"Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me." Rev. 3:20
When I went to Viet Nam in April of 1969, I expected to get wounded. I was a soldier, we get shot at. I had just spent over a year, 1968-69, in the Special Forces at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. The Green Berets, the "snake eaters," we were called. I had completed the Combat Engineer course and I was cross trained as Light Weapons Infantry. My falling out with the Green Berets came when the pencil pushers decided that they had too many combat engineers and canceled almost our whole class. Then they reassigned us to be trained as "RTO", Radiomen. Seems the radiomen were the first ones shot at in an ambush, so there was a shortage that they wanted us to fill. I couldn't see myself slugging through the swamp with a big radio on my back. I also thought it a waste to throw away my expensive engineer training.
I remembered my step brother Frederick Larsen who had died the previous year in a fire fight in the highlands and my cousin Gary Shumbarger who lost his leg a few months earlier. Those things were on my mind , the anti-war movement was getting started around that same time and I had been called "baby killer" by hippies at airports. So when the army lost my records for six months, I was ready to go to Viet Nam. I volunteered and after a 30 day leave with my family and new wife, Barbara, I was on my way. Like I said, earlier, I expected to get wounded; mainly, because of two dreams I had the previous year. They were so unusual that I wrote two poems about them which I will share with you at the end of this story. Several months had passed since I had those two dreams; so they receded into my memory, pushed aside by my army training and my married life. Mankind was not created to die.
