This is my buddy Mike writing a letter to his family.  Although he was only 19, he already had a wife and kid that he was constantly showing everyone pictures of.  When we first met, we had only been in-country four days and had just gotten off the truck for our first duty: “Grunts” (infantry) in a provisional rifle company that was stationed in wet, rat and insect infested underground bunkers along a river with the enemy on the other side–hardly what we’d expected and certainly not what we’d hoped for.  This was at the beginning of the bloody Tet offensive of ’68 and we were both scared out of our minds, certain we were going to die at any moment.   But misery loves company and we hit it off immediately.  We stood guard in the mud filled bunkers together, we went on our first patrol together and we got drunk together on the foul tasting Vietnamese beer with a big tiger on the label called Tiger beer--we all called it “tiger piss.”

After only a few weeks of grunt duty, Mike got reassigned to the company office in his regular MOS: an “office pogue” (slang for what is essentially a clerk).  It was a far cry from the front lines where he had been and I still was.  But most every night, he would sneak down to my bunker and keep my partner and me company.  Night after night, week after week, we would talk for hours.  There wasn’t much else to do.   We were such opposites yet we became very close. 

After almost two months, Mike came down one night all excited.  The Commanding Officer in the H&S company office where he worked had been denied R&R (rest and relaxation: in the civilian world, it’s known as a vacation) because the office files were so completely disorganized.  The C.O. was a young first Lieutenant with a new bride waiting for him in Hawaii and he was pissed.  The office was understaffed and barely able to keep up with all the daily demands placed upon it.  Mike took him my personnel file that showed I had high test scores and some college and suggested I might be a good person to help get things in order.  

The C.O. went for it and had already started the process of having me transferred by the time Mike gave me the good news: my own cot inside a dry tent (we called them hooches—the Marine Corps has a special name for everything) with a mosquito net, electricity and even, a tape recorder for music.  This seemed like heaven compared to the damp sand bag underground bunkers I had “lived in” for over two months, sleeping in shifts at night and going on patrols during the day.  No longer did I have to share living quarters with centipedes that looked more like anacondas and rats that nibbled on our ears as we tried to sleep.  I jumped for joy.

My most vivid memory of Mike occurred late one night when we were suddenly awakened by the loud explosions of mortars crashing all around us.  They were coming in so close, rocks tore through the tent and I could smell the powder.  Fortunately, it had just finished raining and the mortar sank into the wet ground too far to inflict much damage—the mud absorbing most of the impact.  Had it not been for the rain, all of us in that hooch would have been hamburger.  I never saw Mike move so fast in my life.  As the other guys in our hooch pushed and shoved trying to get out the hatch closest to the bunker, Mike had already disappeared out the hatch on the other end before I could even get out of my rack.  I flew outside and tried to catch up with him.  

When I came running around the corner, Mike was laying in a motionless heap in the mud.  I was completely overcome with grief.  I had been in-country for about four months and I was no stranger to dead bodies—even of friends—but nothing before had ever made this kind of impact on me.  The mortars were exploding more furiously than ever but I just knelt next to him, paralyzed.  I didn’t cry or pray—I was stunned.  I just remember being consumed by a sense of profound loss--a realization that a very special bond would no longer be.

I tried to say something--as much to myself as to him--but all that came out was an anguished babble.  I was totally oblivious to the danger around me yet I couldn’t have been shaking more violently if a squad of V.C. with drawn bayonets was right on top of me.  Again I tried to say something, but nothing came out this time.  As I knelt there shaking furiously and paralyzed with grief, he suddenly came to and sat up as if nothing had happened.  It was the closest thing to the Second Coming I think I will ever experience.  I was so thrilled, I reached over and hugged him and tried to explain how devastated I had been.  Mike started to say something too but the mortars were still coming in as heavy as ever and the peril of our unprotected situation suddenly registered with both of us. 

We jumped to our feet and started to run to the nearest bunker when, BAM, we were flung to the ground: we had run head first into a rope strung between the two hooches that was used as a clothesline—the same rope that knocked Mike to the ground unconscious only moments earlier.  Dazed and cursing, we scrambled to the bunker.  It was full of other guys and the in-coming mortars were landing practically on top of us.  The noise was deafening and dirt was falling through the cracks above us.  I was embarrassed by my earlier emotional display but I was so overjoyed that I tried to make little jokes about what had happened.  The others were very scared and did not appreciate my feeble attempts at humor.  But for me, as I glanced over at Mike with his goofy grin and the bright red rope burn across his forehead, it seemed like the happiest day of my life.

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