stantly.  Later, I was crawling with someone else (I believe it was Newman) and trying to find cover.  There was an extremely loud explosion, which I later learned was a mortar that hit close by.  I remember rolling along the ground; I guess it was from the concussion of the incoming mortar.  After that I couldn't hear anything for awhile.  Then people were screaming and yelling and crying.  I remember hearing the gooks talking and I had the sense that they were all around me, everywhere.

I crawled behind a parapet wall and rolled over on my back.  My butt started burning and I realized I was wounded.  I lay on my stomach with my .45 in my hand, hearing the gooks talking.  When I looked in the sky, I saw "Puff the Magic Dragon" dropping illumination rounds.  Snoopy was firing in our support and after each loud roaring noise, I could see wavy red lines from the chopper to the ground.  I remember thinking Snoopy would fix everything.  I could see the gooks running around everywhere, talking and shouting.  As I was looking around trying to figure out what to do next, I saw a gook aiming at me with his rifle; it seemed like he was aiming at me for hours.  It was almost like slow motion as I brought my .45 around and fired… I don't know what happened next.  I'm sure I must have hit him, I just don't know.

It started getting daylight and I saw a 50 Caliber Machine Gun on the top of a hooch below us.  I remember thinking I needed to get to it, but every time I tried to climb over the wall, someone started shooting.  Some came up to me, maybe a corpsman, and said I had "all kind of meat coming out of my ass".  He dressed the wound and when I told him I was trying to get to the machine gun, he said, "I'll get the sonofabitch for you"…. And he did!  Another guy asked me if I knew how to shoot a 105.  I told him I did, but we could not get it to work properly.   Then he told me he was going to put the 50-Cal on top of a bunker and wanted me to shoot from here, to here, until he told me to stop.  And I did.  I was carried to the machine gun and someone brought me boxes of ammo.  I kept shooting the gun exactly where he told me to.  It was hard to see anything as it was still dark and smoke was everywhere.  He eventually came back and told me to stop firing.  I remember the gun was so hot, it fired four or five rounds even after I stopped.

Te next thinking I remember is being put on a med-evac chopper and going to Da Nang.  As we left the hill, I remember the chopper was full of pain;  people were crying and screaming.  I was only eighteen years old and I didn't understand why all this was happening… it seemed like a bad dream.  When I got to Da Nang, a chaplain came and asked if there was anything he could do.  I gave him a headspace gauge for a 50-Caliber Machine Gun and told him to be sure to get it back to my unit.  He said, "Son, you've got a lot more to worry about now, other than getting this tool back to your unit".  I started crying and told him he didn't understand how important this was.  It was the only gauge my unit had and he said he would take care of it.

The chaplain went around talking to other wounded Marines, while poncho liners were being pulled over heads of those who had died.  The doctor told me I was being sent to Japan and I was glad to be leaving such a God-Forsaken place.  I was carried onto a C-141 Med-Evac bird and flown to Japan, where I was put on a helicopter and flown to the hospital.  The pilot asked me if I wanted to see a little bit of Japan from the air and I told him I did.  He banked the chopper so that I could see out of the window.  The snow on the mountains was beautiful… quite a contrast to a few days before where all I could see was blood and smoke and death.

At the hospital in Japan, as I was being pushed to the operating room, a doctor bent over me and told me he was from Georgia too and I was going home.  I heard someone say, "He's got blood in his urine," and someone else say, "He has shrapnel close to his kidney.  Take him back to X-ray".  One nurse told me she was "From Georgia and everything was going to be okay".  I was in the hospital for three months and I visited Newman, (I think that was who he was), who had lost both his legs.  We talked and cried over why all this was happening.  I remember lying in the hospital bed on my stomach at night with silent tears coming down my face, as I did not want to wake the others in the ward.  During the time I was in the hospital, someone called my Mother and told here I and been killed.  She thought I was dead until she got a letter from me.  There were some good times in the hospital, mainly getting to know some of the staff.  I got to be friends with two corpsmen and went on liberty with them when I got better.

After my recuperation, I was sent back to Vietnam to Golf Battery, 3/12.  I raise hell, because I wanted to go back to Hotel Battery and within a few hours, I was there.  I returned to LZ Russell where things looked very different because the SeaBees were concreting the parapets.  After a short time, I contracted Malaria and had to go to Da Nang for treatment.  I stand there approximately a month and then returned to LZ Russell, where I worked in the XO pit at night.  My job was to wake the XO officer when a fire mission came in.

These are the main things I can remember.  Everything may not be in the exact order, but this is my best recollection.

Bobby Daniels
02/28/2001

I remember one evening, I was sitting around the hooch I shared with Doc.  I was fortunate to be sharing a hooch with Doc.  Everyone took good care of him because you never knew when you would need him and I reaped some of the benefits of that.  Anyway, we had several rat holes in our hooch just like everybody did.  Whenever you saw a rat hole, you tried to block the hole or kill the rat.  That night, while Doc was out, I found a hole and filled it with as much shaving cream as it would hold.  When Doc came back, we chatted