Veteran Neil Chamberlain, was crawling through a Vietnamese sugar cane field, when he witnessed a miracle. When they came to an opening, there was a canal bank in the clearing, and they were cornered.
“We were crawling forward, stuck in a crossfire, when all the sudden I see the second guys head gets slammed to the ground,” Chamberlain said. “I crawled up next to him, I didn’t want to take his helmet off, because he had a hole in the back of his helmet.”
Chamberlain, an Army infantryman at the time, started to move him and took his helmet off after the heavy blow to the head, what he saw was shocking, the soldier with a bullet stuck in his helmet, wasn’t hurt at all.
“When I flipped his helmet over, inside he had a scapula taped to it. A scapula is like a paper or cloth cross pendant like a patch,” Chamberlain said. “Its called the bleeding heart of Mary, and it shows Mary holding Jesus, the bullet had penetrated the helmet, helmet liner and just pierced the scapula.”
“This was from 30 yards away, that guy had us dialed in,” Chamberlain said.
According to Chamberlain the Army had actually given him the helmet back, a neighboring platoon had new technology, and had asked if they could have the helmet analyzed.
“They actually did give it back to him and said there was no physiological reason for this helmet to have stopped this bullet,” Chamberlain said. “It’s not like there was a thicker patch on this piece of steel, they tried all these different things, and this was an AK-47 from 30 yards.”
As well as being an infantryman, Chamberlain was a photographer throughout his service in Vietnam.
According to Chamberlain, the usual military training for a photographer was 26 weeks, compared to an infantry man, which was 12 weeks, because they taught them how to build cameras from scratch.
When he met the Colonel, he had made two things abundantly clear. “I only have two things I want y’all to do--one, make sure nothing bad about the battalion gets in the news, two, make sure none of them dumb sons-of-bitches, from the press, get killed while they’re with us.”
Chamberlain decided to enlist in the military when he was 20 years-old, because of his family background within the military.
“My dad was in the military, he was 4F and my grandfather got drafted at 42, because he abandoned his family, I also just got tired of wasting my dad’s money,” said Chamberlain.
There were about 10 men from his neighborhood that signed up to go overseas and luckily all 10 wound up coming home.
By the end of his service, he had reached the rank of Buck Sergeant, and was awarded the Purple Heart and the Combat Infantry Badge.
