Gary Bell Interview Clip #3

Gary Bell Interview Clip #3

Gary's Losses

Gary Bell discusses his friends who died in Vietnam and how he felt about being a survivor.

Drew Delor and Corbin Landrum

Wabash College

April 2nd, 2020

MP3

0:02:32.63

192kbps

And my Lieutenant that, the one I was telling you about earlier, he was the one that was killed. Dan Anderson, he was from Minnesota. And I lost a couple good friends, Marines that day. And that’s when you started wondering, you know, “I made it through Khe Sahn, and how’d I make it out here?” I still got out of it there, and you think “well it wasn’t supposed to be,” you know? I was supposed to make it out of there. But it’s different when you see their name on a wall, you know? You think, when you see their name on the wall, you see them in their combat gear. You picture them in their combat gear, you know? That’s the way it looks. But we were pinned down that night, and the next day Army tanks come in from the 77th armor. They were out of the First Division, Army division. They called them the ‘Iron Tigers’ but there’s like 6 or 7 of them tanks come in, they pushed the, we were fighting the NVA, the North Vietnamese Army at that time. And they pushed them back, and they come back and they got us, and they loaded us on those tanks. We got out the worse wounded on choppers, they helped me up on the back on the tank. I’ll tell you this because it’s funny, but not funny. But I got the Forrest Gump injury. He’s smiling [Drew] you know what I’m talking about. Yeah, I got hit in the butt. I got hit in with shrapnel though, he got, the difference between him and I is that he got to meet the president and have a Dr. Pepper and I didn’t. But I did, and I was awful sore for quite a while and they dropped me off at an Army forward aid station, battalion aid station. And the doctor there took, gave me some, you know deaden up around where I was hit with the shrapnel and he went in and took shrapnel out, and he give me that piece of shrapnel, and I had it in a pill container and somehow lost that thing, I was going to keep that forever, you know?