Into the Storm: On the Ground in Iraq sic-1 Page 10

  "Medevac on the way!"

  They set up an LZ with colored smoke. But it turned out the medevac wasn't the first ship down. Colonel Starry's command-and-control Huey came in ahead of it.

  Somebody helped Colonel Starry aboard. Then others lifted in Fred Franks's litter. He was feeling dry in the mouth, from the morphine. And he would fade in and out, from the pain in his crushed foot and from the drug. The other troops who were hit in the incident also were aboard.

  One of the other AA positions was still operating. When Starry's Huey took off, it put serious fire in their direction. With tracers flaming close… erupting all around them… the pilot took the ship down low, skimming over treetops. As out of it as he was by then, Franks could hear the popping sounds from the AA.

  It was less than fifteen minutes after the grenade blew.

  Later that day, the battle that started near the airstrip expanded and intensified. Though they tried to avoid it, the Blackhorse had to take the fight into the town of Snoul. When it was all over, they had dealt the NVA a defeat, but at the cost of serious collateral damage to the town. If they had managed to obtain the intel Fred Franks wanted from the NVA at the AA site, all that might have been avoided.

  Thirty minutes after Franks was lifted out of Snoul, he was at the aid station at Quan Loi, near the 11th ACR base camp. The aid station was a triage area. They decided which of the wounded they could fix up there and which had to be medevaced back to Long Binh. Franks was clearly evacuation material.

  When the doctor at Quan Loi looked him over, Franks asked him, "Am I going to lose my foot?"

  "Nah," he said. "You'll be OK. Don't worry about it."

  They always underestimate combat wounds…

  A medevac took him to the 93rd Evacuation Hospital at Long Binh. When he arrived, they rushed him into surgery. And during the next two days, he was in surgery again, more than once. How many operations he had then, he doesn't know. He was pretty much out of it during that time.

  He asked a doctor at Long Binh: "Doc, am I going to lose my foot?"

  "Nah," he said. "Six months and you'll be up and around doing duty."

  On 7 May, they flew him to Camp Zama Hospital in Japan. He was there for a week.

  He asked a doctor at Zama, Dr. Jeff Malke, "Doc, am I going to lose my foot?"

  "You don't want to hear this," Malke answered, "but six months from now, you're going to decide you'd be better off without that foot. But you're probably going to have to go through a battle to decide that yourself. You're not going to get around well on that leg. Major, that is just not a good-looking leg and foot."

  Dr. Malke was a wise man, but Fred Franks did not want to hear such wisdom just then.

  He said to himself, The hell with that. He doesn't know what he's talking about. I'm going to beat this thing. I haven't met a hurdle yet I can't get over.

  It was not, in truth, a good-looking leg and foot. The entire ankle was shattered, dislocated. The bones of the ankle and foot were splintered or crushed, and part of the lower leg had serious damage.

  The war was over for Franks. Little did he realize that his, and the Army's, biggest battles lay ahead.

  Fred Franks tells what happened next.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Valley Forge

  2408 Cleveland Avenue, West Lawn, Pennsylvania.

  That's where I grew up.

  My family moved there in the fall of 1946, right after Boston lost the World Series to St. Louis. I was nine. Housing was scarce in 1946, and my dad was lucky to find the place. It was what was called a double home, a two-family house, and it had been built in the twenties. There were no sidewalks out front, and to the rear of the house were open fields where people still hunted for small game. A baseball diamond was across the street next to the double railroad tracks of the Reading Railroad. It was there and on other athletic fields around Berks County that I learned about competition and teamwork.

  It was a great place to grow up. Even though the Army sent Denise and me all over the world, that part of Pennsylvania is still home to us. In that neighborhood, my sister, Frances, my brother, Farrell, and I grew up with a spirit of togetherness — my mother and dad saw to that. And it is where I first met Denise in 1949, right after she moved into the school district and took the seat in front of me in homeroom in Wilson High School. We learned values at home from our family and had them strengthened in that community in school, in church, in sports, and with our friends and their families.

