He Was Shot So Close To His Heart Doctors Left The Bullet In Place

He was face down in the mud of a rice patty, shot twice, and he could see them coming. The radio on his back weighed as much as a sack of feed. His left shoulder had a hole in it. His left ankle had another. Somewhere behind him, a few hundred yards back across the open ground.

 American machine gunners were dug in among the headstones of a small Vietnamese cemetery. And they were listening to him on the radio. And they could not help him. They could not tell who was who. Every man out in that patty, American and enemy alike, was covered in the same gray water and the same gray mud. From the cemetery through the smoke, they all looked the same.

 So he made a decision. He rolled over, sat up in the open, and did the one thing a wounded man is never supposed to do. What he had left was 20 rounds, a full magazine of tracers he had been carrying for months for no reason he could ever explain. This is the story of how a farm boy from the northeast corner of Missouri ended up in that patty outside a village called Lo Jang and what it cost him to get out of it.

 October 6th, 1966. He remembers the date the way men remember the day their life stopped belonging to them. That was the day Jim Brewer was inducted into the United States Army. He was a farmer. He is still a farmer. Northeast Missouri. born and raised a family operation feeding grains and cattle and in those days a dairy herd that had him out of bed before the sun whether he liked it or not.

 He had a stubborn streak and he knew it. Headstrong he called it. They sent him first to Jefferson barracks in St. Louis. Two days there then onto Fort Leonard Wood. It was on about the second morning at Leonard Wood that he came as close to the Marine Corps as he ever wanted to get. They had the whole group lined up outside in the early light and made them count off by numbers.

 1 2 1 2 down the line. Then a Marine Gunnery sergeant walked over, looked at them, and said, “All the twos come with me.” Jim Brewer was one. That was all it was. A coin toss with no coin. men who had stood shouldertosh shoulder in the same line, drafted the same week, walked off in two different directions that morning and into two different wars.

 He stayed where he was, and he was scared. Not anything specific. He had been away from home before. It was not knowing where they would send him, what they would do with him, what was waiting at the end of it. Vietnam was a word he had heard. Nothing more than that. You did not really know about Vietnam until you were in it.

 And by then, knowing did not help you. Before we continue, if you enjoy true stories from history that put you inside the moments most people have forgotten, subscribe to the channel. Then the army did what the army does. At Leonard Wood, they told the whole group they were going to Fort Carson, Colorado. They loaded them onto buses. When the doors opened again, the men stepped down into the heat of Fort Hood, Texas.

 He says he knew right then that the whole thing was going to be a bad deal. It was autumn on the calendar. It was not autumn in central Texas. Basic training was strenuous in a way that surprised a man who had spent his life doing physical work. He had always been active. This was something else. The calisthenics, the marching, the walking, the endless movement with no purpose he could see.

 The early mornings did not bother him. He had milked cows. What bothered him was the other thing, the constant instruction. Someone telling him when to get up, when to sleep, when to eat, when to move, when to stop. For a headstrong young man off a family farm, that was harder than the running. After basic, he went to a mechanized unit, an outfit that rode tracks and vehicles and a seat for every man.

 He liked that fine. Then in the first part of June 1967, as best he can place it, they moved him over to the first battalion, sixth infantry, and put him in a mortar squad. A mortar squad walks. That was the shock of it. He had been riding everywhere, and now he was humping mortars, carrying the tube, the base plate, the rounds, the ammunition, all of it on his back in Texas heat.

 He says it liked to have killed him. But the Sixth Infantry gave him something the mechanized outfit never had. He had made friends in other units, ordinary friends. What happened in this company was different, and it happened fast. There was Jim Turner from over in East Texas around Livingston. Almost every weekend, they could get a pass.

 Seven or eight of them would pile in and go home with Turner. On the way, they would stop off in Huntsville, where Turner’s girl Judy was in college. and Judy would try gamely and usually without success to come up with enough dates for the whole crowd of them. Most of the time she could not.

 There were always too many soldiers. That is a small thing. It is also the thing men remember 50 years later because it was the last ordinary happiness before everything else. Eight young men crowded into a car on a Texas highway going to a friend’s house because none of them had anywhere better to be. They bonded quickly and completely.

