Anchor Struck

I want to get back to sharing my military experiences, but as an American and American-Canadian, I simply must weigh in on Trump’s newest tantrum, the trade war. Overall, I urge Aging Orange to accept Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s invitation to kiss Ford’s ample ass. That would bring things down to the juvenile level where Donny Jay thrives, what with the abundant ALL CAPS and infinite !!!!!!!!’s that infest his X account. I want to say that his twittering has the emotional heft of an eighth grader, but that’s really not fair to real eighth graders.

The shit that Trump and his lackeys are spewing is predictably lame, witness his unofficial renaming of Lake Ontario to Lake America. However, I am compelled to call bullshit on U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffey for claiming that Canada has the highest euthanasia rate in the world. It’s true that we have an assisted suicide program, but our rate is lower than that in the Netherlands. I’m hard-pressed to understand how this would justify raising tariffs; but, Sean, since you brought it up, shouldn’t Canada raise tariffs on America since the U.S. had a higher suicide rate than we do?

Anyhoo, back to 1968 Vietnam. I posted (see “made it!” below) on July 12th, my birthday, about my most memorable birthday, highlighted by a shelling from the Viet Cong. I was at Delta Med, a M*A*S*H-type unit — minus the laugh track — for two weeks, while the Navy ship I was stationed on was in the Philippines for repairs and resupply. Delta Med was at Dong Ha Base just south of the DMZ in Quang Tri Province, quite the hot spot. Just before I got to the ship, the battalion of Marines we supported had engaged the enemy near there and lost 81 with 300 wounded.

Delta Med took Marine and Navy casualties as well as civilians. One day a group of villagers came in. Their hamlet had been hit with our napalm bombs. Napalm adheres to skin. I watched a corpsman use a spoon to dig some of it from the arm of a screaming child. Another child also had napalm burns plus he’d been caught in a stampede of water buffalo caused by the bombs. There really wasn’t much of him left. He was in shock and fading fast. The corpsmen set him aside, near where I was waiting as a litter bearer. He looked at me, smiled and died.

I was serving stretcher duty one night when a chopper full of casualties swooped in. A doctor checked one of the wounded Marines and yelled “Graves!” at me. That meant to take him to the morgue in a separate building near Triage. I don’t know if our customer was really tall or if he was just placed awkwardly on the stretcher, but he kicked me in the ass all the way to Graves. It was eerie.

We usually had just two litter bearers per stretcher. However, once I saw a casualty with five, one on each handle of the stretcher and one holding in the casualty’s brain. That wasn’t the weirdest thing I saw there, though. We were used to just getting parts, but one day we got a bag with just one dog tag on it and three feet inside. We had to laugh about that one.

Then there was the worst day of my life. It had been a slow day, so we were playing football near Triage. The field was mostly mud but one end zone was in the iron grating the helicopters landed on. We figured if we got tackled and cut up on the grating, it was no big deal because the equivalence of an ER was right there.

A chopper swooped in and we ran to Triage, but the bird swerved off to Graves. It didn’t land, just bounced off the ground and headed back out as the crew chief started throwing and kicking out cadavers. About a dozen or so. As the bird flew off, the crunch of each body landing grew louder.

I regard that day as the start of the PTSD I struggle with yet.