The Right Answer

On his first visit home to Joliet, Ill. last spring, Private Hubert Edward Reeves, a 19-year-old Army veteran of Korea, found huge stacks of letters waiting for him. Ed couldn't get around very well in those days, so he spent most of his time lying on the davenport while his mother read the letters to him. When one began, "Oh, my poor dear boy, how sorry we are that you have to lie there, crippled, not able to move hand or foot . . ." Ed would laugh and say: "Throw that one away, Mom."

Ed didn't want sympathy. He often told his parents: "You count what you've got left, not what you've lost." It was a good thing that Ed Reeves felt that way. In the bitter fighting around the Changjin Reservoir last winter, he had been hit by a Communist mortar burst, had lain helpless in the sub-zero weather for nine days. Army surgeons had to take off both of his frozen feet and the fingers on both hands./-

One day last May, Mrs. Reeves read Ed just the sort of letter he liked but seldom got: "This isn't a letter of sympathy. Not at all. Rather it's a letter telling you how much I appreciate what you've done for our country." The letter was signed by Beverly Jean Hall, 18, who lived in nearby Wilmington, Ill. That night Ed asked his brother to drive him over to Wilmington to meet Beverly. "I didn't even think of him as Private Reeves, the amputee," said Beverly. "He was a nice-looking boy."

Ed and Beverly dated almost, every night after that. Finally, Ed reached a decision, but first he had to get something straight. One night while they were out riding, he asked, "Beverly, do you feel sorry for me?" Her answer was just what Ed hoped to hear: "No, Ed, I don't feel sorry for you."

Private Reeves still has to return to the hospital to be fitted with artificial limbs and undergo more surgery. But before he goes, Ed Reeves and Beverly Jean Hall will be married in the First Baptist Church in Joliet. Beverly knows everything will turn out all right. "I guess some people don't understand," she says serenely, "but I happen to love him. And Ed loves me."

/- Making him one of three quadruple amputees of the Korean war. The other two (also wounded in the Changjin Reservoir area and victims of the bitter cold): Army Pfc. Robert L. Smith, 20, Middleburg, Pa. (TIME, Jan. 8); Marine Sergeant Werner Reininger, 22, San Antonio, Texas.

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