40 Days of Walking Hell D

The Walk 40 Days to P, The Untold Story by Dr. Kevin P. Wallace, Van of Valor. The firebase was raw, like a dripping clarrett wound sliced into the jungle’s green flesh. Perched on a low hill, it was a precarious circle of order in a land of chaos. Defined by its earthen BMS, tangled Constantina wire and sandbag bunkers, it had become home to Army Sergeant David Allwine, assigned to Military Assistance Command Vietnam MV.

By day, the air was thick with the sense of diesel fuel, damp earth, and the distant everpresent wood smoke of cooking fires from the nearby village. The stars and stripes hung limp in the hung humid air. A splash of defiant color against the monochrome olive draps of tents and armored personnel carriers.

As dust bled into night, the perimeter lights flickered on, casting a weak orange halo that pushed back against the absolute blackness of the surrounding jungle. A blackness that felt watchful and alive. From all wine’s experience, danger always lurked there. Suddenly, the darkness came alive with hail of AK-47 rounds.

Sound seemed to be swallowed by the night, then shattered by whoop of familiar blades. With eyes straining through the darkness, all wine finally saw it all clear. Death everywhere. Jumping into action, all began dragging casualties to the Hueies as he fended off a brutal attack. Rocket pel rocket propelled grenade rounds walk the ground, ripping through the comm’s equipment, the bunkers, his friends.

Looking toward the perimeter, saw one North Vietnamese Army soldier throw the body of a dead NVA onto the sea wire. Then another and then another. Then shadows began methodically and ruthlessly pouring through the breached wire. A moment later, another RPG hit right on All’s position. The world was silent once again.

All Wine was dead. Perhaps a passing NVA soldier fired a single shot into each American lying on that ground to ensure they were all dead. For all wine, it was that bullet that actually restarted his heart. He now has come to believe. The sun rose and smoke began to settle. As he slowly began to come too, Allwine felt himself being pulled from rubble, but recalled seeing utter desolation.

Where once flew an American flag, now stood a burnt, splintered stump. Thick, silty smoke coiled from the husks of jeeps and collaped skeletons of bunkers. The red earth was churned and blackened, littered with poignant debris of lost lives. Of the hundred Americans who fought tooth and nail to survive the night before, all now were still in the grim morning light.

The sole survivor was The Soul Survivor was dragged, dazed, and wounded from the pile of rubble that buried him when the RPG struck. Rough hands bound his wrists, and pain throbbed in his chest, his stomach, his shoulder, everywhere. Allwang caught a final searing glimpse of the Overrun base, his home, his prison.

his comrade’s doom. Then a blindfold plunged him back into a different kind of darkness, the beginning of a long and solitary captivity. Though the words were lost on him, a stern shove was enough to understand the NVA wanted him to walk. Air left his lungs, then a gasp. When he tried to draw it air back in, he couldn’t.

Its seared sucking sensation bloomed in his chest with every frantic aborted attempt. A young NVA soldier, face and passive, struck Allwine with his rifle. In his lungs released a loud groan, as the soldier drew back his rifle again and prepared to strike Allwine’s already bleeding head, he seemed to hear the wet bubbling sound.

Allwine’s vision swam. He couldn’t walk like this, and the NVA had no intention of offering a stretcher. That meant one thing. He was dead weight. Pushing through the pain of his own failing body, he let out a soft whisper. “I can walk,” he said. He later stitched himself up by pulling strings from banana leaves and made a bamboo needle sharpened by his own teeth.

Allwine said he learned this from his father. His proficiency also was so good that when he heard the NVA released female German nurses back to the Germans, he tried to convince them he was a German doctor by speaking the modern amount of the language he knew, also taught by his father. The march began, and Allwine’s legs, miraculously unharmed, obeyed out of some primal survival instinct.

His left arm hung useless, a pendulum of agony with every step. His shoulder completely shattered. He had a broken left shoulder, sucking chest wound on his right side. His diaphragm was torn, and he had a bullet lodged in his lower back. The chest wound was the true master of his misery.

Every inhalation was a battle he was losing. He couldn’t draw full breath. His body starve for oxygen. Screamed in a constant silent panic. He moved in a shallow panting rhythm. Fish drowning on land. How could he survive a 40-day walk up north under these conditions? He wondered. The first day was a blur of pain and hypoxia.

On the second day, his daily ration was introduced. The guard shoved a small hard ball of cold rice into his good hand. Another placed a single dried slice of orange peel on top of it. A third ladle two scoops of murky water from a canvas bag into his mouth. All wine in his delirium tried to ask for more water.

The response was a rifle butt to his broken shoulder, sending him to his knees. Vision exploding into white stars. The lesson was learned. And so the 40 days trudged on. He walked the world narrowed to the muddy root tangled path ahead. The back of the prisoner in front of him and the sympathy of his own broken body. The sucking in his chest was a constant wet metronome to his steps.

At night, lying on the damp ground, he could feel the air leaking from his lung into the cavity of his chest. A so a slow suffocating inflation. He learned to sleep against propped up against a tree fighting for every shallow sip of air. The next morning offered a glimpse of hope. With his blindfold now removed, Allwine saw 16 South Vietnamese soldiers with him in captivity.

He was not alone after all. Then, hearing a familiar voice, exhausted eyes faintly made out another American. It was unmistakable. Another soldier survived. Allwine remembered thinking. It was Sergeant First Class James Sally Jr. from Allwine’s same company. His happiness soon faded and he lost track of time. Days bled into nights.

