The Therapy I Needed by Fix’m
Enjoy , The Therapy I Needed
My name is Scott Radner and it was the end of May 1970 and I had been out of the United States Marine Corps for a grand total of 9 weeks. I had returned Stateside from ‘Nam nearly 6 months ago on a medical evacuation flight after I had gotten busted up when the chopper I was traveling on was shot down. I was a 2 digit midget as they used to say when you were really short in your tour and about to be rotated back to the States when it had happened.
I was finishing up my 2nd tour in ‘Nam as the team leader of a Battalion Recon unit and this was likely the last trip into the boonies I would ever have to make. We had been playing up near (over) the DMZ having dropped in by night with a primary task of gathering intelligence We had ambushed a small motorized patrol and found we had captured a full blown NVA Lieutenant General and a Chinese Colonel doing a little sightseeing and I had split the team 5/4 with the 5 guys taking them back while the 4 of us set a false trail for those who were going to be following us. We led them on a merry chase for a week before slipping back across the DMZ and heading for our pickup point.
I had an open offer to go to OCS sitting in my file, but had decided that I had seen enough, heard enough, done enough and I was simply going to get out when my enlistment was up in March. I was pretty fucked up at the time and getting very hostile toward authority, especially the assholes that didn’t have a clue what they were doing, but gave us fucked up orders anyway – ‘Nam had a way of doing that.
Anyway I noticed that the chopper carrying my team and I away from our pickup point was flying really low and asked the Crew Chief if there was a problem. He covered the mouthpiece of his headset and said there sure was and his name was 1st Lieutenant Chambers, the birds’ pilot. It seemed he was looking to score “brownie points” with the squadron’s CO by trying to spot ‘charlie” on the ground so was flying below regulation height. Normal height he said was usually 1500 meters or so and here we were not more than 150 off the deck. I was just getting ready to move forward and have a “word” with this wannabe john wayne pilot when all hell broke loose. The bird took a burst of fire from the ground that killed the pilot, severely wounded the co-pilot and damaged the front rotor.
The co-pilot did a hell of a job keeping the bird (a Ch-46 without power has the glide ratio of a brick) in the air and managed to get us about 8 klicks downrange from where we initially took fire, screaming out Mayday, Mayday, Mayday, as he gave our coordinates on the radio. We finally came down and came down hard. Everyone in the back of the Chinook was pretty busted up with lots of broken bones and a couple of severe look gashes and cuts, me being one of them. Well everybody but our “medic,” a short little Mexican-American with a perverse sense of humor named Miguel Gomez, who got bruised up a bit, but nothing broken or busted. We scrambled and set up a defensive perimeter as best we could, knowing that if the VC found us before help arrived we were dead meat and we hoped like hell that help was on the way. We found out later that there was 3 full battalions of VC and a full regiment of NVA in the area and the pilots had been cautioned about flying too low. Hell I haven’t yet figured out why they sent that big bastard to pick us up in the first place other than I had heard that it was a tad faster than most of the other choppers with a bit greater range.
The crew chief and another crew member got the co-pilot out and applied temporary bandages to the 3 bullet wounds he had and left that dead son of a bitch pilot handing from his straps. I recommended the co-pilot for the CMH and he ended up with a Navy Cross which I thought grossly unfair considering what he had done.
I had a pretty good gash across my forehead and another down my cheek that bled pretty badly, and I knew that more than a couple ribs were busted because I could feel them grating whenever I moved too quickly. Miguel told me that the co-pilot would live if we got him to help fairly soon and then said that Steve Michaels, our explosives guy and Joe Barton, who handled heavy weapons were mirror images of one another in that their injuries were exactly the opposite of each other. Me, he said, would have a couple of nice sinister looking scars on my face and for me not to try passing them off as dueling scars because everyone would think I was a lousy swordsman.
The first incoming rounds started to go ping off the body of the chopper when 3 gunships showed up and began blowing the shit out of the bad guys. A couple of jets then moved in and dropped napalm on 3 sides of us and two dust-offs were right behind them and behind them a sky-crane to retrieve the downed bird. We got loaded on board the dust-off and were soon on our way to the hospital.
I was lucky as the x-rays confirmed that I had 4 broken ribs, but they weren’t broken all the way through, they were what were called non-displaced rib fractures. The biggest danger was the possibility of pneumonia setting in so after they had strapped me up they started me on breathing treatments that forced me to take deep breaths and it hurt like a son of a bitch! Since I was so short on my tour it was decided that I would be shipped home to recover and get out. I ended up in Balboa Naval Hospital where I spent my days laying in the sun and healing. Finally the day arrived and I was discharged from the hospital and 3 weeks later the Corps and I parted ways.
I had taken my discharge on the West Coast and had saved up the vast majority of my earnings while in the Corps. That and a really good run of luck at the nightly poker games has given me a respectable road stake of about 10 grand, most of which I had converted to traveler’s checks. I had no real family to return to as dad had died when I was very young, mom had passed during my first tour in ‘Nam, and I had no brothers or sisters. I had a couple of aunts and uncles and a slew of cousins, but I was never close to any of them and had never, in fact, met the majority. I was just drifting around the country traveling where I wanted, doing what I wanted. I had a really short fuse to my temper, probably drank too much, and was very sexually frustrated because when girls saw my face they just avoided me. Oh, I wasn’t ugly, ugly, but I wasn’t my usual handsome pre-war self either so I picked up the occasional hooker and got my rocks off, but it wasn’t the same.
I used to be fairly good looking; at least I never had a real problem getting into a girl’s pants when I was in high school especially once the word of my abnormality spread. I stood 6’ 3” tall and weighed 195 lbs and I was blond haired and blue eyed. I had an average size cock of some 6 ½ inches in length and maybe 4 ½ inches around behind the helmet. I did have one somewhat unusual physical attribute in that I was able to take my tongue and completely cover the end of my nose with it or, if I went the other way, I could place the tip of my tongue under my chin. When I stuck it out from my mouth it measured nearly 5 ½ inches from my lips to the tip, yet somewhat surprisingly it never affected my speech or gave me any other problems. I had let my blond hair start growing a couple of months before I got out and now it hung to just below my shoulders and was raggedy looking because I never had it cut or shaped. I made a conscious effort to keep in shape running a couple of miles every day and doing a minimum of 50 push-ups, sit-ups, and bends and mothers every morning.