out that side of my leg. Because of this, most of the damage was limited to the muscle and nerves. The nerves still are not right, if you touch the front of my leg, I feel it in the back. Funny what you can get used to.
From Bien Hoa they flew me to Cam Ranh Bay Hospital to recover, before I was to return to my unit. Tomorrow I will share about how Cam Ranh Bay, "The Safest Place in Vietnam" stopped me from returning to my unit.
