Earl Chittenden: "I could feel no pulse"

The ambush and Russell's wounding

Chittenden: We were set up to do an ambush. That means whoever springs that ambush, they know they got you, or they'll let you go on by.

Matthew: Yeah.

Chittenden: Well, if you walk into an ambush and they spring it, they feel they got you. And what do you do? You get the heck out of there. Don't hit the deck and return fire, because you don't know where it's coming from. But the Marines hit the deck. I said, no, get up, we've got to get out of here.

Chittenden: We could hear the fire. We could hear the grenades going off. We could hear the guys up front howling and yelling and screaming. We called in help. We had another platoon about a mile, two miles away. We called in an airstrike, gave coordinates. The other platoon came in on the run, we returned fire, and the North Vietnamese retreated. They left us with a bunch of wounded and a bunch of dead.

Chittenden: After things quieted down, we started evaluating casualties, taking care of the wounded, reorganizing. We called in medevac choppers.

Chittenden: I went up near the front, and there's Jake, around a bamboo tree. He's out of it. I could feel no pulse. I could feel nothing on him. Part of his scalp was missing. He had his flak jacket on. What happened was they opened up the ambush and he took automatic weapons fire. He got it in the legs, in the upper shoulders. He was out. And then they came up on him and put a concussion grenade between his flak jacket and his pack. It blew his kidney to a standstill. It didn't blow it out, but it had been impacted so hard it started to malfunction. Plus his legs were bleeding and the bones were sticking out.

Matthew: Your father was dead.

Chittenden: I know a dead person when I see him. I went through Korea too. So I just made him as comfortable as I could. We continued on, putting the wounded on helicopters. And then we put the bodies. Your father was one of the bodies. I'd say he was 130, 135 pounds, very light. I'm a tough cookie, so I picked him up by the guard belt and dragged him over to the chopper and threw his body up on it. We made out the paperwork: who he was, his dog tags, all of that.

The reunion at Chelsea Naval Hospital

Chittenden: I had three, four months to go in Vietnam. I had Jake's address up in Norwich. I thought I had his parents' address, so I would have written to give them my condolences and tell them what I could. But three or four months went by and I got my orders out of Vietnam.

[Time passes. Chittenden is now stateside, working at a naval hospital.]

Chittenden: He won't let his mother, father, or girlfriend visit him. I'm six foot, 200 pounds. I don't fear anybody. I said, next time we get an order for an x-ray on this guy, let me have it. I'll go personally.

Chittenden: Two or three days later, here comes another request for an x-ray. Check on this guy named Jacobson. I said, wait a minute. Jacobson. I had a corpsman killed in Vietnam named Jacobson. I said, I'll go check on this guy myself.

Chittenden: I went up, got my greens on, got the portable x-ray. I went into the ICU. The nurses were there. She said, he's over there, in a Trendelenburg, which is a maneuverable stretcher that can turn in different positions. He was laying face down.

Chittenden: I went over and knelt down and looked up. I said, My God. Jake, is that you?

Chittenden: He said, Chit, is that you?

Chittenden: I was in shock. I had put his body on a chopper in Vietnam three, four months before that. He was dead.

Chittenden: We got the details of what happened. He told me about the ambush, that he took the automatic weapons fire, that he saw the enemy soldier creep up on him and put something between his pack, but he didn't know it was between his flak jacket and his pack. He said it exploded, and that's the last thing he remembered until he was aboard the hospital ship.

Chittenden: I said, Jake, you were dead when I put you on that chopper. You were with the dead Marines.

Chittenden: He said, what I heard was the vibration of the chopper stimulated me, got my circulation going, brought my heart and breathing back. He said he got to Da Nang and someone said, Hey, this guy's still alive. He said he doesn't remember that part.