Most of my time was spent patrolling around LZ Ross or LZ Baldy while in Vietnam. I was with the Marine Corps, Lima 3/7 in 1970 and my squad spent almost all of our time on patrols. If you were in the rear at the LZ for any reason other than to recuperate from patrols, you almost always had night guard duty, and I really hated that. Squinting through those ghost-like, green, night-vision goggles was pure torture for me and I just couldn't stand being on night guard duty. So if you got sick out on patrol or even medevac'd to the rear and weren't almost dead, you had to stand guard duty at night.
Early on in my tour of duty one evening out in the field, I am preparing my sleeping quarters for the night which consisted of a heavy-duty dark green poncho for a roof, held up by four freshly cut bamboo sticks. I normally used my entrenching tool to dig fox holes but that particular evening I got the bright idea of using my entrenching tool as an ax since I didn't carry a hatchet with me and was wearing out some fresh bamboo stalks by bending the bamboo stalks to the ground and holding them down with one foot and balancing with the other foot. As I got to the fourth and last stick, I increased my adrenaline to finish the job and pounded the bamboo hard with my entrenching tool which was barely sharp enough to cut dirt, but on the last hit, it came bouncing off that last bamboo stick right into my shin bone. We were out in an area where the enemy could hear us and so I crumpled to the ground, grabbing my injured leg. As I went to the ground, I stifled a banshee-like scream and groaned and moaned very earnestly for about 5 minutes. After about 10 minutes, the pain had subsided a bit so I didn’t want to call the Corpsman partly out of embarrassment but mainly because I didn't want to be medevac'd for such a silly mistake and hoped that I would be fine. After all it was just a little pain. (Uggh, I can almost feel it today which is December 14, 2016) Still, I managed to fall asleep somehow.
We were physically fit, but it seemed like I was always tired. Being stressed out 24 hours a day can do that to you. We ate the best C-Rations the government could buy so I was never hungry, and they provided energy for our job. The next morning, I woke very quickly, wincing in pain as I tried to stand but was unable to do so. I sat back down and reluctantly told my buddy to send the Corpsman over to me because I knew I couldn’t endure this much longer. As I waited for the Corpsman, all I could think about was that we had been out on patrol for 13 days and we were going back to the LZ the following day. If I got medevac'd back right then, they would have me standing wretched guard at night and I truly despised that. As the Corpsman raised my baggy camouflaged pants leg, I saw what was causing my pain. The entrenching too, while it had not caused a lot of bleeding, it had made a small dent in my shin bone and now my lower leg was twice its normal diameter. Infection had set in the Corpsman recommended medevac, but I told him I won’t go, and he had to do whatever he had to do to allow me to stay in the field one more day so that I wouldn’t have to stand guard duty when I got back to the rear. So he gave me what I think was a penicillin shot for the infection and a very weak pain pill but it helped me to stay out for that one extra day so that I could enjoy my rest back at the LZ without doing that despicable guard duty at night. And that's how the entrenching tool lost me as a friend.
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