Man helps disabled in Vietnam

When I read that a group of American war veterans was about to embark on a survey of unexploded bombs and mines that remain scattered across Vietnam, I called Roger Marshall to get his reaction to the encouraging news.

Marshall, as you might have read here before, is the retired prosthetist in Corinth who has devoted the last 15 years to establishing a clinic in Vietnam that provides artificial limbs to people maimed and crippled by the triggering of old ordnance buried throughout the countryside.

The newly announced mapping survey, sponsored by the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation with enthusiastic support from the Vietnam Defense Ministry, marks the first attempt to clear the ground of the war’s abundant and still deadly legacy.

“It is an answer to a prayer, in many ways,” said Marshall, the former British Royal Air Force medical corpsman who spent four years during the war training South Vietnamese students to make prosthetics for injured countrymen. “It’s a wonderful first step in ending the misery and suffering that has plagued the Vietnamese people since the war.”

And a critical undertaking that is long overdue.

Unlike in Europe, where the task of recovering unexploded ordnance began soon after the end of World War II, Vietnam’s most infested regions have never been formally identified for the potential dangers that lurk underfoot. It’s an enormous job given that twice as many bombs were dropped on Vietnam than during all of World War II.

“According to Vietnamese defense officials,” Marshall said, “there are still between 350,000 and 850,000 tons of unexploded bombs and some 3 million land mines spread out across the country. They have caused an estimated 30,000 deaths since the war ended, and about 64,000 injuries.”

Marshall has treated many of those victims since he began his mission in 1986 to build a prosthetic-orthotic rehabilitation center in the impoverished city of Quang Ngai, a scene of heavy fighting during the war, which lies about six miles from the site of the infamous My Lai massacre.

With farmers maimed while working in the rice fields, women blown to bits while walking in the mine-studded countryside, engineers wounded while dredging silty riverbeds, village children who have lost arms or legs while handling chunks of metal that are actually decades-old grenades unearthed by a plow or the monsoon rains – hardly a week goes by without another death or dismemberment.

More than 26,000 people in the rural province of Quang Ngai are disabled, Marshall said, and more than 4,000 of them are in need of artificial limbs and bone-straightening orthotic devices that could allow them to walk again. The clinic in Quang Ngai, the capital of the same-named province, is a rudimentary operation – one building with a small staff of technicians and local Vietnamese doctors – but it is an invaluable resource for the poor people of the region who otherwise would have to travel several hours to the nearest prosthetic center in Da Nang.

Marshall, whose efforts to raise money for the clinic include a fund-raising parachute jump from an airplane not long ago, expects to return to Vietnam in a few weeks with the $50,000 in donations his nonprofit organization has managed to collect. Aside from buying prosthetic devices, the money will be used to provide a physical therapist who will work with amputees and people born deformed from the lingering effects of Agent Orange.

An American businessman in Hong Kong has donated a second building in Quang Ngai that will expand the clinic’s services, and the International Red Cross in Ho Chi Minh City has expressed an interest in helping with the project.

“The survey being planned by the American veterans will get to the source of the problem – all the bombs and land mines that have yet to be identified and dug up – and that will be a major step in cutting down on the death and injury,” Marshall said.

Meanwhile, another Maine Vietnam veteran from Naples has launched a letter-writing campaign aimed at redesigning land mines to include simple, built-in corrosive mechanisms that would render them incapable of detonating once their military purpose is past. Dick Enright, a local Rotarian, is lobbying Rotary International to adopt the revamped land mine policy as a humanitarian mission statement that can be put before the United Nations.

“If you’re going to produce a land mine, which is intended to maim the enemy, you have to have a plan for dismantling it, too, so it can’t harm innocent people later,” said Enright, who served in the Strategic Air Command during the war and is a member of Veterans for Peace. “Being in the military, I saw one side of war back then. Now I am at an age when I can see the other side, too, a humanitarian side. I think a Vietnam vet can heal emotional wounds by doing some good.”

Marshall, who is a Quaker, regards the ordnance-clearing project by the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation as one of the most important forms of humanitarian aid that could be offered to that Southeast Asian country.

“This should have happened many years ago, but it didn’t,” he said. “So now that something is finally being done, it’s an opportunity to not only save lives and limbs but to bring together two countries, two former enemies, in a noble cause. After all these years, it really is the honorable thing to do.”