head was supposed to be. With the size of the wound I doubt that Mark felt a thing. But he was stone dead when his body hit the ground. It was then that I discovered that a bullet had struck the can of pineapple in my pocket. All I got was a had bruise - not a wound.

Now our grim task was to get all the bodies back to the area where we could be air lifted out. It had grown dark in the meantime, and we were having a bit of trouble with the strikers. They were all for getting out now and to hell with worrying about dead men.  Frank was determined to leave no one and was prowling the area with a flashlight, which 1 believed to be very brave or very dumb. 1 thought for certain he would draw a burst of fire and become another casualty. The strikers were all moaning about having to carry the dead bodies. I was all for shooting the sorry bastards myself, but Frank, the cooler head,  got it organized and we started down the mountainside in darkness and a driving rain.  I am convinced that the North Viets thought we were all absolutely crazy and that is why they did not attack us on the way down.  That was a long and difficult night - still vivid in my memory. Mark was a big guy and it was hard to carry his body.  The guys kept switching off with each other. Some one would check with the Viets and be told all was OK.  But when we reached the bottom area, there were no dead Viet bodies. Their loyal comrades had simply dumped the bodies and left them to rot in the jungle. Well, we were not about to go back and recover them. We found that Haley and Ed Corpus had remained behind with a small group of strikers to provide some protection for us. As we all set up a perimeter and tried to settle in for the night, we placed Mark's body in the center of the area.  During the night I, and I'm certaul others, went to his body to say our final goodbye to him.

The next morning we heard and saw a small plane in the air above us. It was Major Reed directing us to hurry and go here,   go there, probablv not realizing that it looked a whole lot easier at 3000 feet up than it did on the ground. I  finally became so angry that I took a BAR from a striker and fired the entire 20 round magazine at the plane. That got the Major's attention and he went away. We finally  got to an open area where we could be picked up by the helicopter and we went back to Kham Duc.  A sad and sorry bunch indeed.

        It was there that Doc Worley had the terrible task of preparing Mark's body for shipment to Danang and then to Saigon and eventually home. None of us ever saw Mark again. Mark was a idealistic  young man who longed to be a heroic warrior.  What he did not realize was that while there are warriors,  there are no heroes. Still ,we all believe that Mark died the way he wanted to. But that does not make his loss any easier to bear. Now his name is on the black wall in Washington D. C., along with many, many others who perished in Viet Nam for no good reason.
 
 

to pg 5