  It was a modest, mostly blue-collar community. People worked hard, many in the factories of the Textile Machine Works or the Berkshire Knitting Mills in nearby Wyomissing. Homes were small, but clean, and well kept inside and out. There was pride there, and humility. Hard work was the ethic. Earn your way to the top, then when you get there, be modest, don't get a big head.

  In the summer of 1969, after I got orders to Vietnam, Denise, our daughter, Margie, and I moved into the old homestead at 2408. The house had been vacant since Mom and Dad had moved to Endwell, New York, in 1968, following my dad's promotion to a senior management position with the Endicott Johnson Shoe Corporation. I had just finished three years at West Point as an instructor in the English Department and as assistant varsity baseball coach. I felt good that Margie and Denise would be home while I was gone, and that Margie would go to the same grade school in West Wyomissing that Frances, Farrell, and I had attended many years earlier. Some of the same teachers were still there. And Denise's parents, Eva and Harry, lived less than a half mile away, in the house where Denise grew up. Most of our relations were within fifty miles. Just as when we had both grown up, the three us were surrounded by family and friends.

  In late July 1969, as I kissed Denise and Margie good-bye in the Philadelphia airport, I was off to war, but I was happy that my family was in good hands.

  It was to that house that I would return on Christmas 1970 to decide whether to have my left leg amputated.

  VALLEY FORGE GENERAL HOSPITAL

  Valley Forge General Hospital, just outside Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, is forty-five minutes by medevac helicopter from the hospital at Fort Dix, New Jersey. I had spent the night there after a long, C-141 medevac trip from Camp Zama hospital in Japan. It was the Army's policy to place long-term-care soldiers as close to home as possible, and Phoenixville was about an hour's drive for Denise each way, mostly on two-lane roads. On 18 May 1970, the helicopter landed on the asphalt Maltese Cross landing pad at Valley Forge.

  Though it was great to be back in the U.S.A., I was beginning to grow concerned about my leg. Since I'd been wounded on 5 May, I had undergone surgery in a string of hospitals. Each time, the doctors had been less and less optimistic.

  On the night before I came to Valley Forge, I had an emotional reunion with Denise and Margie, who had driven the three hours from our home to Fort Dix with our friend Betsy Hassler. It was a reunion not much different, I suspect, from those many of my fellow soldiers experienced when they returned home wounded from Vietnam. At first Margie was not permitted to come to my room, but a sergeant snuck her up the back stairs. Sergeants just know sometimes.

  When we were all together, few words passed. We hugged each other and did not talk about the obvious. By now, some of the wounds on my hand, arm, back, and both legs were healing, although there were still bandages and stitches. But there was still some concern about my ear, which had been damaged by the grenade, and my smashed lower left leg. If Denise had any thoughts about my condition, she never let on, although she told me later the wounds were more extensive than official communications had indicated. We tried to put a positive face on it all.

  Valley Forge General Hospital was a World War II-type hospital, with two stories, a wood frame, and a sprawling design. (Most of these facilities have since been torn down or used for other purposes; Valley Forge was closed in the late 1970s.) There was a central nurses' station, with long wings reaching out on each side, and a corridor connecting them all. The wards were open, with four
to six beds on each side, for a total of eight to twelve per section, and three sections per wing. A few private and semi-private rooms were sandwiched in between the nurses' station and the wings. With four wings per ward, on two floors, each ward had a total patient population of 150 to 200, and the total patient census at the hospital at that time was somewhere around 1,400 or 1,500. The military installation included the hospital itself, plus other activities supporting it, such as the troop barracks, gymnasium, chapel, small PX and commissary, service club, and even an officer and NCO club. There was also a nine-hole golf course. Later, an amputee instructor gave some of us instruction there on how to play golf as an amputee. The facility was not large, but covered maybe 200 acres, including the golf course. The orthopedic ward—3A and 3B — held approximately 300 soldiers, all male. We actually had more patients (about 400) than we had beds. The hospital got around that by putting about 100 people on convalescent leave at any one time. The hospital was full.

