Deadly Mistakes

My plt. would sometimes stand down in Tuy Hoa - formerly an AF Base but now the Army ran it.

There was a numbered hospital on the Post.  I would sometimes go there to hang out with medics in the ER when we were on base.  I was also there for a couple of weeks as a patient when I was down with scrub typhus.

This was on or about July 28, 1971.  I was at the hospital for some reason.  I don't remember exactly why - tests, hanging out, I'm not sure.

They brought a GI in from the perimeter. He had tried to take an M-79's HE round apart.  He was in a tower or bunker position on the line. I heard a a few versions of what happened.  In one he was a FNG, a new guy, possibly a clerk who was assigned to augment the grunts. If that's the case he probably didn't know that the round goes live after separating from the brass and rotating about 20 or 30 times

Whatever the case was, he armed and detonated the round while holding it close to his torso.  This was instantly fatal.  Sitting in a corner with sandbags to the front and sides his body absorbed the full blast.

The damage was sickening, as if a flaming chainsaw had bisected his body head to crotch.  Blast damage is horrific.

Somebody put a white sheet over the body and rolled him into the main hall.

I have a vivid memory of the misshapen body under that drape with a perfect red line going down the middle. It looked like a painted stripe but it was blood.

The other man with him survived the explosion.  Sometimes I wonder how he feels about it now.

We usually avoided the new guys and especially rear echelon people.  Mostly I think it was because of stupid things like this mistake.  You just never knew what someone who didn't know what they were doing might do, and as a result get somebody killed.