 He has never found the words for it, and he has tried. At home, the families were not so easy on their minds. They had the television. They had the evening news. In training, the men saw none of that. No TV, no broadcasts, nothing from basic through advanced training, and right up to the day they shipped out. The soldiers knew less about the war than their own mothers did. The families were worried.

 The soldiers were not. Not yet. They went to war by sea. 28 days on a troop ship. He believes around 5,000 men aboard. Crossing the Pacific with calisthenics in the mornings and cleaning details in the afternoons and sleep as the only real mercy. He was lucky in his bunk near the top of the stack.

 Not quite the top, but high enough. That mattered more than it sounds because most men got seasick. and a man in a top bunk who is sick creates problems for everyone beneath him. The rolling of the ship never bothered Brewer. Other men being sick did. If someone near him started, he had to get up and go outside or he would be sick himself.

 Then in the South China Sea, they hit a storm. He never forgot the water coming green over the bow of a ship that size. He reckons 3/4 of the men aboard were sick. There was nowhere to go and nothing to do about it. 5,000 men in a steel hull with the oceans standing up in front of them. They put in at Okinawa and let the troops ashore for one night.

 They spent every dime they had. All of it in one night because it had finally worked its way through to them that they did not know whether they were coming back. They stayed up until morning and barely made the ship before it pulled out. He remembers being with Turner. He thinks Moles was there. After 60 years, the rest of the faces from that night have gone. Vietnam did not greet them.

 It processed them. The troop ship could not put them directly ashore. So, the men were transferred to LSTs, landing ship, tank, flatbottomed vessels built to run up onto a beach and open their bow doors for the last run down the coast to Chuli. The brigade was going to be met on arrival by General William West Morland himself, the commander of all American forces in Vietnam.

 So the order came down. Clean uniforms, every man. They look like soldiers. Then they put them in the LSTs. The bottom of those boats held 6 or 8 in of standing water, rust, and filth. That is where the men had to stand. There was nowhere else. They rode in it. And when the ramps came down, and they marched out onto the sand in front of the theater commander, they came off looking, in his words, like a bunch of filthy pigs.

 West Morland stood there and watched them come. The transfer at sea was more dangerous than the inspection. The swell was running high, and the LSTs were rising and falling alongside the ship. A man had to time the gap and step across at the top of the wave. two or three doors down from him, someone mistimed it and broke his leg.

 He never knew the man’s name and did not think he was from a company. They had not been in the country for an hour. The war had already taken a man. One of the first missions was bridge duty. It sounds like nothing. It was routine, constant, and necessary. Sitting on a bridge through the night so the Vietkong could not come down and blow it.

 Their company commander worked it the same way every time. A line platoon out on the bridge itself. A weapons platoon in support. The food was the problem. Sea rations in the field were a fact of life, but these were old. The newest can he ever saw out there was dated 1944. Most of them were stamped 1942 and 1943. Rations canned before he was old enough to remember, before some of these men were born, hauled halfway around the world, and fed to soldiers a quarter century later. So they stole a pig.

 It belonged to a local farmer. And they took it and they killed it and roasted it. And they made absolutely certain that every man out on that bridge got a piece of it. All of them nearly got in serious trouble. A good deal of brass came out and made their feelings known about American soldiers helping themselves to a Vietnamese family’s livestock. And they were right to.

 He does not defend it. He just remembers that everybody got a bite. At that stage, they were still young in the way that only unblooded soldiers are young. Nothing had happened to them. No real battle, no serious contact. A sniper round now and then, cracking past and gone. Somebody’s war off in the distance.

 He reaches for the word and it takes him a moment to find it. Untouchable. That is what they were. It was not going to happen to them. He saw the base camp three times, maybe four. In roughly four months in the field, that was all. Captain Brennan kept them out. The company commander was gung-ho in the old sense of the word. Determined, relentless, and permanently forward.

 If a mission came up, Brennan wanted it. The men thought he was an old man. Years later, comparing notes, they worked out that he was probably 6 or seven years older than the rest of them. He demanded a great deal of respect, and he earned it. When the privates did not know what was happening, Brennan knew. That counted for more than the men understood at the time.

