A minute later there was a tremendous explosion, an airburst right over the company command post (CP). We ran up there. Captain Ryan (the CO), the executive officer, the company radioman and the company corpsman were all killed. The company runner lay talking calmly. I held him. He asked for a cigarette and asked if he would be OK. Sure, I said. The back of his head was completely gone. Shortly afterward, he died.

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We found Lightning in the CP bunker. The others had been outside, filling sandbags. He was sitting on a cot, apparently knocked out. We shook him and checked his pulse. No pulse, yet no sign of any wound. I took off his helmet and held it up to the setting sun. A tiny sunbeam poked through. We searched his scalp and found a needle-sized shrapnel hole. He got his Purple Heart.

After they flew his body out, somebody asked if we had recovered any money off his body. No, we hadn’t. We wanted to send the money home to Lightning’s mother before the rear support troops discovered it, but we couldn’t locate it. For infantrymen, the indignities of combat didn’t end with death.

Another Marine we lost was Sergeant Walter Singleton, who won the Medal of Honor posthumously. He was company supply sergeant and had been a machine-gun section leader. He raced by our mortar position in the tough battle for the hedgerow-lined village of Phu An. When Andy Anderson was carried back wounded from his machine gun, Sergeant Singleton raced to the gun and ‘took 10.’ They found his body surrounded by the bodies of several NVA soldiers. I didn’t know him well, but it was a privilege to have met him.

As for Captain Ryan, the CO who was killed by the airburst at Con Thien, I had known him for some time. When I had attended Mass at Camp Carroll one Sunday, another Marine and I tried to warn Captain Ryan about his pew. The church was a tent with the side flaps rolled up, the altar at one end, and benches for pews. The two of us sat at the outside of two pews, close to the trench outside in case incoming artillery interrupted the Mass. Captain Ryan sat right in the center in front of the altar. We explained to him that there was about a two-second difference between his position and ours, which could easily mean his life. He just laughed.

Once an airstrike north of Con Thien landed short and exploded all the mines in the minefield outside the wire. The concussion collapsed several bunkers on that side. One Marine was crushed to death as he slept on a cot and thousands of pounds of sandbags fell onto his chest. Captain Ryan muttered that the Army would have flown in prefab bunkers, then put sandbags on top of them.

When I talked to him about extending my tour six months to get 30 days in Australia, then an early out from the Marines with less than three months to do after I got home, he dissuaded me. You’ve done your part, he said. Go to college, come back in as an officer. What I couldn’t explain even to him was that I felt closer to my men than I did to my own brothers.

After Captain Ryan’s death at Con Thien, an event occurred that changed my mind about extending my tour. Two weeks before the end of my tour, one of my men accidentally killed one Marine and wounded another. He raised the gun’s elevation but did not add an increment. Our new guys were an engineer, a cook and an embassy guard. We dry-fired every chance we got because they weren’t experienced mortarmen.

The gunner and I had to stand in front of the battalion legal officer and give statements about what happened, as well as ideas on how it could be prevented in the future. The major recommended we carry land-line phones and use communications wire to hook up to each gun. I tried to explain to him that a mortar squad might be one Marine carrying the tube (without bipods) with six mortar rounds. The snuffies might carry one mortar round each. But he insisted. I realized that the major had no idea what the war was about in the bush. I decided to go home.

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