The Water Boy

Prologue

The years have gone by at an unbelievable rate. I am sixty two already and retired, my physical health is starting to deteriorate from old military wounds and just the passing of time itself, I suppose.  But mentally, I am as young as ever and as a matter of fact, my creative juices seem to be just bursting out of adolescence. I'm trying to put together a radio talk show format and at the same time I want to write a book, maybe my autobiography in a creative non-fiction format.

I'm not quite yet sure of all the content, my daughter suggested that I write about my family's history here in the state of Georgia. Well, I'm thinking” That's a great ideal.”  After all they're part of my history.

From there I started writing. Then I got to the Vietnam part of my life and that kind of took over the story. Wow! Now I have three stories here. First, my autobiography then my family's history here in Georgia and third my Vietnam experience. I decided to combine all three in this one book, but scaling down each.

This is June 2008; I'm about a year into my retirement.  After working on and around computers for forty years, I still find myself on the computer four or five hours a day surfing the Internet. You would think I could find something else to do with my life in retirement.             

I'm in a rather melancholy mood today, it's shortly after Memorial Day, and as a disabled Vietnam veteran, this time of year often leaves me this way.  To exacerbate the situation, one of the topics in one of the local watering holes that I frequent, had been on the wars that we're presently fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Many of the Vietnam veterans, including myself, would sometimes, try to compare the current wars with the Vietnam War.  As far as most of us were concerned, the war in Iraq is nothing more than an urban police action void of actual enemy troops. At best, it amounts to a police action that is better left to some government agency such as the CIA.

I was wounded in Vietnam on July 16, 1966 while participating in Operation Hastings. At the time, it was one the largest US military operations in Viet Nam, taking place near the DMZ, the dividing line for North and South Vietnam.   In this melancholy mood, after the bar debates the previous  night ,and thinking about the day I was wounded, I decided to do a Google search on Operation Hastings to see if there was any information on this battle that took place over forty years ago . 

“Oh my goodness!”   I thought, as a ton of information on Operation Hastings appeared.                                                                                                                     

I come across an entry on `Operation Hastings' on Wikipedia.com. It's a pretty detailed account of” Operation Hastings”. It goes into the planning details of the operation and describes events from the beginning through to the end.    The operation itself started on July 15, 1966 and ended the initial phase anyway, around July 28 of 1966.   Wow!  About a third of the way into the article,  I come across my company,  Company “ G”  2nd  Battalion 4th  Marines . Not only that, it described what happened to me and my company on the morning of July 16, 1966.

This is surreal. How could someone know that  at 8:30am that