 So they lived in the country. Search and destroy over and over. Long patrols with no clear end. Day into night into day. He remembers marching as high as 36 hours without a minute’s sleep. He remembers once walking while asleep, coming to himself on a different hill from the one he was on when his eyes closed with no memory of the ground in between.

 The loads were brutal. 6 or 7 days rations, 200 rounds of M16 ammunition, possibly a great deal more. And for the weapons platoon, the mortar rounds around 30 lbs a piece carried in addition to everything else 80 to 90 lbs on a man’s back all day every day. And it’s wet, not sweat rain. It rained almost every afternoon, and the country was hot and humid enough that nothing ever dried.

 A man was simply wet continuously for months. The night positions had their own arithmetic. on a listening post or ambush. Two men would try to keep each other awake. Half the time they slept straight through it. You would lie there fighting your own eyelids, nudge the man beside you, and wake up at first light to find that nobody in the position had been awake at all.

 There was only one night he can recall when anything actually came at them. They opened up into the dark and 15 seconds later it was over. In the morning, there was nothing to find. No bodies, no way of knowing whether there had been five men out there or 50. Nobody told him anything. He was a private. Privates were told what to do, not what was happening.

 On Christmas Eve, they came back into base camp. He bought a fifth of Jim Beam with the seal unbroken, almost certainly counterfeit, and he knew it even then, and drank most of it himself. The next morning, they went back out. By the last days of January 1968, something had changed in the war, and the men in the field were among the last to know it.

 On the night of January 30th and into the 31st, North Vietnamese and Vietkong forces launched coordinated attacks across the whole of South Vietnam, cities that had been considered relatively secure were hit simultaneously. Daang, the great American base complex on the central coast, was among them. None of this reached Jim Brewer as information.

 It reached him by helicopter. They were lifted out and flown north, a long way north of where they had been operating and set down short of the Daang air strip. Nobody explained why. Nobody said what was up there or who was waiting. You were told, so you did it. It was late evening when they came off the aircraft. Then they walked.

 There were Arvin soldiers with them. Army of the Republic of Vietnam. their South Vietnamese allies leading the column. The route ran along the dikes, the narrow raised earth paths that divide the rice patties, single file in the dark with the water on both sides. And as they came in toward the airrip, the Americans ahead of them opened fire.

 He never established who it was, air force or army, defending the perimeter of a base that had been under attack for days, and had every reason to shoot at movement in the dark. The radios failed as radios did. There was no way to tell them who was out there on the dikes, so the column lay down in the patty and took fire from its own side.

They were pinned for a considerable time before it was sorted out. Nobody was hit. When the word finally came that it was clear, they stood up out of the water and walked on through, and they kept walking most of the night. It was very near daylight when they stopped. They halted around a small Vietnamese cemetery out in the open ground near the hamlet of Lojiang.

 He does not know the cemetery’s name. He is not certain now which side of the village it stood on. With the first gray light, the sniping started. It came from the hamlet. Not heavy, not an attack. Just a single round every time a man tried to stand up, move, or do anything that showed him above the ground. One shot, then nothing, then another when somebody forgot. That went on into the morning.

Then the order came to form up online and advance into the village. The company split. Part of the weapons platoon and part of the first platoon stayed back at the cemetery. in position with their machine guns covering the open ground. The second and third platoon stepped out into the patties and started forward toward Lo Jiang online in daylight across flat ground.

 Jim Brewer went with the third platoon on the right carrying the radio. He cannot say how far they got. Not far. Then, as he puts it, all hell broke loose. Mortars came down on them first, then machine guns, more than one, well-sighted, and small arms of every kind from the front. The men in the patty had no cover except the water and the low dikes, and the enemy had been waiting for them to walk out into exactly that.

 The order came back to fall back. What he did not know, what nobody on the right flank knew, was that the second platoon out to his left had been cut to pieces in the opening burst. He was on the other side of the line with the third. He would not learn what had happened over there until much later.

 He turned back with the rest of them. He did not get far at all. The first round hit him in the left shoulder. It entered at an angle and traveled down through him. The second went through his left ankle. 80 odd pounds of pack. The radio. Two holes in him. He went down in the water. He thinks he passed out. There is a stretch of time there he cannot account for.

