This is an excerpt of a story Mike Little wrote for the Plieku MP web site a few years ago. It is about the ambush when George McDonald was killed. 

Just before reaching our checkpoint, a VC sniper put an AK-47 round through the door of your 5000 gallon tanker truck, killing you. Losing control, you rolled the truck down a dirt embankment, ending upside-down. Lucky for everyone else, your load of diesel fuel didn’t explode. But you were dead anyway, either from the bullet wound or the broken neck. When I arrived, somebody motioned me to the cab. I gazed at your slumping body. your eyes were closed, as if in peaceful sleep, a bullet hole in your side, leaking very little blood. I looked away and wished we had a medic around to help. You didn’t have a pulse, but we called for a medivac anyway. I held your hand until the chopper arrived, then cradled you head as we carried you to it. “Been shot in the side,” I told the door gunner, I think he was pissed for risking his life to retrieve a dead guy. That was it, you were gone. I didn’t get drunk that night because I couldn’t stop thinking about your family, who would soon receive the saddest news of all. The Army installed armor plating in all the truck doors a few weeks later, but it was too late to save you, that day on highway 19, 1968.

Mike thank you, from all of us for allowing us to share this story. And for your support in Vietnam.

Posted in 1967-8