Having taken no wounded, and since the Viet Cong heavy machine gun could not depress its barrel far enough to shoot through the dike, Hunt let Maibach go to the aid of 2nd Platoon while his men concentrated on bringing suppressive fire to bear on the enemy positions. Toward the right of 1st Platoon's positions, Frank Boetcher, a replacement who had already served his hitch in the army but who had re-enlisted to go to Vietnam, fought a duel with the Viet Cong 50-caliber bunker, waiting until its burst of fire had ended before popping up from behind the dike to fire a burst from his own M60 light machine gun. Up and down the line men watched the nearly suicidal display of bravery as Boetcher jumped up again and again in his deadly game of tit for tat. After a few minutes, Boetcher's helmet flew off, and he fell backward into the paddy bleeding badly from the head. Before anyone could rush to his side to see what was wrong, Boetcher sat up, tied on his own battle dressing, and got back to work. A bullet had holed his helmet on both sides and had laid open the top of his scalp. As the duel continued, Boetcher's assistant gunner, Jimmy Miller, a Charlie Company original from the hill country of Tennessee, fell into the water and clasped his hands to his face. Fearing that Miller had a bad face wound, John Young crawled to his side and pried his hands back only to find a tiny cut on the bridge of his nose. Young happily informed Miller that he was OK. His face was still there. He had only been “punched in the nose by a bullet." When Miller sat up, though, bright red blood began to spurt from his left arm where the bullet that had grazed his face had severed his brachial artery. Closer to the safety of the main river than the other, more exposed platoons, after applying a tourniquet, Young directed two of his men to drag Miller down to the nearby navy boats for medical care.
World History
