Thanks To You
Team Marines was still out front, leading the pack by $1,300 at $14,561 as of 1 p.m. today:
OK, maybe some other readers at other blogs had something to do with it.
Starting with the great Villainous Company, which has a great post about Marine war dogs. They get wounded, too. That reminds me. Blast from the past, a great Marine and a great Marine war dog from the Boston Herald archives:
By rights, John Flannelly should have bled to death under a barrage of rifle and rocket fire 27 years ago.
The 48-year-old Lynn man can thank a dog’s love and strong jaws for dragging him out of the muddy clearing where he expected to die.
“He was my best friend. We ate, slept, did everything together. Wherever we went, we went together,” Flannelly said of Bruiser, the black German shepherd he lived with for nine months in the jungle.
Last week, Flannelly spoke as he walked around with surprising energy for a man who has shrapnel in his head and a bullet in his spine, and who is missing large parts of both lungs, his left kidney, his spleen and gallbladder, half of his stomach, three ribs and a lot of muscle tissue.
“I was wounded real bad the last time,” Flannelly said, recounting the events of a pre-dawn patrol in September 1969 during the Vietnam War.
“The VC had set up a horseshoe ambush. As I walked into the clearing, my dog stopped. There was a bush, and it moved. So I opened up.”
Flannelly carried a 12-gauge shotgun with deer slugs for “stopping power.” He killed the Viet Cong soldier in the bush, but another VC hit him with four AK-47 rounds that ripped open his gut and chest, smashing ribs and exposing a puffing lung. A nasty, churned-up line of scars under his shirt and some yellowed newspaper clippings attest to his story today.
“It knocked me down like a punching bag and I popped right back up. I shot the guy who shot me and fell down again. I tried to get up on my feet, but I couldn’t.”
As Flannelly lay there, a rocket-propelled grenade exploded beside him. It lifted him in the air and dropped him in the mud. Man and dog were sprayed with shrapnel.
“When I came down, I thought I was dead,” he said. “I still had the leash on my wrist, attached to Bruiser’s harness. I unlocked him and said, `Get out of here. Go!’ But the dog wouldn’t go.
“He stuck his teeth into my shoulder and started to drag me. So I put my arm around him. He actually dragged me back 25 yards to a bomb crater.”
A nearby chopper came to lay down covering fire for half an hour or more until reinforcements arrived. Flannelly said he remained conscious despite massive blood loss.
“The doctors didn’t understand why I was alive,” he said.
At the hospital in Da Nang, Cpl. Ken Sucharski of Manchester-by-the-Sea browbeat a nurse to get Bruiser into the ward. That was the last time Flannelly saw his dog.
John Saco of Manchester inherited Bruiser and also thanks him for his life.
“In the middle of the night, you’d be on a patrol. He’d stop and sit down, and you’d find a booby trap on a monofilament line stretched across the trail three feet ahead,” he recalled.
“A Marine tried to step around the dog once and I told him to get back,” he said. “Eighteen inches ahead there was a trip wire that would have taken out three men.”
Bruiser’s fate is unknown. Records indicate that war dogs were handed over to the South Vietnamese when the Marines left. Today, the veterans can’t forget the dogs who kept them alive.
“You become more attached to that animal than most people,” Saco said.
“My dog was a hero. I wasn’t,” Flannelly said. “I was just a guy on the other end of the leash.”
That was written in 1996. Regarding his injuries, as he was describing them back then, I remarked he seemed pretty spry for someone shot up that bad. He raised his shirt and showed me. He definitely got shot up that bad. Flannelly died in 2005 at the age of 57.
The Valour IT push is on Veterans Day. All proceeds go to buy laptops and specialized electronics to accommodate the needs of war-wounded vets of all services.
Topics: courage, dogs, military
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 1:14 pm on Monday, November 2, 2009
2 Responses to “Thanks To You”
Leave a Reply
Trackback URLYou must be logged in to post a comment.
November 2nd, 2009 at 1:32 pm
Woo hoo for Team Marines!
November 3rd, 2009 at 12:49 am
Many, many thanks for the wonderful story about this hero and his pup. Reminded me to make a contribution and give my dog a hug.