Eventually the flashes from the ridge ceased. Our enemies melted into the darkness behind their bunkers. Someone in the squad yelled, ‘Cease fire!’ Firing slowed to sporadic pops and then stopped. The jungle was thick with silence, and a gray haze of sulfur hung in the air.

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In the strange new quiet, adrenaline, or the previous noise of the fight, kept up a steady ringing in my ears. By this time I had one hell of a stomach cramp after continually rocking forward and being kicked back while firing the M-60 from such an awkward position. I did not realize that I was also bleeding from a spot at my shoulder blade. The medic was behind me, reaching over Andujar’s body.

He began pulling at my shirt, then startled me with a quick rip of the fabric. Noticing fresh blood, he began asking questions about my breathing. The wound was small, entered from behind and did not appear to have traveled very deep. I could breathe, and no air seemed to be sucking in at the wound, so he told me the grenade fragment was probably not in my lung. With a smile, he said, ‘This is your ticket to the good life…well, a couple weeks anyway.’

After a few minutes passed, and we were confident that the fight was really over, some of the squad moved forward to explore the enemy camp and blow the bunkers with C-4 plastic explosive. In situations like this, when the NVA would engage and then run, they seldom left their wounded or dead behind. Our captain came over the hill and down toward us. He asked for a body count, but the men could only report that there were bloodstains left behind in the camp.

Andujar’s body was strapped to a stiff litter and hoisted out of the jungle canopy through an opening created by one of the artillery rounds. Earlier we had placed him in a body bag, but we realized the closest LZ was about three klicks through the jungle. None of the troops wanted to drag the body to the LZ where the resupply chopper could pick it up. In the Army, if you want to go by the book, a body is to be transported on a supply vehicle, and only wounded soldiers are to be extracted by medevac. The officers decided to claim that Andujar was wounded but alive, hoping to evacuate his body along with me. We took Andujar out of the body bag and strapped him to a stiff litter. The chopper crew dropped the hook and cable. He was hoisted up and out. I was the next to ride the jungle penetrator. I will never forget that trip up, fighting branches, swinging around and watching my buddies turning into ants on the jungle floor.

And I remember the ride on the dustoff, with Andujar’s body at my feet. A couple of times the chopper banked in the turns, and the litter started sliding. With the open doorway, the body could have slid right out the side of the chopper. Each time the litter started moving, the door gunner and I would catch it and drag it back to the center of the bird. After we were well on our way, I remember watching the gunner lean over and close Andujar’s eyes with two fingers. I remember how breezy, cool and free it felt in the wind up over what had been our jungle world. It was as if we were on our way to heaven on that chopper ride. Looking back, I think it was just a reaction to the easing of adrenaline and the realization that I could relax for a few days in a base camp. It was at that moment that I began to contemplate my obligation to the man’s family.

The last I remember of the sergeant was the sight of the chopper crew and base camp medics offloading his body while I walked to the operating area of the field hospital. I remember Sergeant Andujar as a muscular, quiet man of dark complexion, a man well respected by the officers and men in his platoon.

Thirty years later, on a Sunday afternoon in March 1999, our daughter Ruth and the other band members at Floresville High School were asked to play at the ceremony for the traveling Memorial Wall that had come to the local park. My wife and I went over to support her at the event, but I was not prepared for the experience of the Wall. The speakers at the ceremony were retired officers from the U.S. Air Force, and it was obvious from their remarks that they knew little of the lives of the infantrymen in Vietnam. With the old ‘flyboys’ honoring their own, my thoughts turned to life 30 years past and the brave men that I had known. I forced myself to confront memories of buddies and our wounded. Eventually, the KIAs from Delta Company, 4th Battalion, 12th Infantry of the 199th LIB began to slip quietly into my consciousness, as if they were reluctant to awaken from their sleep in some sad corner of my mind. The naming in my mind stopped on an image of Sergeant Andujar.

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