  Valley Forge was a general hospital, in which every kind of medical problem was treated. There were psychiatric patients, an entire ward devoted to amputees, and an orthopedic ward devoted to non-amputees.

  I was admitted to Ward 3A/B, the non-amputee orthopedic ward. We had a lot of badly hurt soldiers there, a lot of them much worse off than I was. At first I was in a room by myself, but later shared one with a warrant officer aviator named Tom Merhline. Though Tom had severe abdominal wounds and couldn't get out of bed, he was a tough guy and fought his battle day after day. I admired his courage.

  As for me, the next several months, I ran up against a wall I could not get over no matter how hard I tried.

  DECEMBER 1970

  After more than six months in the hospital, I knew I had to make a decision about the leg. I talked about my choices a few days before Christmas with Dr. Phil Deffer, the chief of orthopedics at Valley Forge.

  "So, Doctor, what are my options?"

  "You have two," he said. "First, we can continue to work on your foot and ankle to try to stop the infection and help you walk better. We'll leave you with something that looks like a foot. Chances are you'll be able to walk a few blocks without too much pain, but you might have some continued bone infection."

  "What's the other one?"

  "Amputate your left leg below the knee and hope we got high enough so there is no residual infection. We'll probably have to leave the end of your leg open for some time, to be sure there is no infection in the remaining bone. No guarantees."

  "What about staying in the Army?"

  "There's no way to do that and keep your leg. The Army does allow amputees to remain on active duty. But that depends on your motivation and the medical board recommendation."

  "That's it?"

  "That's it."

  "Okay, Dr. Deffer. Tough choice, but that's what I needed to know. I'm going to talk about it over Christmas with my wife and daughter.

  "The choices are clear to me."

  Nothing had worked.

  CHRISTMAS 1970

  I do not like to think much anymore about the six months that had just passed. I was in a real losing streak and did not seem able to do anything about it. I was losing not only physically, but in other, less visible ways.

  Multiple operations at many hospitals up to and including Valley Forge had failed to halt the infection or ease the constant pain. For the first eight weeks after I arrived, it had been surgery every week to debride the wound. In July, they'd stopped operating to try to get me to walk. We tried it all. I got a special shoe to keep weight off what was left of the ankle and foot. Then we tried a brace above and below the knee to take more weight off the ankle. Physical therapy was twice a day, but I was walking with a thirty-degree list. I continued to lose weight. During those six months, my weight dropped from a normal 165 down to less than 130. The only thing that worked was a skin graft to the side of my leg to replace a large area of lost skin, but even that took three attempts.

  The days were long but the nights were longer. I was running temperatures almost every night, followed by night sweats. They checked for malaria and everything else likely, but they found nothing except the leg wound and the resulting infection. The cultures from my leg were not good, and I had received four or five pints of blood because of blood loss during surgery. Meanwhile, the multiple surgery had taken more of the bones away. Even with all that, my ankle remained dislocated, and I could barely move my toes. I had maybe ten to twelve degrees of motion in the ankle.

  By now I could change my own bandage, which was necessary because of the constant drainage from the wound. I did that about twice a day. It was ugly. I had been on pain medication for almost eight straight months, every four to six hours. I would watch the clock, waiting for the time to pass between medications. Try as I may, I just flat could not walk straight or put much weight on that foot and ankle. I even tried to kill an ant on the sidewalk but could not put down enough pressure to do that.

