A Memorial (Day) to Come

In his wheelchair, Davy sat in the darkened 6-man bay, his mind swirling in reflection from the 6th floor of Letterman Army Medical Center at the Presidio, staring over the runways at Crissy Army Airfield and beyond at the fog-lighted Golden Gate with its stream of headlights painting white blurs in both directions of traffic.

He'd been in a drug-induced coma the month of his arrival and awoke 62 days earlier, finding a Purple Heart pinned to his pillow atop a bed appearing to have a tent over it's lower portion under which just a single leg now lay, bandaged.

Despite his pleas and protests, his lieutentant had veered the 12-man patrol into the jungle in the wrong direction, into an ambush and firefight that would bring decades of nightmares to the only five survivors of its carnage.

On point, 'Jinx' had been hit and pretty bad, but Davy--the medic--couldn't get to him under the fiercity of incoming fire the VC were laying down from all directions with frighteningly lethal accuracy. Davy couldn't wait for a let-up and low-crawled out of safety to Jinx, grabbed a wrist and rolled over with him twisting up into a standing position, firing his M-16 with Jinx now slung across his shoulders, just as an RPG shuddered Jinx' body and shattered the medic's leg as Davy gushed blood with leg bones exposed incredibly dragging them both to safety, collapsing among his fellow troops, and indadvertantly dropping Jinx' now-lifeless body.


Members of the patrol wrote of Davy's heroism beyond their belief to bring a deserved and earned CMH (Congressional Medal of Honor), but to no avail in direct contradition to the courts-martial testimony, perjury, that mentioned the medic's use Cpl. Johnson's body as a shield, a lie to lessen the lieutenant's culpability, one that would cause Davy's own nightmares and force a visit of everlasting consequence to the disgraced lieutenant once a prosthesis had become second nature to walking...not for the medal, but for a liar's mettle to hide incompetence that had cost Jinx and others their lives.