Sheepdog Tip of the Day, After Combat tip 75
Tim said he had never told anyone this story. This is a statement that should always set off alarm bells, since it usually means that the person has not made peace with the memory and the experience has been eating away at him for many years. Tim was in an infantry unit in Vietnam. On one occasion they had been out "rocking and rolling" all day, and then that night he was assigned extra duty, which kept him from sleeping. The next day he was out doing the same as the day before, and then that night the company went into a defensive position on a hilltop. There were two covered and concealed avenues of approach, two wooded draws that came close to the top of the hill. Although he was exhausted, Tim was ordered to go out with three other troops at dusk to establish an observation post (O.P.) as part of the security plan. They were ordered to establish their O.P. in one of these draws, and another group of four soldiers would set up an O.P. in the wooded draw on the other side of the hill. So at the last flickering of twilight they slipped out to their position, scratched out shallow foxholes, and hunkered down. Tim said he was so tired that he turned to one of the other individuals in his position and said, "I had duty last night and I didn't get any sleep." He slipped off his watch, which had a luminous dial, and handed it to him. "Just give me 30 minutes and then wake me up and I'll give you a break." The soldier agreed, and Tim went to sleep. Tim says that he had no idea how long he had been asleep before he felt a hand cover his mouth and someone shaking his shoulder. "I woke up," he said. "I groped for my weapon, and by the moonlight trickling through the forest canopy, I can see this guy pointing down the hill. When I look, I see North Vietnamese soldiers, lots of them, crawling past us and moving toward the perimeter. I pulled him over to me, and whispered in his ear, 'Fire their asses up and run.'" The soldier obediently popped up and emptied a magazine of ammunition from his M-16 on full automatic at point-blank range, and then all hell broke loose. It was a major regimental attack coming at them from multiple directions. Tim and one other man went running into the perimeter shouting, "It's the O.P. It's the O.P. We're coming in. Don't shoot." As soon as they got in, a corporal grabbed Tim and asked where was the rest of his O.P. Tim realized that just he and one other individual had made it in. Again the corporal asked him where the other men were. Then, "You left them out there," the corporal screamed. "You left them." For the rest of the night the battle raged with artillery and air strikes all around the perimeter. Tim says he spent the entire night behind an M-60 machine gun, firing all around the area of the O.P. to keep the enemy at bay. At dawn, the North Vietnamese finally pulled out. At first light Tim went with a patrol to check the O.P.s. The men assigned to the O.P. on the other side of the hill all had their throats cut. They had fallen asleep on guard and had paid the price. Then they went to Tim's O.P. and found the two remaining members of his team. One was dead and the other was badly wounded. "I jumped into the hole," Tim said, and I saw that the wounded one was the guy I had given my watch to. He tried to give it back to me, but I said, "No buddy, you keep it. You keep it." To this very day, I can't wear a watch. Tim's wife had been sitting beside him as he told his story and when he finished, she said, "It's been almost 20 years and I never knew this. I never understood why you wouldn't wear a watch." Tim looked at me with pain in his eyes and tears running down his cheeks, and said, "Do you understand? I abandoned those men. I left them." I shook my head and said, "Tim, listen to me. I'm an airborne ranger. I'm an infantry officer. I teach tactics at West Point. Believe me when I tell you that an O.P. is a sacrificial lamb staked out to bleat once as the tiger comes through. Your only job was to warn everybody else in the company. You went out there and you set up a sleep plan, and then when you saw the enemy at point-blank range, you gave the order to open fire. Do you know how easy it would have been to hunker down and wet your pants and do nothing? You saved the lives of every man in that company that day and you got 50 percent of your people out of there. You provided cover fire all night long and you came back and got another 25 percent of your people out of there. You should have gotten a medal for what you did that night." He looked at me for a long moment and then said, "I never looked at it that way." For over 20 years, this had been a cyst in Tim's brain, a cyst filled with guilt and self-loathing, and it had swollen and festered across the years. He had never had the chance to lay it out and examine what exactly had happened that horrific night. He had never debriefed; he had never even talked about it before. It was an event that impacted the mind of a terrified, sleep deprived 19-year-old kid and had eaten him alive, year after year.
Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, On Combat
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Additional Resources
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