How To Pray In Combat When Your Mind Is Off: How to be prayed up

By Martin Latigue

How do you pray in a time like this when your mind is gone so fast,
you can’t think? How do you pray in combat when your mind is
off? When we went to South Vietnam, I could go to the front line
to fight the enemy, but I couldn’t ride on the front of the bus, illegal
in south. Draftee were ordered to join the a

• Language: English
• Publisher: LitFire Publishing
• Release date: Sep 11, 2019
• ISBN: 9781643989242

Martin Latigue

Martin Latigue hopes that this account will help others he served with in Vietnam share what it was like to fight in the Battle of Ia Drang.

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How To Pray In Combat When Your Mind Is Off

Copyright © 2019 by Martin Latigue.

ISBN: 978-1-64398-924-2

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Printed in the United States of America.

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HOW TO BE PRAYED UP

MARTIN LATIGUE

To all that served in VIETNAM

I was born during World War II. My mother’s father was one hundred years old, and he would live eight more years. One of my brothers—Jackson—was named after him. He was killed on the U.S.S. Indianapolis in July 30, 1945.

On the night before Thanksgiving, my brother Wedges was killed in our home. This was two years after Jackson was killed. Wedges was babysitting me and my niece. My sister, was with mother and father at night service at church. Two of Wedges’s friends stopped by our house to visit Joseph saw the shotgun at the head of the bed. One of them asked if he could check it out. My brother said it was okay.

My father and Wedges had been hunting that day. They found a bald eagle and brought it home. It had a broken wing. My father did some first aid on it. During the night, it flew away. Some of my Indian cousins who saw it say it was bad luck to put your hands on an eagle.

Joseph was checking the gun when it went off. It hit Wedges in the head, blowing his head in half, some of it hitting me in the back as I turned to see the friends bolt out of the door. I got my niece out of bed and got dressed so we could get my father at church, which was very near our house. It was so dark, and I couldn’t even see my niece at the end of my hand. As we got near the church, I could hear my father’s voice. He was running to meet us, and he had a flashlight with him. There was no electricity in this part of the town. Joseph had made it to the church, asking for my mother. When he saw her, he passed out before he could tell her. When my father saw Wedges’s body, he turned to stop my mother, who was running toward him. He would not let her see the body.

Many hours passed before the policemen came. It was very cold that night, and the men made a big wood fire in the front yard. When the policemen showed up, it was already late at night. They put me in the backseat of the car. This was my first time in a heated car, and it felt good. It was also my first time to talk to a white person. I planned to lie to the police because it hurt to see my father, mother, and sister crying. My lies would have put those young men in jail for a long time, but a voice told me to tell the truth. This was the first time I heard the voice, but during my lifetime, I would hear it again.