Wounded veterans have problems most veterans don’t experience. They may be so seriously hurt they cannot even walk up a flight of stairs or drive a car, for example. The Military Order of the Purple Heart, a nonprofit formed in 1932 exclusively for troops wounded in combat, works with Congress, the Department of Veterans Affairs and volunteers to make sure those veterans get the medical care and support others might not require. About 65 percent of MOPH’s 45,000 members are Vietnam vets, says Fred Taylor, a past national commander of the organization and now on the board of the MOPH Service Foundation, which raises funds for MOPH’s operations and programs. Taylor, a Vietnam veteran, earned three Purple Hearts as an Army private first class in 1968, on April 29, June 11 and June 15.
Could you recap the battles that led to your Purple Hearts?
The first Purple Heart I received was at a place that one year later was named Hamburger Hill. It was actually called Ap Bia Mountain, in the A Shau Valley, a stronghold of the North Vietnamese Army. My unit, the 1st Air Cav, engaged in the largest air assault in the war in April 1968. I was on the second helicopter. We jumped in, worked our way down into the valley and then up Ap Bia. I was the ammo bearer for the machine gunner. We were so close to the enemy that I could feel the muzzle blasts of their weapons in my face. A grenade landed near the machine gunner and exploded. It picked him and me up, and I spun through the air like a helicopter propeller. When I landed, I was totally disoriented, and the explosion had deafened me. There was a sergeant in a foxhole, waving for me to come. I crawled into the foxhole. When I was there, I reached down with my hand and it came up full of blood. I had two pieces of grenade shrapnel in my right leg.
Did you get the shrapnel out?
That night the medic told me, “I’m going to take the shrapnel out of your leg, but I’ve got nothing to give you.” We’d been in a big battle, so the medics had no pain medicine, no morphine, nothing left. The medic said, “You can’t scream.” I had to keep quiet because we were still in the A Shau Valley and surrounded by the enemy. Just like in a John Wayne movie, he gave me one of those tongue depressors and said, “If you got to scream, bite on the tongue depressor.”
I had two holes, one in the front of my leg where the shrapnel chipped a piece of my shinbone and one on the side of my leg. The medic took this metal thing and dug down in my leg and popped it out. And I bit through those tongue depressors. He got both pieces out, put some kind of medicine on it and wrapped them up. I was in the hospital for two weeks, and then they decided I was fit to return to the field. The next time I got wounded, we were pinned down in an ambush.
When was that?
June 11 in Quang Tri province. I was carrying a radio that day, so I was with the lieutenant. We were lying behind a tree that had been bombed down. Guys [on the other side of the downed tree] were screaming for us to help them. We were shooting our artillery, and the enemy was starting to shoot artillery too. I figured that when we sent in an artillery test round, which explodes like fireworks to show where the impact area is, I could get one of our guys or maybe drag a couple at once because the burst makes the enemy put their heads down. I was just getting ready to go over the tree and bam! It felt like I had been hit in the back with a baseball bat. I fell over the tree and couldn’t move. I was paralyzed from the chest down.
They grabbed me by the boots and pulled me over. I could smell the smoke coming from the artillery shrapnel in my back. It was burned flesh. I said: “Dig it out. I don’t care what you got to do, dig it out.” They took a bayonet, and they dug in and popped the shrapnel, which was about the size of a 50-cent coin and about a half-inch thick. It had bruised my spine. Within 15 minutes I was able to use my arms and legs again.
After the battle was over, I was lying on the ground and they were putting stuff on the hole in my back.
The lieutenant came over, knelt down and said: “Taylor, I know this is your second Purple Heart. You have every right to expect to go back. But your buddies really need you because we are so short. If you’ll just hang with it, we’ll get you out of here in a few days, as soon as the replacements come out.” I was kind of important because I was a radio operator, a job that’s not easy to learn because there is a certain language [of code words]. I said: “Yes sir, I’ll stay. If I can get fixed up good enough, I’ll stay.”
Well, I had another injury. When I got hit, it snapped my head back, much like whiplash, which caused the vertebrae in my cervical spine to protrude into my spinal cord. I told the lieutenant, “I can’t hold my head up with that steel pot [helmet] on,” so they put a couple of green towels under my chin to hold my head up.
That day one guy was missing in action. Four days later we went back—we always went back to find our dead and wounded— and I got shot twice.
How did that happen?
The enemy knows we always come back. We were going down this hill looking for our missing in action, and they ambushed us. I covered our guys one by one as they got out. I fired and kept the enemy machine gunner’s head down. When the last guy went by he was supposed to go up about 10 meters, stop, lay down a base of fire, and under his cover I would go about 10 meters past him, and set up a base of fire so he could go back up the hill. When I called, “Cover! Cover!” he was supposed to start firing, but no one started firing. I looked back and everyone was gone. I was alone.
I’m shooting at a guy in a bunker who’s shooting a .51-caliber machine gun, a very powerful gun. I’ve only got two magazines left, 18 rounds in each. I fired my last two clips into the hole to hopefully get this guy’s head down and give me a chance to do an evasive maneuver where you bend over as low as you can and run in a zigzag. I started to do that and go back up the hill. All of a sudden, to my left I hear an AK-47. A sniper had flanked me, climbed a tree. So now I’m in a crossfire. The guy at the machine gun shot me through the left foot. It entered my arch and exited the ball of my foot. The guy from the tree shot me in my right leg. It entered the inside of my leg and exited on the outside.
I fell to the ground. Here’s what saved my life: I got shot in the foot with a tracer bullet, which has a chemical that shows you where its going and helps direct your fire. The chemical burns as the machine gun bullet travels through the air, and the heat cauterized my foot wound, so my left foot didn’t bleed.
But my right leg was gushing. Two bones were sticking out the side of my leg, which had a hole in it the size of a grapefruit. I took the shoelace off my left boot, put a tourniquet on above the knee. I couldn’t stand to see my bones lying out on the ground. So I lay on my back, kicked with my left heel and clawed with my hands as I moved to straighten my leg out. The bones went back in the hole.
I crawled up the hill. The jungle weeds were 3 or 4 feet high and the enemy couldn’t see me, or they would have just kept shooting me. But I started to become blind. I had lost too much blood. I leaned back against a tree. My mom and dad had given me a St. Christopher’s medal that I wore on my dog tag chain. I put my hand inside that chain like in a sling, and I said, “Oh God, if this is the way I’m supposed to go, I’m ready to go.” I was dying. I was dying.
And a few minutes later I could hear someone going “Taylor.” Not yelling it, but kind of whispering it. “Taylor, where are you? Taylor.”
How did they get you out?
They took some limbs out of trees, cut them up with a machete, took two poncho liners and made a makeshift carrying cot and got me to a medevac helicopter.
Originally published in the February 2015 issue of Vietnam. To subscribe, click here.
