Pacifica Military History Free Sample Chapters.pmd

Free Sample Chapters 357
meters away. The M-60 gunner sprayed forty or fifty rounds into the
palm tree and then stopped. He looked down, right at me, and said, “I
think I still see the fucker.” Then he blasted the tree again with another
fifty rounds. I called up, “Jesus Christ, if that goddamn NVA is still
alive after that, don’t shoot at him again. You’re just gonna piss him
off.” The M-60 gunner looked down at me again and said, “Oh, yessir.”
Then he crawled off.
I was still trying to get a handle on the situation when, above the
sound of many M-16s and a few M-60s, I heard someone nearby yelling
threats. I climbed back up to the lip of the crater and saw our senior
corpsman, Doc Bratton, beating a Marine on the chest, swear-ing as
loud as he could, “Goddammit, you’re not gonna die! Dammit, you son
of a bitch, breathe! Breathe!”
As the firing died down—it was all ours by then—I found another
Marine lying on his rifle in another bomb crater. He was sort of kneeling
at the edge of the crater, with his arms and hands in a firing position on
his rifle, but his head was leaning against the rifle on the ground. I said,
“Are you all right, Marine?” I took him by the shoulder and pulled him
back. It was Private First Class Francis, the stutterer. His eyes and mouth
were wide open, but a second look revealed that he had been hit right in
the back of the head. He was dead. He was the first dead Marine I had
ever seen.
I called one of the corpsmen over to take care of Francis and then I
went over to see how Doc Bratton was doing with the wounded man.
Doc was beating on the man’s chest to try to keep his heart going. I saw
that the Marine was one of my best squad leaders, Corporal Pat Cochran,
formerly a semiprofessional football player, a handsome six-foot Texan
with enormous, wide shoulders. Cochran had taken a round in the initial
burst of enemy fire that sort of creased his scalp. Lance Corporal Anthony
Benedetto was kneeling right next to him when Cochran turned to him
and said, “I’m hit.” Benedetto said, “Right,” and reached around to get
a bandage. By the time Benedetto turned back, Cochran had been hit
again—right in the head. The second round had penetrated Cochran’s
skull and gone right into his brain. He was brain dead, but his body