Third Platoon is a series of vignettes about the Vietnam War by a corpsman (medic). You will find few accounts of heroic exploits here. This is not the memoir of a decorated hero but rather a frank disclosure of one who held on by a thread. Illustrations are by the author. Chapter crawled out of waist-high brush twenty meters from me. I scrambled to them on hands and knees. Both had suffered life-threatening injuries. Streams of crimson arterial blood meant I must abandon one of them. Precious seconds counted. We learned in Corps school to assess and compare before making risky decisions, but this dilemma never came to light. I turned to the nearest casualty to set a tourniquet and applied battle dressings while the other struggled. Minutes later, both died. Severe trauma may have doomed them both, but what about the other Marine? I had saved a few with comparable wounds. You could dismiss the question with a simple, logical I made a wise decision to act at once. The ultimate fate of the other casualty is irrelevant. Time didn’t allow a thorough estimate to decide which might have survived. What makes good sense in our supposed rational environment often rings hollow to veterans. We search for our own answers in a world steeped in Disney culture. Americans fight wars over there, never here. No collective understanding of conflict informs the homeland.