Tag: wounded

We have been ordered to take Hill 875. The hill has been bombarded by air power and artillery for the past three days! The ground shakes under our feet and our ears ring from the deafening sounds of battle. We are at the base line of this hill yet the Vietnamese continue to come down off this mountain at night and attack our positions! If we do not take this hill then we will all die! As a leader I know the only way we will take this hill is to send our best men up this hill. This means our best men will die! This is the way life works! God gave His best shall we then do less? I have tried in a thousand ways to take this hill without loss of life but the longer we wait the more American’s die! The only solution is to charge up this mountain and take it for America. We should put a U.S. consulate on this hill after we finish our job! It is difficult to maintain morale here with all those radical liberal college professors and their students fighting against us back home! They have joined Ho Chi Minh and his ideology of murder! It is better they stay back in America than be here with us where they would get us all killed! No Monday morning quarterbacks out here! You make a mistake out here and you do not see Monday! I wish our politicians understood this? I have to leave enough troops behind to recover our bodies and remove our wounded off this mountain to our helicopters to take them back to base camp. If I lead the charge the good men will follow! Freedom is cheap to those who have never paid the price! Those who lead the rebel’s back in America against this war can only do so by the freedoms obtained by those that went before them and paid the sacrifices to win victory over our enemies! Another officer got fragged yesterday? We must wait until daylight before the charge to allow the enemy to return to their positions on top of the mountain. The sun has now broken the dawn and now I must lead the charge up this mountain! The first one hundred yards was uneventful? I figure they figured we were not stupid enough to do this! They were wrong! Then they opened up with all they had! Machine guns, rocket launchers, grenades, mortars! It was rockets red glare, bombs bursting in air! We just kept running forward up the mountain! I kept getting hit with tree bark in the face from bullets cutting up the trees! The other problem was dirt hitting me in the face from bullets dancing around my feet! We would run right past gun positions and then break off behind them and clean them out! We got to the top of Hill 875 and planted the American flag on the top of the hill. We claimed this hill for America and Liberty! It is Christmas now and we count our Blessings we have obtained through our sacrifices and God’s sacrifice! We do not serve a bloodless Christ and we will never win a bloodless war! Squad Leader, Screaming Eagles, United States Marines, Christmas, Vietnam, 1967