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The battery was scheduled to lift off at ten o’clock the following morning. Hoping there might be an early bird I could get my advance crew on, I took Gunny Mac and the three FDC personnel over to Charlie Med at seven in the morning. There we settled down next to a sandbagged bunker and found ourselves in the old hurry-up-and-wait mode to which we were so accustomed. Unfortunately, over here away from the battery, we did not have anything to do but think. I was soon dealing with butter®ies in the stomach, again being reminded of the pregame jitters that used to come in my football days. Also contributing to our discomfort was the proximity of the makeshift morgue, hardly more than a few pieces of canvas hung over a wood frame to screen bodies from general view. When the wind puffed, the canvas would ®ap, and plastic body bags containing dead Marines could be seen laid out in a row. The tattered state of that ¤nal way station with all its starkness sobered us, to say the least. No one made small talk as each man dealt with his own inner feelings, and the waiting dragged on. Another thirty minutes, seemingly forever, passed before we ¤nally heard choppers coming in from the south. Hoping one was for us, we automatically began gathering our gear. About that time a corpsman from Charlie Med came running over, quickly explained that they were shorthanded, and asked us to help them unload some medevacs. We, of course, dropped our gear and ran over to the landing pad as a big double-rotored helicopter settled down. Following the corpsmen, we ap15 LZ Torch LZ Torch proached the rear of the big chopper in order to run up the rear ramp as soon as it dropped. It opened slowly, and there before us was a bloody pile of men either sitting up or sprawled out all the way to the front of the aircraft. In mild shock at the sight, I focused on one of the crewmen dragging a Marine down the ramp. His head bounced up and down on the deck, and my ¤rst reaction was to knock the crewman away. I do not know what I had been thinking, but when I reached down to pick up the Marine, I saw that the top of his head was gone and that only a cavity remained where his brain had been. It ¤nally hit me that he was dead. I still did not want him dragged like a sack of meat, however, so I picked up his body in my arms as if it were a child. Every bone in his body must have been broken, and his limbs ®apped and sloshed like I was carrying jelly. Carrying him as gently as possible, I took him over to the morgue and laid him on the ground inside. Then, with tears running down my face, I returned to the chopper and helped unload the rest of the dead and wounded. Returning to our gear by the bunker, I found the butter®ies in my stomach were now merely a sick, numb sensation. Looking at the silent faces of my guys, I knew this was affecting them, too. We needed to get out of here in a hurry, so I went over to the command bunker to try to¤nd out what was taking so long. As it turned out, the casualties were coming in from the operation we were about to join, and the choppers we had just unloaded had returned for more wounded. Fortunately, however , the infantry now decided they wanted our batteries out there in a hurry and promised us a ride on the next bird out. Rejoining my men, I calmly told them what was going on, but my inner self struggled with the trauma of the moment. Never had I felt such stress. Beyond a doubt we were going into a hot zone. I imagined we must be experiencing something similar to what Marines in World War II must have felt while waiting for the landing crafts that would storm the beaches in the Paci¤c. Maybe our situation was even worse because we had just unloaded the carnage from the zone we were going into. It was just wait and pray; I genuinely tried to make my peace with God. During all this and for the sake of the men with me, I acted...

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