By Paul Churchill
July 10th 1966
Not much has been happening here other than the routine stuff. We have had contact with the enemy a few times since I last wrote. Again we were lucky and lost no one but two men were killed in the area we patrol two nights ago. They were from another outfit. I guess it was just luck and God that kept us from being the ones to lose more men.
We are supposed to move again before long. The new location is to be hill 41. Dave may know where it is. It is supposed to be pretty heavily booby trapped. Most of the guys seem in doubt of our going there but I don’t know what to think any more. So much is supposed to happen and never does.
I doubt if they will let me transfer if the battalion goes to Okinawa as we are losing most of our corpsmen and they will want to keep the ones left to break in the new men. I am still going to try.
As I mentioned, when the unit (3/3) was to go to Okinawa they would be resupplied. I guess they wanted to get a little head start on the resupply part because the following took place before our move to hill 41.
I got a new Unit 1 (medical kit) the other day and was I happy. I even got a brand new surgical kit with it, something I didn’t have with my old one.
You have never seen anyone as excited as Larry and I when we got those new Unit 1’s. The things we had been carrying just weren’t the best. They were full of holes, the straps were ruined & broken and there was no keeping them closed. That, thank God is all over now.
Larry Williams was with 3rd platoon, Lima Company when I arrived in country. He would finish his tour and rotate to THE WORLD a few days after this. From then until my eventual transfer a couple days before 3/3 was to leave for Okinawa (yes, they finally did) I would be going on every patrol and ambush that squads from third platoon ran. That meant from three to five times a day, 20 to 22 hours out. I would crash as soon as a squad returned to our base camp area and have the squad leader tell the leader of the next patrol where I was so he could wake me up on the way out with the next patrol. This could be any time from 20 minutes to an hour or two. Looking back I must have been running on adrenaline, fear, a sense duty and the constant steady hand of God.
I wrote home of one night patrol where we were on a paddy dike several hundred yards from any cover except to dive into the paddy itself, anywhere from knee to chest deep in water laced with human waste for fertilizer, when a unit somewhere called for illumination and an artillery illumination round went off a few hundred yards from us lighting us up like broad daylight with no place to hide. We flattened out on the dike and I think my heart was beating like a drum for fear that the enemy might catch us defenseless out there and we would have to roll into the paddy, when I clearly heard a voice say “don’t be afraid, it will be all right, I am with you”. An indescribable peace came over me and I knew that no matter what happened I would be able to care for my guys even if I was injured myself. HE was indeed with me and the patrol was completed without incident.