 He does not remember doing anything for a while. When he came back to himself, he started trying to crawl and that was when he saw them coming. They were not far away. That is the detail he keeps returning to. Not far away at all. He still had the radio and he got on it and he called back to the cemetery asking for fire, telling them where it was needed, telling them men were in the open and the enemy was coming forward.

ed across the patty. The answer that came back was the worst possible answer. They could not tell the difference from the cemetery. Looking out across that ground, every man in it was plastered with the same mud and the same patty water. American and North Vietnamese were indistinguishable. If those guns opened up, they would kill their own.

Lying there hit twice, he thought of the magazine. Somewhere in his gear, he had a full magazine of tracer rounds, ammunition with a pyrochnic charge in the base, so that each round burns visibly in flight and shows exactly where it is going. He had been carrying it for a long time. He has never been able to say why he saved it.

 He got on the radio and told them, “I’ll mark targets for you.” Then he loaded it and he sat up. Not once, three times, maybe four. He would push himself upright in the open, pick out a man he could actually identify, fire a burst on full automatic, and drop back down into the water. 20 rounds does not last long on automatic. Three bursts perhaps.

 Each time the tracers went out, the machine guns back at the cemetery followed them in and hammered the ground where they landed. Then the magazine was empty, and he was flat in the mud again with nothing left but the crawl. A young soldier named Smise came over to him. Brewer could not manage the radio anymore.

 Could not work, could not lift, could not do anything but hurt. And Smise got the harness off him and freed him from the weight of it. He left the radio lying in the patty. He kept his rifle. Then he started dragging himself back again, and he has no idea how long that took. There had been Marines guarding a bridge not far from Lo Jiang. They heard the battle, that is all.

 They were not part of the operation. They had no orders to be there and they had a bridge of their own to mind. Eight or 10 of them came across anyway to see what was happening and whether anyone needed help. A soldier the men called bunk came out into the patty with one of them. The marine got hold of Jim Brewer, hauled him up, and threw him across his back.

And as he started out of there under the weight of a grown man and his gear, he said the only words from that entire day that Brewer can quote exactly more than half a century later. You big son of a If I’d have known you were this heavy, I’d have left you laying. He carried him out. Brewer never learned his name.

 He never saw him again. He heard afterward that the marine and bunk went back out for more wounded and that the marine was hit doing it. Whether that man lived or died, he has never been able to find out. I owe my life to the Marines, he says. Don’t even know the guy’s name. Behind them, the air strike came in before the last of the wounded were clear.

 Jets over the hamlet and then a fireball larger than anything he had ever seen in his life. The hole of Lo Jang going up in front of him as he was carried away from it. He was on one of the first medevac helicopters out. A man named Hammet was loaded aboard beside him. Brewer remembers him for one reason only.

 Hammet was torn up worse than anyone else on that aircraft, and he was lying close enough to touch. Someone took Brewer’s rifle. He never saw who. It was a Marine helicopter, the big slow ones the men called the Jolly Green Giant. It lifted off, got maybe as high as the treetops, and a machine gun opened up on it from the ground. The rounds came through the airframe, holes appearing in the metal around wounded men strapped to the deck with nothing any of them could do about it.

 The pilot put it back down. Then he wound it up again, and this time he took it straight up, vertically, hard, as high as it would go, and out. They got him to an aid station at Daang. And there, the second injustice of the day began. The wound that interested the doctors was the shoulder. The bullet had gone in high on the left and traveled downward through his body and it had stopped underneath a rib.

 On the X-ray, they could see how near it had come. Another inch or so and it would have gone through his heart. That is what they looked at. That is all they looked at. What was actually causing him agony was his ankle and he could not get a single person to examine it. from Daang. They flew him out to the USS Sanctuary, a US Navy hospital ship standing off the coast. He was aboard her for 34 days.

The day after he arrived, someone finally looked at his foot. The bullet was still in the ankle and they took him in to cut it out under local anesthetic. The local anesthetic did not work. He remembers the surgeon and a group of corman around the table. and he remembers picking those men up and throwing them around with his arms while they dug the bullet out of his ankle joint.

