Near Life Experiences

“Do you wanna hear about my near death experiences?”

If I was a bit braver, I would ask if you care to hear about my life. But I can’t squeeze that out of my mouth right now. Katie, you can’t see the man I was then. You're just a little girl.

“To be sure, my heart didn’t actually stop in this first one, but I reconciled with mortality because I believed I was dead. We were in a helicopter over Cambodia; how I got there is another and longer, stranger story altogether.”

“A lot of people think that all of Southeast Asia is jungle. That is a pretty serious misapprehension, but the part we were flying over was. It was triple canopy, with the tops of the trees reaching up four or five hundred feet over the top layer of jungle, quickly. The theory is that you are visible for a shorter time and they have less time to draw a bead on the aircraft. Ya get shot down less. I think the pilots just like the sensation of speed that you get when you’re that close to the terrain.”

“My team had been in the jungle for three days: we were tired, hungry, filthy. We were on our way back to Udorn RTAFB, and with an amazing alacrity, our chopper’s engine stopped. The wind rushing by the open doors continued to roar at us, but the engine noise was gone. I don’t so much like flying when it goes right, so I wasn’t liking this one bit. What usually happens is that the pilot does a thing called an auto rotation. The rotor blades are still turning freely, and the forward motion of the aircraft maintains a certain amount of lift when coupled with the rotor turning. You can’t climb or turn, but it’ll give you something. The pilot has to keep the forward airspeed using the momentum of the aircraft. The aircraft will loose altitude, but slowly and as you move forward. Eventually the forward motion slows down and you start losing altitude faster; the helicopter’ll drop, but in an open area a decent pilot can make a hard -- still kinda safe -- landing. It’s better than just dropping out of the sky anyway. But we were forty feet above the tops of trees with no open area anywhere. We weren’t even wearing seat belts... of course we seldom did. We didn’t have time to share a knowing look or anything else that might have been meaningful, we were just dropping and we were headed down to crash into trees that were four or five stories off the ground. I panicked at first, but then I went calm. I knew I was dead so the particulars didn’t so much matter. The skids were actually brushing the tops of the trees by that time. It was over, except the pilot had seen something none of the rest of us did. There was a place in the jungle ahead where a huge Iron Wood tree had been harvested. There was about a fifty to sixty food wide hole in the canopy, and he shoved us into it somehow. We still had a lot of forward motion and it was more of a crash than a landing, but we were on the ground just the same. I didn’t see a lot of what was going on: I was in my troop seat waiting to die, but surprisingly calm. As we struck the ground, the aircraft tilted to the right side, where I was sitting. The rotor was still spinning and I was thrown out the door into the path of it. You know how in cartoons everything slows down for the dramatic moment? It’s totally true. Everything slowed down, and all I could see was the rotor blades turning, still very fast. I smiled to myself, thinking that after everything that had just happened I was going to be cut in half by the helicopter. It was almost funny, but I went through them without making contact.”

“I hit the ground at the edge of the clearing, or I may have hit a tree trunk, I’m not sure. I was sore the next day, but I was still holding my weapon when I recovered awareness. I can’t say if I was really unconscious or not, but I went away for a while. I was virtually unhurt, but some of the others didn’t make it. The whole thing couldn’t have taken more than a minute, but I was certain I was dead twice. It may not have been death, but it got me ready for the crap that came up later.”

“It amazes me to think that this next incident was only about three weeks after the helicopter incident. We had gone into Cambodia on a mission, and missed our pick up. The primary LZ was occupied. The secondary, too. Then the batteries went dead on the radio. We couldn’t pop smoke or flares because the Khmer Rouge were all over the place. We could hear the helicopters all over the place above the canopy, but we couldn’t signal them in any way. By the time we were sort of clear of the Khmer, we were too far from our rendezvous point for the choppers to find us. So, we walked back to Thailand, and got some Thai forest rangers to contact the base for us. That’s harder than it sounds. We wound up catching a ride on a boat down the Ping River, which is just an open sewer from one end to the other. Disgusting. But by that time we hadn’t been out of our boots for 10 days or more, and we stank at least as bad as the river.”

“Through some series of misadventures the boat got swamped. I still had on most of my gear, and went unceremoniously to the bottom. I didn’t know what else to do, so I hit bottom and started walking. I guess I swallowed some water, because three days later I came down with amoebic dysentery.”

“My Te Loc and some of the ladies in the neighborhood carried me to the main gate. I lived in a hooch, off base. I woke up several days later in the base hospital, with a doctor standing over me asking if I had a will. He wanted to know if I had a wife or kids. I was very weak, and I didn’t understand. He asked if I wanted a priest: I was still Catholic on my dog tags then. The last damned thing I wanted was a priest! I told him I wanted to go home. He told the nurse, as if I wasn’t there, to try to get me on a medivac for the States, but not to bump anyone who had a chance of making it. Great bedside manner.”

“She got me on a medivac all by myself. I was delirious and semi-conscious the whole way, but I got it. They were sending me home to die. The flight nurses took good care of me, but I just didn’t care. I was so tired. So sick. But I lived long enough to get to Fitzsimmons Army Medical Center in Aurora, CO where I got a private room. I had dropped from 220lbs to about 160lbs. It just so happened that the Hospital Commander was a nurse. She was a full bird and tough as an old boot. She came into my room and told me that I was not to die on her shift, and they were alllllll her shifts: “So straighten up Sgt. Reynolds.” It was actually quite liberating because the fear had washed out of me in the helicopter over the jungle and I just kinda let go.”

Does that sound cowardly? Will she think I’m weak? Is she listening?

“The Colonel and her staff pulled me back. I didn’t help or resist them, anymore than I resisted death. In about three weeks, they had me sitting up, eating pabulum and Jell-o.”

“That was the beginning of the end of my first marriage. She never came to see me in the hospital. Everyone was mad at her except me. I understood then, and still do. Anna was a remarkable girl; she was incredibly pretty and smart, but she had issues: wanted me to fix her. She married me because she said I was the most masculine man she had ever met. You can imagine how that played to my very masculine ego. She needed to feel protected, and I wasn’t protecting her or me or anybody else. She couldn’t handle the state I was in. She was just very afraid. She loved me as best she could, but I wasn’t a very good husband. I was gone a lot, and I kept coming home on medivacs. I became rather casual in my professionalism. I alternated between feeling immortal and having a sort of death wish. I was distant and angry a lot. I fooled around, but to be honest sometimes we fooled around on each other with the same girls. And my god, she was beautiful.”

“When I got out of the hospital, I was on light duty, so they made me NCOIC of a burial detail. It’s not a very good story, but it’s what happened next.”

She’s going to say I should write a book. What is it with people and a book. These things happened… to me.

Sgt. Reynolds picked up the small black book that he found in the Cambodian jungle so many years ago, and wondered if he should tell her about it. It had contained just over $20,000.00 when he found it in Konrad’s pocket so many years ago, but he hadn’t known that when he took it and left his friend behind.

“Konrad. I swore I was going back for him, but I think I knew it was a lie even then. He wasn’t walking point, we weren’t in a firefight. He just got shot before the rest of us noticed that a scout had noticed us. I couldn’t carry him, I tried. Now all I have left is this book with his mother’s photograph and money I could never bring myself to spend.”

I hate myself. I never called her.