One Soldiers Story: Billy Tate, pony express rider

I was eighteen years old the first time I saw combat and the men with me were about the same age, eighteen or nineteen years old. They came from towns and cities in California, Georgia, Texas and a hundred other places. Most or all of them carried their hopes, their dreams and their lives in the small metal boxes the ammo came in. Letters from home and pictures of the families they left behind.
Little did we know they were memories of a world we would never return to. At night the men would take out the letters and read them to anyone who would listen. They held the pictures of children they had never met cupped in their hands and guarded them as if they were precious diamonds, or bars of gold. They talked about the times when they had gone deer hunting with their brothers or fishing with their fathers. They told stories about how they were going to scare the pants off the first boy their daughter brought home and how they were going to teach their son how to play baseball or football. The only problem was we were a wild battery sent from one battle to another. We were attacked on a hill called Granite and in less than an hour they had over run half the hill, some of us died there. Four days later we were still under attack and still dying. Death followed us from one hill to the next. Later we were moved to a hill called Ripcord.
I guess everyone knew it was going to be a bad hill and they started to read more and more of the letters from home. They were showing the pictures to anyone who would look, talking about fishing trips they would go on, jobs they would have, places they would see and the lives they would live. Then the Rockets started coming in, and the men started dying. At first, they sent replacements for the dead or the wounded but then the replacements stopped coming and we grew fewer and fewer. When we flew off the hill there weren't a lot of us left, and we had to leave the small metal boxes with the pictures of the children they would never know and the letters from families they would never see, behind. We left them in the blood-soaked hills of Vietnam, as the Rockets ripped into the ground below us and the cry of the dying echoed from the hills. I wanted to tell the families of the dead that their sons, their fathers or their brothers never forgot about them and that they loved them until the day of their death, and that we sent the little metal boxes home whenever we could

.Billy Tate, the fourteen-year-old pony express ride killed seven warriors and wounded others, Numaga the war chief of the Paiute nation, and the braves themselves, gave Billy Tate the respect of a warrior and never lifted his hair or mutilated the body and left him his weapons and pony so he could ride and fight again in the spirit world
I believe Billy Tate was buried somewhere between the borders of Arizona and Nevada.