 It had done far more damage than the round through his shoulder ever did. He would spend the rest of his life finding that out. Then there was the nurse. The shoulder wound had to heal from the inside out, which meant it had to be packed and cleaned down its full length every single morning. She used a swab on a stick about that long and benzene, and she ran it down the whole track. the bullet had made.

 He called that woman everything a man can call another human being. And every morning she would say evenly, “Well, Sergeant Brewer, you shouldn’t say that. He has never forgotten her. He cannot remember her name.” When the worst was passed and the men on the ward were mending, the afternoons on the sanctuary belonged to Bingo.

 They played every day for 34 days. Jim Brewer played bingo on a hospital ship in the South China Sea. and never once won a game. When they carried him off to the Philippines, the nurses presented him with a small pot with fuzz around the rim. A joke gift, the booby prize, the only thing he took off that ship besides his wounds. He has not played bingo since, not once in nearly 60 years.

 a few days with the Air Force in the Philippines, then Japan, Camp Drake, and the 249th General Hospital and a little over a month of it. There was a new problem, and it was worse than the wound. Every time he lowered his left leg below the level of his heart, it turned black. The bullet through the ankle had wrecked the nerves, and the blood was not coming back out of the limb.

 The operation they performed is called a sympathettomy. Surgeons went in through his abdomen, worked back to the spine, and cut the sympathetic nerves that controlled blood flow and sweating in his left leg, deliberately severing the body’s own regulation of the limb so that the vessels would stay open and the circulation would run.

 He did not know any of that at the time. He knew only that his leg kept going black and that men in white coats kept looking at it. He was convinced they were going to take it off. He made one of them promise him. Promise him outright that they would not amputate. They did not. From Japan, they sent him home to Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, the same post where a Marine gunnery sergeant had once walked down a line of frightened drafties and taken all the twos.

 He spent three months in the hospital there. Then the army passed him fit, sent him to Fort Carson, Colorado, the place they had promised him in the first place, two years too late, kept him 28 days, and discharged him. He will tell you he was lucky, and he means it in a specific way. He was on one of the first medevacs out of Lo Jiang.

 That meant he did not see the rest of it. He did not see what the men who stayed saw, and he did not have to take part in the clearing of that ground afterward. Whatever is in their memories from that afternoon is not in his. He was lucky in another way, too. And this one, he says carefully. He knows men from that company who came through the whole tour without a scratch and who are in far worse condition today than he is.

They spent a full year in the field. He spent about 6 months in the country before the patty at Lo Jang took him out of it. I didn’t have to lay an Agent Orange for a full year. The defoliant sprayed across those provinces to strip the cover from the countryside is now linked to a long list of cancers and chronic illnesses in the men who lived under it.

 Through rifle bullets in February 1968 pulled Jim Brewer out of that spray 10 months early. That is a strange kind of luck. He knows it. He says it anyway because it is true. The bullet from his shoulder is still in him. It stopped under a rib and no one ever took it out. It is there today. What happened afterward took longer than the war did.

 He spent decades pushing all of it down. Years of deliberate forgetting, of not talking, of getting on with the cattle and the feed grain and raising two sons on a family farm in northeast Missouri. Then in the last 6 or seven years before he sat down to tell this, the company started holding reunions and he found himself doing the opposite of what he had done his whole adult life, trying to pull it back up, trying to recall it, comparing fragments with men who had been standing 20 yards away and remembered a different afternoon entirely. Some of it will not

come back. Names he knew as well as his own brothers have gone. He cannot recall the name of the marine who carried him. He cannot recall the name of the nurse. He is not certain now who was on the helicopter with him besides Hammet. What did not go is another thing. There is a brotherhood between the men of that company that he cannot put into words and he has stopped apologizing for failing to.

 It is not friendship as civilians use the term. It is what is left when a group of young men are put through something together that no one else will ever fully understand. and it does not fade and nobody can take it from them. He calls it one of those million-dollar experiences that you would not give a dime to have again. Jim Brewer went home to Missouri, married, raised two sons, and worked the same ground his family had always worked.

 He carries a bullet under his rib and a leg that does not regulate its own blood. He does not play bingo.