2L Hey Dad, It’s Not Me

When I first met Rocky in Las Vegas, I told him how he got me in trouble with the 25th Infantry Division commanding general because he got wounded back in Vietnam. I was engaged in a Sapper attack on Nui Ba Den Mountain on 6/16/1969, several months before Rocky became a casualty. Rocky had been wounded on 8/20/1969 and was sent to a hospital in Japan for treatment. One of my dad’s friends, who was familiar with the Sapper attack, thought he saw a picture of me on TV showing me sitting upright in a hospital bed…in Japan.
He called my dad and told him I had been wounded in combat and was medevac’d to Japan for emergency surgery. The next day my dad saw the photo of Rocky in Japan, was convinced it was me, and that the Army was covering something up. He contacted Senator Charley Sandman in Washington for help. Sandman was a friend of Dad’s, and even he thought it was me in the photo. What happened next was like a scene from Saving Private Ryan. Sandman called the Pentagon and demanded that the Army investigate.
The Army assigned a team to track me down, but nobody could find me in Vietnam, and as the days passed without hearing from the Army or me, my family began to think that I had been killed. (I wasn’t in Vietnam- I was in Hong Kong on R&R.) About a week after I returned to Nui Ba Den Mountain, I was paid a visit by some Red Cross officials who arrived in Lt. General Williamson’s helicopter. I went down to greet the general and got my ass reamed for not contacting my family for the last two weeks. I had no idea what he was talking about…until the Red Cross representatives told me how they had been all over Ill Corp looking for me. Somebody took a picture of the general and me to prove I was well.
Rocky loved the story and apologized for getting wounded.