the bunker because someone roused me for guard duty, or if I’d simply wandered outside because I’d heard someone call my name.
Blood pours out my head, neck, chest, left arm and legs, drenching my jungle fatigues with a sticky wetness like warm pee.
I lay on my back, numb, the pain of my wounds not yet breaking through the shock of the explosion.
“Move!” I say to my body, “Crawl for cover!” but my body will not answer, my arms and legs beyond my words.
Blood seeps into the dry clay beneath me, forms a puddle like monsoon rain.
I am dissolving into the earth, sinking down in a warm pool.
Then a hand, hands start to pull me out, up. I see faces, flashlights with red lenses, red flames igniting my eyes.
I bounce up and down.
I am a huge insect with eight legs running toward a bunker.
I look up at the faces lit by red light.
I see fear, fear of death, fear of bad karma and bad luck, fear that whoever called to me may soon call to them.
And now I too am afraid, afraid of what they see, afraid of the bloody face reflected in their eyes.
“Hang in there, Radio!” Mike, our platoon leader, screams. “You’re alright!”
His order will not rouse me. I can no longer hear his commands.
“How’s the FNG?” someone asks.
“Gone. Mortar must’ve hit right where he was standing.”
“You find a body for his tags?”
“Uhhh…no. Not much there, you know.”
“Keep looking. Find something to tag. Alpha one, this is Bravo-two-twelve. Request medevac. Affirmative. One. Yes, just one. Serious. How you doin’, Ace?”
“I can’t breathe.”
“Medic!!! Where the fuck is that medic? Just relax, Radio, we’ll have you out of here in ten minutes. You see the flash?”
“No.”
“Nothing?”
“No…nothing.”
I can’t answer him. I can’t talk. I want to sleep, close my eyes and sleep, let my body fall into that pit I’ve seen 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,
