this day I wonder if he went for it.  I hope so.
As the chopper lifted off, they left the ramp down.  I could see the few people still on the hill and my heart went out to them.  There weren't enough there to fight off another attack and I hoped they would be reinforced quickly.  The sight of that hill fading in the distance was like leaving a world that I would never see again.  Twenty-five years later, in the last scene of the movie, "Platoon", that moment would be brought back as if it had happened yesterday.
From there, things get sketchy.  I think I was flown to Quang Tri, because the airport we landed at was all concrete and there was a large medical facility there.  Body bags seemed to carpet the tarmac as far as the eye could see.  It reminded me of the "Atlanta Scene" in the movie, "Gone With the Wind".  I realized the battle had reached far beyond our little Hill. 
Later that afternoon, I was shot up with drugs and put in a ground ambulance.  The next thing I remember is waking up in an inflatable hospital ward and told I was in Phu Bai.  I noticed someone had installed a complicated splint and new bandages on my right leg. 

The next morning I was put to sleep again.  Later that day I woke up in a hospital bed in Da Nang.  I looked over to my left and saw a Vietnamese guy.  His wrists and ankles were shackled to the corners of his bed and as the fog cleared in my mind, I realized he was a prisoner of war!  Having recently discovered, first hand, how serious the Communist Vietnamese were about making it clear that I was an unwelcome guest in their country, I called a nurse and was granted my request for a bed somewhere other than the prison section.  Despite my seemingly more secure surroundings, laying in that bed and listening to VC Rockets exploding in the distance was not conducive to sleep.

I spent a couple of days in Da Nang when they came at me with the needles again.  I knew this meant another trip, but this time I tried to stay awake.  I knew I was being shipped to Japan and I wanted to experience the moment of lifting off of Vietnamese soil.  I remember being loaded through the aft ramp of a C-141 Star Lifter but I was asleep before the engines started.

When I woke up I was on a stretcher looking out the window of a Huey helicopter, a couple of thousand feet over the outskirts of Tokyo.  A bright layer of snow covered the city and it was at that moment that I had my first sense of being safe, since the attack on our hill.

I think I spent a week in the 249th Army General Hospital before being loaded aboard another C-141 for San Francisco, where I spent two days before being flown down to San Diego and then bussed to Camp Pendelton Naval Hospital.

I remember how strange it seemed to me, to be on a stretcher while heading North in Interstate 5, through all the towns I had driven through when the most important question of the day was which beach would afford the best combination of hot surf and good girls…. Or was it the other way around?  People were just driving along as if there were no war.

I saw a VW bus pull up next to us, covered with painted peace symbols and flowers.  There must have been ten kids in it, all decorated in the "flower children" icons of the times… all around my age.  Two girls hung out the windows, flipping us the finger and screaming profanities at us.  A long haired guy stood up through the sun-roof and threw a full beer can, smashing the window next to my head and spreading glass all over my stretcher. 

Thus began what would be a 25 year struggle between what I wanted to believe about America and humanity and what the evidence seemed to show to the contrary.  For decades I was plagued by a resentment fueled by the echoes of supreme sacrifice on LZ Russell, mixed with the squealing self-righteousness of those who would criminalize the very people who possessed the heroic willingness to risk their lives to serve the higher ideals of our country.  I saw how the selfish would promote and extend such wars for no better reason than to increase their financial profits, achieve their political ambitions or simply to add more tinsel to their pious false image.  I watched a foolish attempt to restore normalcy to a shocked and divided nation, as our government shamefully swept the Vietnam Veteran under the rug and yielded to the denial born of cowards and fueled by the pious.  Oh yes, I was a very angry person.

At this writing, I am 52 years old and 31 years have passed since the night the world changed.  Oh, the echoes of LZ Russell are still there, but not as strong as they used to be. Thankfully, the years have brought wisdom which allowed me to see that it is impossible to pass judgment on even the absurdly horrific events, or the people who make them happen.  The advancement of human spirit is built upon the experience it gains from living in the product of it's decisions.  The experience of LZ Russell has touched hundreds of people through me and I am sure countless thousands more through everyone who survived.  I can see, clearly, that those kids on LZ Russell did not suffer or die in vein.  They reach out, even today, and cause all who know of them to look within themselves, if even for a moment.  As long as we can do that, then we can know that eventually we will see what is there… the true nature of their being.  When we see that, there will be no more war.