The year just past – 2023 – marked fifty years since the official end of the Vietnam War for America. For many who served – including me – the Fifty-Year Commemoration invoked any number of memories. Please bear with me as I share a few.
My tour of duty in Vietnam was cut short when I failed to duck fast enough and low enough and was wounded in action. I prayed for help, but the Good Lord was ahead of me. He already had seventeen Guardian Angels on the ground with me – the very young Enlisted Soldiers of my platoon – all between seventeen and nineteen years old. They saved my life by enabling my safe medical evacuation. My respect and gratitude for Enlisted Soldiers is without limit.
After surgery and some recovery time at the Army hospital at Long Binh, I was shipped with other patients on the way home to the Army hospital at Camp Zama, Japan. The recovery period in Japan was an important transition time. Immediately following our surgeries in Vietnam, many of us were on heavy pain-killers – morphine or other narcotics. Our stay in Japan was the time to ease off those drugs in preparation for our return home.
At Camp Zama, I was in a mixed ward of about eight wounded Officers and Enlisted Soldiers.
About a week after I arrived, a young soldier – perhaps eighteen or nineteen years old – was carried in. He had stepped on a land mine. The booby trap had taken off his right foot.
Within a day after his arrival, his condition became extremely serious when an artery opened near the wound and he was losing blood quickly. An Army doctor and a nurse came to his bedside immediately to stop the bleeding. As they began to work, the soldier’s pain dramatically increased. He cried – and then screamed loudly. As I recall, they didn’t give him any painkillers. Perhaps it was because he was transitioning off narcotics – or perhaps the drugs would have aggravated the bleeding – or more likely because there wasn’t time given how much and how fast he was losing blood.
In the midst of the now very loud and continuous crying and screaming, the doctor and nurse remained focused, stopped the bleeding, and saved that soldier’s life. He could have died right before our eyes.
The next day, after he had rested and recovered from the pain of the day before, that young soldier did something I will never forget. He asked the nurse for a crutch, and he got out of his bed. Then he carefully hobbled around to each of us in the ward – to apologize – for not “keeping it together” – for not handling his pain in a better way. All of us were stunned. We were almost in tears when he went through his excruciatingly painful ordeal – and now, almost in tears again, at this soldier’s humility.
I learned two lessons from the events of those two days. First, I could never be a doctor (or nurse) – certainly not an emergency room physician (or assisting nurse). I understand, of course, these doctors and nurses train intensely to develop the skills needed to perform just such life-saving work. But to be able to perform those tasks under conditions of extreme pain for the patient remains a wonder to me. My respect and gratitude for such doctors and nurses also is without limit.
The second lesson I learned was from that young, seriously-wounded, soldier. I suppose he believed we may have thought less of him because – in his eyes – he didn’t bear up well under his pain. All of us in the ward knew, however, that had the situation been reversed, we would have screamed as loudly or more.
That soldier could have remained quietly in his bed for his remaining few days at Camp Zama without saying a word to any of us. He would have moved on quickly along with the rest of us – far from the memories of that time. Instead, he felt the need to come to each of us face-to-face – his fellow soldiers – to say, essentially, that he had “not measured-up” as a soldier and as a man. He left us speechless.
Courage comes in different forms. It’s not just battlefield courage. It took real courage for this young soldier to come to the rest of us in this way – in an extraordinary show of humility. His actions were unnecessary, of course – but not without deep meaning and effect. Would any of the rest of us have shown such humility and courage?
I’m certain the young soldier had no idea that anyone would remember – with respect and thanks for his humble and courageous actions – more than fifty years later.
I still pray for him and all the others who served so many years ago.
