so many before me fall.
Besides, I didn’t see the flash. The round must’ve already been in the air.
“I will not die here.”
Others might, but not I.
I said it under my breath during lulls in firefights.
“I will not die here.”
I said it as I walked out of the company’s perimeter on eight-man night patrols deep into the terrifying jungle.
“I will not die here.”
I said it as I lay on my back three hundred meters from the company’s barb-wired perimeter on two-man listening posts as enemy soldiers moved in green shadows around us.
“I will not die here.”
I said it as a promise, as a vow to myself against the war, as a pledge to my own allegiance.
I said it over and over to keep humping down the trail each day.
“I will not die…”
Not here.
Not in this god-forsaken country a world away from my wife and home.
Not here in this sick excuse for a war.
Not here where a life wasted is ever a bullet or trip wire away.
Not here.
Not now.
I said it after the mortar exploded and left me a crumpled heap on the ground.
I mouthed it in half-breaths.
“I will not die here.”
I repeated it over and over like a mantra as I waited for the medevac to come.
“I will not die here.”
I said it as I watched my buddies pull a poncho over the FNG’s body parts.
I said it as blood pushed the air out of my punctured lung.
I said it as I looked at my reflection in Mike’s eyes—a bloody, ripped face I’ve never seen.
I said it as I couldn’t breathe.
“I will not die here.”
I said it silently as I started to slip into irreversible shock from loss of blood.
“I will not die……
.here…”
Scissors cut through my bloody jungle fatigues, and quick fingers peel the pants and shirt apart to get at the wounds. Gauze bandages and tape are wrapped tightly around both my legs. Butterfly bandages pull the ragged gashes in my neck and head together. Compresses are taped to deep wounds in my left forearm and chest.
“I…I can’t breathe, Doc.”
“Okay. Let me get an I.V. in you.”
“I’m fucked up ain’t I, Doc?”
“You’re alright. Just hold on, Radio. You’re going back to The World. What’s the ETA on the medevac?”
“Ten to fifteen.” barked Mike.
“As soon as I get an I.V. in him and a chest tube, we need to run him down to the LZ.”
I was down to half-breaths now, sips of air as if I were floating on my back in a turbulent sea. Waves jostled and broke over my head.
But the short gasps weren’t enough. I needed more, more breath, more air, more than my collapsed lung could hold. I was hyperventilating, drowning in my own blood.
I close my eyes. The voices around me fade, and I drift into a peaceful half-sleep.
“I will not die here.”
“Hey, Radio, wake the fuck up!”
I open my eyes as a needle pushes into my vein. An icy, burning liquid shoots through my right arm. My shirt is cut off and pulled away, and then a blade edge presses between two ribs. The blade pierces my skin sharply and stabs in. I can feel the metal inside me, but the pain is muted, far off, as if my punctured body were no longer mine. Through the numbness, I feel a tube slide through my ribs and into my chest. After a few minutes, the pressure on my lung begins to ease and I am able to breathe again.
“Alright, let’s get him down to the LZ.”
Mike, Lee, and a new guy pick up the stretcher while Doc holds the I.V. bag. Pain shoots through my wounds as they double-time me to the landing zone.
“I will not die here!”—but my voice is drowned out by the whirr of the rotor blades.
We rise slowly above Firebase Pershing, the olive drab entrails of the chopper like a cocoon around me, and out the doorway, the sparks of distant flares.
I know I need to stay conscious to survive, but my eyes slowly close, and the dark washes over me like black blood.
All I want to do is sleep, to let my body go.
Rotor blades chop through the heavy air. In the distance, I hear B-52’s carpet-bombing the Ho Bo Woods—boom! boom! boom! boom! as the thousand pound bombs thud and explode against the wet earth.
Through the rotors’ whirr, I hear the pilot’s muffled voice talking to someone at the Army hospital in Chu Chi.
“Affirmative. One W.I.A. Multiple shrapnel wounds. That’s affirm. Head, neck, chest, left arm, both legs. Grave. ETA about fifteen.”
“Hey! Wake up, soldier! What’s your name?”
The medic crouches over me and holds my face in his thick hands.
“Wha…?”
“I can’t hear you! What’s your name?”
“Radio.”
“Okay, Radio, what’s your mother’s name?”
“What?”
“Your mother? Your mother? Open your eyes!!”
“Lil…Lillian.”
“Where you from?”
“L.A.”
“Alright Radio from L.A., you’re not going to sleep on me are you?”
No answer. I’m back in that secret room behind my eyelids where the chopper’s whirr and the medic’s voice fade away.
No tunnel of white light to go through, no dead buddies and relatives waiting to greet me on the other side—nothing but a silent, dreamless sleep.
“I will not die...”
“I will not…”
“What company are you from?”
“How old are you?”
“How long have you been in country?”
His questions are staccato now, a rapid fire of question after question—rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat like a fifty caliber machine gun—meant to pull me back, to open the door to my secret room and pull me out.
“Wake up, Radio!”
I want to stay where I am, but I know if I stay here too long I will not return—“I will not die here.”
I open my eyes to see the medic’s face leaning over me, his green flight helmet starring down at me like a gigantic fly.
“Nineteen.” I mutter. “Bravo.”
There were no brain surgeons in Chu Chi.
The doctors and nurses who hovered over me with their tubes, clips, gauze, tape, and sutures stopped the bleeding from my neck, and the artery in my left arm.
They stabilized my heart rate and blood pressure and got me off the border between life and irreversible shock, but the