from the cross. I thought back again to the Bronx VA when I had been stuck in that chest cast for nearly six months after breaking my femur, and how as I had lain on a gurney on my stomach I would paint pictures of the crucifixion with myself as Christ, and how they’d sent the psychiatrist down from the psych ward because they were concerned and I immediately stopped painting, afraid they would have me committed just like my Uncle Paul who had been beaten to death in a mental hospital years before.
The weeks and months in the Long Beach VA hospital passed, and I slowly began to adjust to my surroundings. Each morning the aides would lift me out of bed and place me on a gurney, stuffing a pillow under my chest to keep my testicles from squishing and my hips from getting red. They would do the same thing with my legs, placing another pillow under my kneecaps, making sure my bed bag was hooked up, then handing me my two wooden canes. Lying on the gurney on my stomach I’d push around the wards, then down to the cafeteria where I’d get something to eat. I would then go outside on the grass where I’d throw bits of crackers to the sparrows. This became a daily routine for me.
In the weeks that followed I began to make new friends. Many, like myself, had been paralyzed in Vietnam, guys like Marty Stetson and Willy Jefferson, Woody and Nick, Danny Prince and Jake Jacobs, or Jafu as he liked to be called, who used to be a bodybuilder before he joined the marines. Jafu, I learned from Marty, was wounded in Operation Starlite on August 23, 1965, while participating in America’s first major offensive of the Vietnam War. He was shot in the chest, paralyzing him from his waist down. From what Marty told me, Jafu’s squad got caught in a horseshoe ambush, and though gravely wounded, Jafu continued to return fire with his M60 machine gun until reinforcements arrived. For this he was awarded a Silver Star and Purple Heart.
Nick Enders shares a completely different story, though, telling me Jafu was actually paralyzed while on R&R in Hawaii. Some guy caught him sleeping with his wife and in a jealous rage threw him out of the sixth-floor window of his hotel room, paralyzing Jafu for life. I don’t know which story is true but I try not to ask too many questions. In a place like this, those things don’t seem to matter.
Of the new friends I’ve made at the hospital, Jafu is probably the quietest of the bunch, saying very little and letting his grunting and groaning down in the physical therapy room speak for itself. A runner-up in the Mr. Universe contest before the war, Jafu could bench press 250 pounds and now boasts he will soon be lifting three hundred pounds as a paraplegic. He has an incredible physique. From his waist up, his bulging muscles remind me of a championship boxer or wrestler. In high school he ran the hundred-yard dash in 9.7 seconds and set a school record.
Jafu refuses to accept the fact that his paralysis is permanent. He is convinced that given enough time, determination, and effort he will be able to overcome his injury. He talks about it all the time and has even hired a Chinese herbalist on the outside who says he can help. The man prescribes herbal medicines, everything from devil’s claw to capsaicin, arnica to coca leaves. Jafu takes all sorts of vitamins and supplements, convinced his spine can be fused together through a proper diet and physical regimen.
He speaks of experiments with rats in Canada that he has read about in Reader’s Digest where, miraculously, the animals’ severed spines have been regenerated. Like everyone else in this place, Jafu has his hopes and dreams. As soon as he gets out of the hospital he plans to move to Hawaii and open a weightlifting gym on Waikiki Beach where he will continue his journey toward walking again. I have often seen him sitting in his wheelchair alone in the hallway, staring off into the distance, seeming terribly lost and deep in thought. I want to go up to him but I hesitate. There are just some things a man needs to figure out for himself.
While most of us here have accepted our fate and know our wounding in the war is permanent, Jafu refuses to believe that he will never walk again. For the most part we support him, encouraging him, even if we all know it’s just his way of coping. A person has a right to keep on hoping; no one wants to take away Jafu’s dreams. In a place like this, there must be hope, and even Jafu’s stubbornness and denial give us all something to believe in.
I understand why Jafu feels the way he does. When I was at the Bronx VA in New York back in 1968, I was determined to walk again no matter what. I was young, twenty-one years old, and though initially devastated by my paralysis, I was convinced like Jafu that with enough hard work and determination I could walk again. I told the doctors I wanted braces, and at first they resisted, explaining to me that my idea of walking again was unrealistic if not impossible and that the level of my injury, T4–T6, was too high and dragging my paralyzed body around with braces and crutches would surely prove to be too strenuous.
Refusing to accept their verdict, I continued to insist that they allow me to have the braces—explaining that as a 100 percent service-connected combat vet who had just sacrificed three-quarters of his body in Vietnam, I deserved the opportunity to try to walk again. For the next few weeks I continued to ask for the braces, even threatening to call the media and hold a press conference on the Spinal Cord Injury ward unless they followed through with my request. Eventually the doctors relented and about a month later I received the braces.
I can still remember the first time I put the braces on in the ADL (activity of daily living) room with the help of my two physical therapists, Dick Carter and Jimmy Ford. I was so excited and couldn’t wait to get up on my feet. Carefully positioning myself behind the parallel bars, I grabbed ahold of both bars and in one quick motion lifted myself out of my wheelchair, and, with the help of my braces, stood in an upright position for the first time since my injury.
I felt a bit weak and shaky at first but it was wonderful to be standing again, even if I couldn’t feel anything from my midchest down and had to imagine where my lower body and feet were. With Jimmy and Dick guiding me, I began to drag myself step by step as far as I could along the parallel bars until I was exhausted.
“It’s beautiful up here!” I remember shouting to no one in particular, thrilled at the renewal of my old vantage point.
Every day after that I arrived at the ADL room early to put on my braces. I would then begin my daily routine, dragging my paralyzed body back and forth between the parallel bars, determined to do my very best.
By the second week I had already left the confines and safety of the parallel bars and begun to venture around the ADL room, proudly dragging my lifeless body past the others in their wheelchairs and no longer afraid to set out on my own. Each day, as I grew more and more confident and my stamina increased, so did my determination to go farther.
By the third week I was now dragging my body down the hall and onto the paraplegic ward, visiting the other patients in their rooms and confounding many of the doctors and nurses who had earlier dismissed my belief that I would walk again.
I said hello to everyone, including a few of the doctors and nurses who had warned me that for a high-level injury like my own—no use of my stomach muscles, and a spine that had been severed by a bullet—the odds against me walking again, much less even getting up on my feet, were astronomical. Some of them looked at me like I was crazy while still others chose to simply ignore me, turning their heads as I dragged myself past them. Of course, back then as a fiercely determined, twenty-one-year-old former Marine Corps sergeant just back from a war and a former high school athlete, I believed I could accomplish anything I set out to do. As far as I was concerned, like Jafu, nothing was impossible.
I remember telling Jimmy Ford several weeks later that the only way I was going to leave the hospital was on my feet. “I’m going to walk out of this place, Jimmy, if it’s the last thing I do!”
By late November of 1968, having been in the hospital a little over eleven months and my rehab now complete, I was finally ready to be released. I’ll always remember that last day at the hospital: Dick and Jimmy helping me put on my braces one last time, awkwardly dragging my body with my crutches out of
