Opening paragraphs...............

The small bloody hole in the ground that was Captain Bob Edwards's Charlie Company command post was crowded with men.  Sergeant Hermon R. Hustuttler, twenty-five, from Terra Alta, West Virginia, lay crumpled in the red dirt, dead from an AK-47 round through his throat.  Specialist 4 Ernest E. Paolone of Chicago, the radio operator, crouched low, bleeding from a shrapnel wound in the left forearm.  Sergeant James P. Castleberry, the artillery forward observer, and his radio operator, PFC Ervin L. Brown, Jr., hunkered down beside Paolone.  Captain Edwards had a bullet hole in his left shoulder and armpit, and was slumped in a contorted sitting position, unable to move and losing blood.  He was holding his radio handset to his ear with his one good arm.  A North Vietnamese machine gunner atop a huge termite hill no more than thirty feet away had them all in his sights.
-Lt. Gen. Harold G. Moore (Ret.) and Joseph L. Galloway,  We Were Soldiers Once...And Young