Dwight Moss was 19 years old when he joined the Marines in Portland, Oregon — not because he was drafted, but because he’d always wanted to be one. He held a push-up record at his school, liked challenging things, and figured the Marines was the hardest thing he could do. By 21, he was in Vietnam. What he encountered there — the kind of war that gets soldiers killed not by enemy skill but by bad orders and worse strategy — would shape everything that came after.
In this episode of Ask A Vet, Dwight walks us through a year in Vietnam that included firefights across open rice paddies, watching men die beside him, and three moments he describes not as “close calls” but as genuine near-deaths — moments when he knew, with absolute clarity, that he was dying. The first was nearly drowning in a fast-moving river while carrying full gear, saved only because soldiers on the bank locked arms and caught his hand before the current took him. The second came when a Bouncing Betty landmine detonated beneath his foot, shredding him from ankle to chest — and the moment his vision went dark, he assumed that was the end. The third, perhaps the most surreal, happened during a 106.2-degree malaria fever when he found himself watching his own body from the top of a tent, then traveling — instantly — back to a creek near his childhood home in North Carolina.
What’s striking about the landmine story is not just the severity of the injuries — deep tissue wounds across both legs, shrapnel through his chest and abdomen, nerve damage that took months of electrical stimulation therapy to begin reversing — it’s his mental state in the immediate aftermath. Dwight said he stood there, bleeding from wounds he couldn’t yet see or feel, and told himself to stay calm. “People die under severe stress,” he explained. “They make the wounds worse. They bleed faster.” He asked the corpsman to clear his throat so he could breathe, insisted on having his rifle beside him on the stretcher, and didn’t fully break down even when officers had already been dispatched to his mother’s house to inform her he wouldn’t survive. His youngest brother later wrote about clinging to their mother’s leg as she fell apart. Dwight was still fighting.
Recovery took everything he had. He taught himself to walk again by doing squats at the hospital sink. He swam for hours at a time when his foot still wouldn’t cooperate. He eventually completed Ironman-distance events. He became a lifeguard — and saved a young man’s life using the same calm he’d practiced in a Vietnamese rice paddy. Today, at 80, Dwight serves as chaplain at his local VFW post, is writing his first book, and still plans to ski when the VA appointment ends early enough. His philosophy is simple: “What you cannot do is irrelevant. Do what you can today.” That’s not a bumper sticker. For Dwight Moss, it’s the operating system he built from the wreckage of a war that almost killed him three times over.
Listen to the full episode of Ask A Vet on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and wherever you get your podcasts.