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
