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David Mitchell
"I Signed Up For 365 Days.........."
Continued - again, be patient - it will turn out okay.
As I mentioned, several of the rest of our crews stopped on the way home at the Binh Tuey Field EVAC hospital, Including me, after I boarded somene else's ship - (My ship was of course, unflyable and would be recovered later by another team).
Binh Tuey was a large hospital and had several helipads to accommodate a number of MEDEVAC ships at any one time. We parked our three ships out on the helipads and walked in through the ER entrance.
Roger was right there as we walked in, alone and laying sideways on a cot, propped up on his elbow. He was buck naked except for a white bed sheet covering him. But the sheet had several small splashes of bright blood red showing through at his mid-section.
We stood over him, mostly silent at first, but the obvious location of his wound caused one of us to snicker (yes, like 13 year-olds). That started all of us to snicker, and that started Roger snickering also. But as he laughed he shook a bit on his slightly springy cot, and quickly stopped and let out a loud groan. We stopped our snickering - for a moment. But then we started snickering again - and again, Roger laughed and shook and winced loudly in pain again.
We quickly realized there was something else going on.
Roger had always complained of lower back pain. And to help alieviate that problem, he always stuck two strips of C-4 (Plastick Explosives - Or "Plastque" as it was commonly known in french) in the inch or two gap between his back cusion and his seat. The strips were about eight inches long and two inches wide by 3/4 inch thick, wrapped in cellophane - and were of a clay or puddy-like form making them easy to bend and shape. We used them as home made bombs to be dropped by our observers into bunkers with VC hiding inside of them. They were extremely high powered explosives and we had to be super careful with them.
(Not long after this we had two horrific accidents with the C-4 and were ordered to stop using it. Sorry, no details - they were awful!)
Apparantly, as Roger passed over the area, he was also hit with some rounds from behind. A round (bullett) or two had come through from behind and punctured the C-4 strips, spreading tiny shards of C-4 into his buttocks. (Note: C-4 would only ignite with a fuse and a blasting cap - the AK-47 rounds would not ignite them, otherwise he would have gone up in a flash and been literally vaporized - it's that powerful).
So when Roger laughed on his cot, he was agravating the C-4 in his butt, thus the wincing in pain. This only lasted a minute or two before the female Major who ran this ward came over to us yelling something to the effectt of - "I want you people to clear out of my ward and leave this man alone. "I don't need any of you idiots making a bad situation any worse than it alreday is. Now get out!"
(I recognized the Major from a visit a few months earlier. I had been the first of many in our squadron to come down with "shigella dysintery" a very nasty illness that eventually went through the entire squadron. (Dad told me when he was a young doctor it was often fatal - they couldn't stop the dehydration fast enough back then.) I had been Medivac-ed down to Binh Tuey for three days of intervenious feeding and this was the same Major who ran that ward. She was tough as a boot and was not someone to be questioned.)
We said goodbye to Roger and made a quick exit back out to our ships on the helipads and flew the rest of the way - about twenty minutes - home to Vinh Long.
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Soonafter, we got a letter from Roger explaining his surgeries - in much too explicit detail. He was awake and had two surgeries simultaneously - laying on his side with surgeons doing his frontal bullet "removal", while another team worked from behind, plucking tiny C-4 shards with tweezers out of his butt. He said they wore goggles, just to be safe against any accidental "ignition".
A couple of us were able to get a ship and go down to see him. Here are the three of us.
Me (with my head cut off) - Roger in the middle - Gary, Another Scout pilot on the right
We are holding Roger's Purple heart documents.
Three of us flew down for a visit. Captain Steve Denton, Warrant Officer Gary Tamietti and Me.
Note - Christmas decorations still in the hospital ward.
T B C - yup - there's more
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