  I was losing the physical battle — and another one as well. I was rapidly becoming someone different. I was absorbed in myself and this wound and my inability to overcome it. I could not concentrate for long periods of time. I raged, but did not know at what or whom. Anger would erupt for no apparent reason. The events of 5 May 1970 ran like a video in my mind, often starting at times I least expected. That instant replay was a source of great mental anguish, and played itself over and over again, always the same. And I second-guessed myself without letup: Why? I would ask. Why didn't you do something different? Then, Why me? Why did this have to happen to me? Then the guilt: Why am I alive and all those other soldiers were killed in action? Why me?

  I had to do something. I was in free fall. I knew I had some steel in me. I had to find it, grab hold, and start back. My battle was a lot like that of many others from that generation. Some would never make it back.

  The doctors and medical staff at Valley Forge had done all they could. It was up to me. It was my choice.

  I was home on convalescent leave. I had Denise, who was both my wife and my best friend. She had been my daily companion in the hospital ever since I had come to Valley Forge in the middle of May 1970. Many times she was just there after I'd come out of surgery and was not very coherent. Always there. A squeeze of the hand, a kiss, talk, and listen. Trying to help, but puzzled by this man who had gone off to war almost a year ago and was now in another battle. "I'll get by," I had inscribed in her wedding band when we were married. The rest of that song goes, "as long as I have you." How true that turned out to be.

  Denise had her own battles. She had given birth to our second child in May 1966, a son who had died shortly after birth and whom we had buried in the cemetery at West Point. Denise knew about pain. For her there would be more. She knew the difference between pity and compassion. My friend.

  Our daughter, Margie, was now nine years old and also part of this battle. We would write stories together. I'd write a sentence, then she would add a sentence, and so on until we had a made-up story. Our favorite was about whales. She was, and is, a strong girl, and our future.

  And then there were my fellow soldiers at Valley Forge.

  During physical training sessions, I saw men who were amputees move around with a lot more agility and a lot better attitude than I had. Many of them had wounds far worse than mine. I was far from being the only one in a fight. We all were; many had much bigger battles than I did. We helped one another. I was fortunate to have so much help. Not everyone there had my good fortune.

  Denise said she was ready to help in any way she could, but she agreed with me. I needed to do something.

  It was a tough Christmas.

  We did what we could to make Christmas the usual joyful time it has always been in our family. Denise even bought me a La-Z-Boy chair, black like Blackhorse, with a raise-up footrest so I could keep my foot elevated. She did it, she said, because when a wounded combat veteran talks to visitors, he should sit up with some pride — when I'd been home on convalescent leav
e, my practice had been to lie down on the couch with my leg elevated. She was trying to help me save my dignity, but I did not get it at the time. I was too absorbed in myself.

  I would sit looking at that foot and ankle. Was I giving in too soon? Should I fight it some more? Maybe some other kind of treatment was possible. More second-guessing. It was a tough Christmas, all right, not only for me, but for Denise and Margie as well. I was not much fun to be around.

  As I look back on it now, it amazes me how much my world had shrunk and how absorbed I was in myself. It happened, and I didn't even notice, but I'm sure others did. I know Denise did, but she kept holding out a hand to pull me out or to shock me into an awareness of where I was.

  One day, she arranged for us to go bowling with lifelong friends Carl and Betsy Hassler to a place called Colonial Acres on Route 222 just outside Shillington. I would stand at the foul line and, without any steps, roll the ball down the alley. We used to like to bowl together, but this was no fun at all. I was thirty-four years old and had been a decent athlete. And here I was, standing at the foul line, struggling to roll the ball from there: not exactly the image of self I'd had in mind for the rest of my life. I got the message.

  It was that Christmas that I reached the bottom.

  It was up to me.

  VALLEY FORGE GENERAL HOSPITAL JANUARY 1971

  "Doctor, I've made the choice. I want you to amputate my leg."

  The surgery took place later in January, the morning after the Super Bowl. I watched the game from my bed in Ward 3B the night before. The morning of the surgery, just for the hell of it, with my cane, I struggled on the leg I was about to have amputated down the hall to the common latrine to shave. Then I came back and they wheeled me to surgery. I would not look back.