As soon as we swept the village and set up a perimeter the Lt. came by and said, “We’re sending out three patrols to check for V.C. movement and try to make contact. Funny there were no men in that village.”  Our platoon Sgt. said, “I want a scout, two rifle teams, an M-60 team and a Rocket team.”  My men were just beginning to chow down on their delicious C-rations and didn’t even look up, they were tired and they were scared.  If a Marine in combat, under fire said he was not scared he was either stupid or crazy or both.  I said, “Smitty, your team will go with me!” Smitty was the best gunner I had, he could drop a rocket in a chimney at 350 yards and that’s about all you could get out of them.  “You gonna go on patrol Cpl.?” he asked.  “Well I’m not sending you out there alone on the first night, so have your team put on some dry socks and finish their rations.”

It wasn’t long that night before we made contact, with the missing village men, and came under heavy enemy fire and got pinned down.  Two of our men were hit, they had a machine gun across the rice paddy in a good position on us and we couldn’t move.  The Sgt. called for Rockets so I crawled up to him and told him we had to stand up to fire and the only place we could get a clear shot off was on a small bamboo bridge crossing the rice paddy.  So he said he would give us all the ground fire he could, ‘Good Luck!’ I really began to hate that phrase, what the heck does that mean in combat anyway?

So, Smitty and I crawled through some thick undergrowth unnoticed and made it to that small bridge and got into position.  How, I’ll never know to this day.  It was hard to estimate the exact distance because it was pitch black, except for their muzzle blast and we didn’t have any range finders.  So, we knelt down to make lower silhouettes and I put a heat round in the Bazooka, armed it, tapped Smitty on the helmet and he took his best shot in the dark and fired.

The heat round hit just behind their position but the blast revealed a bunker that looked like a Japanese pill-box made out of bricks, mud, steel and anything else they could find.  Smitty said, “I need to put a ‘Willy Peter’ round right in their mail box!”  However, the back-blast from the Bazooka gave our position away and they were repositioning the machine-gun on us. I yelled to our ammo bearer for a ‘Willy Peter’ round (white phosphorus) and he ran one out to us under fire, and never got hit, how I’ll never know, lucky I guess, but the stupid canister was unopened.  As I tried to open it the enemy machine-gun was chewing up the bamboo bridge and I can still see bamboo splinters flying in the air.  Finally I just grabbed a piece of the metal like a canned ham and pulled till I got the round out, and loaded the Bazooka and tapped Smitty on the helmet.  In seconds the machine-gun would be on us and we would be dead meat.  “Shoot! Shoot! I kept screaming in my mind!”  Finally, he fired and the rocket went right in the window opening of their bunker, right in their ‘mail box’ and the enemy firing ceased!

We got off that bridge as fast as we could and ran back to our patrol and Smitty said, “Bo you’re hit!” I had sliced my hand open on that stupid ‘Willy Peter’ canister and was bleeding like a pig.  So, the corpsman wrapped it up quickly to stop the bleeding and we moved out because the Viet Cong knew exactly where we were and in minutes we would have company for dinner and we didn’t bring extra chow.

We found a secure location just outside our perimeter and set up and waited till daybreak, then we threw a smoke grenade and entered the perimeter.  As we did I looked up into a beautiful blue sky and said, “That one’s for you Rebel, tomorrow will be Miller’s day!” Just then the Corpsman said, “I ought to write you up for a purple heart Cpl.”  And I said, “If you do, I’ll write you up for a bronze star post-humorously!”  And we both laughed, long and hard.  Then he said, “Come over to the medical tent so I can treat that hand properly, you have some more scores to settle Cpl. this is just your first day.”

He was right, I had a whole tour of duty in front of me and every day I waited for the one with, ‘Bo’ on it!  “And you ‘Bo’ will be the third!”  Oh there were many close calls every day, Double Eagle 1 & 2, Quang Ngai, Operation Massachusetts, Iowa, Kansas, Jackson, Defense of Chu Lai, Operation Sparrow Hawk; a 1968 Lemans and an oak tree; a Mexican standoff as a policeman; you see God had other plans. “And you ‘Bo’ need to marry your Bashertah October 1969; And you ‘Bo’ need to be saved August 1972, and you ‘Bo’ need to serve Me January 1976, and you ‘Bo’ need to go tell Zion their God reigns May 1992, and you ‘Bo’ need to train your children to pick up their weapons and follow Me into battle, and you ‘Bo’ need to keep the faith, stay the course, fight the fight, until you hear the sound of My trumpet!”

Oh, there’s one coming ‘Bo’ with your name on it but I’ll decide when. You see I put the two dates on your tombstone all you get is the little dash ‘between the lines’, so make the most of it for Me, Marine while you still have time.                    ‘Between The Lines’