I picked up a hand-held strobe light and ran to the center of the airstrip, holding it over my head so that the helicopter could see a friendly face on the ground. We began loading the wounded. The last man out was the man with no legs. The crew chief indicated that he wanted this man on one of the stretchers bolted into the helicopter. As we lifted him up, the prop blast of the helicopter lifted the stretcher under him and covered me with his blood.
Time is a healer.
Time is like Novocain. It allows your brain to push events off to the side. My ghosts, especially the half-man, came to visit me in the night for years, but I battled them back. I buried them. In May of this year, though, I was jarred back to reality during a visit to Angola.