Yet like a well-kept clock, the beating seemed to occur right on schedule. To add insult to injury, American politics and communist propaganda deeply affected the NVA’s view on Sally and Allwine. Contrasting All Wines’s one rice ball, one slice of orange peel, and two ladles of water, Sally was given two rice balls, a half a banana, and three ladles of water.

“The NVA was trying to pit Sally and I against each other, which would never work,” said Allwine. The communists told the NVA that the Americans only put rank on black soldiers for the optics. Most of all and Sally’s beatings were due to the pair of soldiers not admitting their actual rank structure.

The NVA were convinced I, an E5 sergeant, was in charge of an E7. They beat us badly daily because we kept telling them he was in charge. Finally, Allwine recalled that he and Sally concocted a plan to admit the communist propaganda was actually correct. “And then they beat us even worse for telling them that it was bad.

Really bad,” said Allwine. Though his rations were larger, Sally seemed to recover much slower with each beating. On his final day, Allwine was helping Sally trudge, allowing his friend to rest some of the weight of his fractured body upon Allwine’s own disfigured one. “The next morning, they woke me up and made me dig a hole, a grave for Sally, they told me,” said Allwine.

In the burning Vietnamese jungle, just beside their foot trail, Allwine dug a hole. The NVA then threw the dead soldier in and began covering him with dirt. Alline stepped up to take over the task. He was my friend, my only friend, and I was going to be the one to bury him with compassion, with love, with respect.

Not like they were just shoveling it all over him, said Alline, who never got to see his friend’s face one last time. I only saw one black leg sticking out of a badly tattered fatigues. The march to damnation continued. The monsoon rains came, turning the path into a river of mud. Each step was a herculean effort.

His boots sucking and pulling with the sound of the earth itself trying to claim him. The fever found him next. A fire that burned from the inside. Fed by the infection brewing around the bullet in his back. He shivered and sweated, his mind unraveling. “I began losing my mind and hallucinating about my wife,” said Allwine.

I reached for her once and found my hand closed around a lump of cold rice. “I would imagine cold bottles of beer just sweating in the sun rather than rusty tasting ladle water.” I had conversations with dead comrades, their faces appearing in the gnarled roots of those banyan trees, said all win. His physical self was also being systematically dismantled.

His uniform hung on him in tatters. His ribs became a stark fence under his skin. The flesh around his wounds was swollen, hot, and wept a foul smelling pus. The bullet in his back felt like it was growing. A malevolent seed taking root to survive. Alwayine had to evolve, remembering I had to stop being David and I had to be that chest wound.

I had to be that hunger. I had to survive those 40 days, never knowing what would happen next, he said. Somewhere around the 30th day, a strange clarity descended. The pain was still there, a vast continental presence, but he had learned to live on its shore. He was a machine made of agony programmed to walk.

He noticed small things again. The iridescent wing of a beetle, the specific grain of a fern, the way the light filtered through the triple canopy jungle. He was almost nothing, a whisper of a man. And in that near nothingness, he found a sliver of peace. They could take his body, break it, starve it.

But this tiny observing part of him, this final, final ember of consciousness was his. Days later, the path widened and the jungle thinned. They emerged into a clearing dominated by a cluster of long low bamboo huts surrounded by rustling barbed wire. A flag with a yellow star hung limply in the humid air. The guard shoved him through the gate.

He stood swaying. A skeleton held together by scar tissue and willpower. Easy, brother. Easy, brother,” somebody whispered, his voice raspy as he came towards Alwine, putting his hand comfortly on Alwine’s shoulder. “The walk’s over.” Allwine tried to speak, but only a dry, rattling sound came out.

He looked down at his chest at the filthy blood soaked banana stitches. He looked at the man holding him. He had survived the march. He had walked 40 days with a death sentence written in his own flesh. But what lies ahead? He remembered thinking. He was a prisoner of war. But in that moment, as the man led him towards the dark, gaping doorway of the hut, Olwine knew with a certainty that itclipsed all his pain, that the walking was only the beginning.

A two-year long night was about to descend. To speak of all’s name is to speak of strength forged in darkness, of hope that endured in the face of despair, of a spirit that could not be broken. For 755 days, he was held captive, a P in North Vietnam. But the measure of his life is not in the years he lost, but in the life he reclaimed.

Allwine was more than a soldier who endured. He was a symbol for every family who waited, prayed, and clung to hope during the Vietnam War. His name etched onto the service bracelets worn by countless Americans was a silent vow to never forget those who were gone. His eventual release in homecoming with Operation Homecoming in 1973 was a moment of profound joy, a sign that the promise was kept.

His return was not the end of his story, but the beginning of another journey. As an Army veteran, he continued to serve his country and community, sharing his experience to remind others of the true cost of freedom. As a former P, those asks are frequent. Decades later, Wine’s quiet strength and enduring spirit continue to inspire.

His legacy is carried forward by those who heard his story and felt its impact. He proved that no matter the hardship, the human spirit can not only survive, but return hope, not defeated, but with a message of hope and unbreakable resilience. Friends, the story you just heard is the untold story of AllWine’s 40-day march to captivity.

His time as a P is highly documented, as are his two silver stars, Bronze Star, Two Purple Hearts, and multiple other medals. Allwine is undoubtedly a hero. I’m really hope you learned a lot from the struggle of his story and from his story. and we were just honored to share it with you. Thank you for following us. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.

Van of Valor, thank you.