True heroes - tested in war - gather at a diner

I hate to do this to this great article but there is something that just does not seem right about it. All my life I've been around veterans and heard hundreds of stories. Whenever they guess at how many lives were lost or how many were wounded, it was never about their own unit. In this case a veteran guessed at how many lives his unit lost as well as how many were wounded while he was with them.

Every other story I've heard showed they remembered. They remembered how many died as well as how many were wounded. They remembered their names as much as they remembered their faces and what happened to them. Is this a case of "fog of war" or something else?

True heroes - tested in war - gather at a diner
Philly.com
Natalie Pompilio
November 16, 2014

"I think hero is a word used too loosely today. To me, heroes are those who act even though they know the risks. They're hard to find. Yet on Tuesday, I was lucky enough to be in a room filled with them."

We were talking about Vietnam. He was a squad leader, Second Battalion, First Marines. The company became separated on patrol.

"The overgrowth of trees in the mountain area there, you would be going down into a riverbed, trying to go from point A to point B, and at 12 o'clock in the afternoon, it would be like 7 o'clock at night," Alex DiGiacomo told me, looking away at something I could not see. "We got ambushed there one night."

Then he paused. He was silent for 13 seconds. I know because I recorded the conversation, and I later watched the timer count down. Thirteen seconds is a long time when you're watching someone in pain. DiGiacomo sat across from me, his lips twisting and his eyes filling with water.

"We lost . . . ," he started, then stopped, then started again. "We lost about five or six guys killed, four or five wounded. We lost the L.T. and the radio man and the other guys, killed and wounded. It took us all night to go 200 yards to hook up with the rest of our company."

He remembered how the weight of his friends' bodies felt as he and the other survivors carried and dragged them away. He remembered the smells. "Certain aftershave lotions, certain times of year, I go right back," said DiGiacomo, 68. "The images you live with when you're in combat . . . you never get over it."
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