In 1962 Glendol Garrett had a plan. He wanted to make a career out of the military. So, at age 17 he left Poplar Bluff High School as an 11th grader and joined the Marines.
A booby trap across a trail in Vietnam put him in various hospitals for 18 months and ended those plans for good.
Garrett was still a teenager when he boarded a Navy ship that would take him for training and an eventual ticket to Vietnam.
Once on the ship, Garrett quickly discovered he was not cut out to be a sailor.
"I got so sick. I was sick for 20 days," he recalled.
When the ship ported in Japan, while the rest of the guys couldn't wait for shore leave, Garrett volunteered for guard duty.
"I figured I'd let somebody else go because I was just too sick to go on liberty."
From Japan the ship sailed to Okinawa and from there headed for Korea where the Marines were to undergo cold weather training. At that point, things went from bad to worse for the seasick Marine. If he thought the first part of his trip was bad ... he hadn't seen nothing yet.
The ship got caught in a typhoon.
"They had me guarding the wheelhouse," he recalled.
He was ordered to wear a wide belt with a rope snapped to the railing to keep him from getting washed overboard.
"The ship was rolling 90 degrees in 20-40 foot waves. The waves were going clear over the wheelhouse."
The conditions were so bad the captain called Garrett into the wheelhouse.
"Once he saw how sick I was he relieved me of duty."
It quickly became obvious the conditions were too bad to continue, so the ship returned to Okinawa.
Okinawa was a familiar name to Garrett.
"My father-in-law was in the Marines that took Okinawa," during World War II.
It was in Okinawa that he took jungle training. From there the thankful Garrett took a plane to Vietnam.
Once in Vietnam he learned that if you extended your tour there by six months, the Marines would fly you home. There was no doubt, he was going to extend.
But he never had the chance.
Garrett was with the 1st Battalion, 3rd Marines. Their first stop was Da Nang. For three months they guarded the base.
"Then the 9th Brigade came in an they sent us to the boonies."
At that point his unit made history. The year was 1965.
"We were the first actual fighting unit in Vietnam," he said.
Before then, U.S. forces consisted mainly of CIA operatives and Special Forces advisers.
"We were assigned to Ridge 368."
One of the soldiers he served with there was a young second lieutenant named Philip Caputo. He went on to be a newspaper reporter for the Chicago Tribune and authored 16 books. He is most noted for Rumors of War, a memoir about his time in Vietnam. It has sold 1.5 million copies. Caputo also was mentioned in Ken Burns' documentary on Vietnam that ran for several segments on the PBS channel.
The living conditions were primitive on Ridge 368 and the duty hazardous.
His unit was tasked with going out on patrols to look for the enemy, signs of the enemy or to set up ambushes for the enemy.
"I was a scout for the company," he said. "We had two Louisiana boys who grew up in the swamps and me and a Michigan guy who grew up in the woods."
So, they all became scouts, taking the point on each patrol to alert the rest of any danger that lay ahead. All of those scouts got wounded. Two were wounded in firefights and the other stepped on a mine.
But Garrett was the first scout to fall. He was 19 years old.
Two weeks before he was wounded, Garrett's unit found two booby traps on the same trail. They blew them up with grenades.
"Some traps were made with 60mm mortars or Chinese hand grenades. We find anything, we'd blow it up with grenades. We wouldn't mess with it."
And, on the same trail they found a punji stick trap, which is made from sharpened sticks and sometimes covered in excrement to enhance infections. The sticks would be in a hole covered with light materiel and when stepped on the person would fall through a foot or two and be impaled by the sticks.
Garrett had been in Vietnam six months when he went out on what was to be his last patrol.
As a scout leading his unit, he found a booby trap.
"It was just some vines across the trail," he said.
The vines act as a detonating cord. When grabbed or pushed, it trips an explosive device set on the side of the trail that blasts shrapnel into the troops.
"I sort of walked up to it to see what side of the trail it (the explosive device) was on," Garrett said. "It was on the left and when I turned around I must have caught it (the vine) with my rifle barrel or my arm. It was a stupid mistake."
The blast riddled his body with shrapnel.
"It went from my ankle to the back of my head," he said. "It blew my right kneecap out, part of my hip off, and got my chest and lower lungs. The guys took care of me at the scene because the lieutenant forgot to bring a corpsman."
A medevac helicopter was called in and Garrett's bleeding body was loaded on board.
The chopper had just taken off when the corpsman leaned over Garrett and touched his wounded arm (which today is usable but gnarled from the wounds).
With his good arm, Garrett grabbed the corpsman by his shirt, raised him up and flung him across his body. The chopper was 500 feet in the air and the corpsman would have gone out the open door if the crew chief hadn't grabbed him by his belt and drug him back inside.
"The door gunner looked to be about 6-foot-6 and he slammed me down" and restrained me.
"I don't know how I got the strength, adrenaline I guess. I like to have killed that corpsman. I didn't mean to. It just hurt so bad."
From there Garrett was sent to a series of hospitals where he underwent numerous surgeries.
His parents were notified of his status and the gravity of his wounds by a Western Union telegram. His mother kept them and Garrett has them today.
While at a hospital in Vietnam, the base underwent a rocket attack.
"The rockets blew up the building next to us but nobody was in the building. It blew the windows out of my hospital room. Scared me pretty good."
Eventually, Garrett was flown to the Millington Naval Base at Memphis. There, as his parents looked on, the assistant secretary of the Navy pinned a Purple Heart on him as he lay in his hospital bed with his heavily bandaged left arm resting on the sheets.
It was his second Purple Heart.
He got the first one while his unit was to go on patrol. They had just got off their helicopter when they started getting mortared.
"Six guys were wounded bad and one killed."
Garrett got hit by a piece of shrapnel. He was given the Purple Heart but it never became official because the paperwork got lost.
"I don't count that one," he said. "But I know I got it."
It, along with the one he did officially get, hang beside each other in a frame in his rural Butler County home.
In February 1967, Garrett's military career ended when he was finally discharged from the hospital and the Marines.
But relics of that day on the trail remain with Garrett.
His son, Dale, who served in the Army and is now chief of police for the John J. Pershing VA Medical Center, was returning from Desert Storm.
Garrett went to pick him up at the airport. He couldn't go through the metal detector. There is still shrapnel in his body.