>Tough to say which one put me closest to death. THere are the wrong place/wrong time kinds (round fired by a weapon on a tripod about 2k yards buzzed past my ear and flipped my hair before striking the embankment I was climbing and making a good portion of it magically disappear and then...after a few seconds...rain down on me).<
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I can relate to that. May 68 south of Saigon my Infantry Company walked up to a battalion strength unit of NVA at a hamlet. I was a few hundred feet from some dug in heavy MG bunkers and was relieved to see a Huey gunship banking in a turn to fire on it. Then to my horror I saw a volley of 2.75 rockets fire from the gunship with one dropping short coming towards my position. I buried my face and the rocket hit a few feet behind me punching shrapnel thru my chest taking down a lung and thru my leg. We were pinned down by heavy fire for 8 hours with no chance of extraction and with only 1 lung working was the longest 8 hrs of my life. They were finally able to get some armor in behind us and get the wounded a mile back for dustoff. I was 18 at the time.
WOW! First, let me thank you for your service. I can’t imagine going through THAT whole scenario (what you saw and heard before the shells hit) as an adult let alone an 18 year old. Eight hours with one lung - that had to be worse than anything I can imagine -fighting for every breath while the battle goes on and not knowing if/when help would come if you’d still be alive to see ‘em or etc. You don’t mention much about the shrapnel and pain. Hades on Earth! I recall reading two Vietnam POW books that both referenced that location. One was titled “The Climate of Hell” and the other was “When Hell Was in Session.” And of course War is Hell - yes fighting for every breath with that going on and not knowing how it was going to ‘end’ for you - that sounds like Hell.
I was just a 14 year old in a neighbor’s backyard when some fool figured that his high powered rifle/tripod setup meant he had to walk all the way down the range to see if he hit his target and that little sapling near him, 60 degrees from the direction of his target was just so conveniently close and wouldn’t it be cool to see a sapling collapse! Apparently he didn’t think that the bullet would travel beyond the sapling?