In 1969, a four-man recon unit of the 173rd Airborne were conducting intel gathering operations deep in the jungles of Vietnam. During one of those missions, Mike Gude stepped on a land mine which blew off his right leg; his teammate Howard Hunt Jr. lay nearby with his legs shredded from the shrapnel. The other two members (Bob Bodemann and Grady Fox) worked frantically to stop Mike's bleeding, and carried him to an LZ where a med-evac managed to pick the team up.
Gude said, "I think I'm going to die." but Bodemann was having none of it. "You're a paratrooper and you're too mean to die." Bodemann replied; and then he took him in his arms to keep him warm during the trip.
When Gude and Hunt were carried into the aid station on Oct. 24, 1969, Bodemann and Fox were blocked from entering and that would be the last time the team would see each other again until 45 years later. “I didn’t even know if these guys were alive,” said Gude; wondering if any of his comrades survived.
Then things changed. With the help of an online message board, Gude found those lost comrades: By some miracle they were all alive. Each of them spent over four decades wondering if their brothers had made it.
On April 24, 2014, at Terminal 4 Ontario Airport, the recon team was finally reunited for the first time since that mission and this photo captures it all. “My life is complete, so if it ends today, I had a beautiful life" - Mike Gude. #stayzero #military #brotherhood