Sunday, May 25, 2014

BACSI: remembering wartime compassion on Memorial Day

Dear Readers, 
I was still in high school and hadn't yet met my husband when he reluctantly joined the Army.
He volunteered for all the interesting education the Army would give him, thinking the Viet Nam war would end before he was done dawdling.  
It didn't work out that way. Cory emerged as a sergeant, an airborne Green Beret medic with demolitions training. Qualified to jump out of planes, blow things up and fix the friendlies, he was sent to war. 
The big gentle hand on the little girl's back, in the photo, belongs to to the Cory I know now, and I'm not surprised at his compassion for war's innocent victims. 
Maybe because we both hate war, Cory always puts a self-mocking spin on the good he did there. Here's what he posted on Facebook: 

"Found this, taken 46 years ago this month, in an old box of pictures. I was was the medic on a Special Forces team running a patrol of Montagnard troops near Pleiku. Our second day out, we came into a small village, six or eight hooches, and a father brought this little girl out to me. She had a high fever alternating with chills; I made an empirical diagnosis of malaria and we managed to get a helicopter in to fly her out. It didn't occur to me at the time, but it was a pretty remote ville, hunter-gatherers eating monkeys and rodents, and suddenly this giant American calls a Huey to fly the whole family to an American hospital. They may be remembered in Plei Bong Whatever as the people who got abducted by aliens...."

Labels: Bacsi, Cory Farley, Green Beret, Memorial Day, Special Forces, Viet Nam

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Posted by Terri Farley @ 8:14 AM

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