Two Veterans

For the vast majority of Americans the war is ending at last, but for some it will never end. Of the 2,700,000 who have served in Viet Nam since 1961, more than 300,000 have been wounded. Of these, the Veterans Administration carries on its rolls 73,670 suffering at least 50% disability. Last week two of these men recalled their own personal wars, past, present and future.

WITH fluffy brown hair, bright blue eyes and a complexion as clear as a baby's, Paul Coats looks much younger than his 23 years. As he lies on the bed in his sunny corner room at Manhattan's VA Hospital, he appears healthy enough. But Coats carries a wound that has not healed in 41 years and is taxing the ingenuity of some of the nation's most expert neurosurgeons.

Coats enlisted in the Marine Corps within eight hours of graduating from Calhoun High School in Merrick, L.I. "I saw no way to beat the draft, and if I had to go, I wanted to get it over with. And it looked as though we were in for a bigger war, with the North Vietnamese coming in, not just the guerrillas." With the 2nd Battalion, 9th Regiment of the 3rd Marine Division, he landed in Viet Nam in November 1967 and served six months as a machine-gunner in "Leatherneck Square" adjoining the DMZ. Lance Corporal Coats no longer remembers the date when he was wounded more precisely than "the last couple of days in May 1968." "We'd just cleared a bunker complex and were stationary. Early in the afternoon, a barrage came in. A rocket round hit about 15 feet from me and a fragment got me in the right buttock, right on the sciatic nerve."

Dropout. Discharged from the hospital after five months, Coats returned home to his family and tried to resume his education by enrolling in general studies at Nassau Community College. Four times he had to go back to the hospital, however, once for five months. He dropped out of college, partly because the commuting was too difficult. "Even at home," he says, "it's like being in the hospital."

To end the agonizing, fiery pain in Coats' leg, surgeons are thinking of a radically new procedure: implanting a device with electrodes in the spinal cord so that when the pain heats up Coats can press a button and switch it off. He may have to use such a device all his life. Was it worth it? Would he do it again? "I don't feel the same as I did in 1967, because of what's come out--the Pentagon papers, and the reasons for the U.S. going in originally. I can't see why we kept on spilling American blood for a government that wasn't worth fighting for and people who won't fight for themselves. Eventually, they'll throw down their arms and the Communists will win."

Theodore Cornelius Strong, 35, a black double amputee, thinks differently. Topping six foot, Ted Strong was a muscle builder, weight lifter, football player and boxer in Memphis when he was drafted in 1960. On his second re-enlistment in 1966 he expected to stay in the U.S., but was soon shipped out. "I never would have volunteered for Viet Nam," he says. "I wanted to stay here, save my money, and start a health club and bodybuilding studio after my years in the Army were up. You might not believe this, but it just never occurred to me that I'd get wounded in Viet Nam. When I got there, I couldn't see much reason for being there, but then I figured it out. We were there to hold them off, at a price. There's always a price."

The price for Strong was high indeed. On the morning of May 3, 1967, when he was on a search-and-destroy mission, he was preparing to throw a grenade into a bunker. "I felt this tug at my ankle, but I didn't break stride," he recalls. "I guess I should have broken stride." The trip-wired land mine blew off Strong's left leg just below the hip and tore the back off his right leg. The grenade in his hand exploded and took his right forearm with it. He spent 18 months in Army hospitals, shrinking from 225 Ibs. to 135 Ibs., sometimes too weak to lift his head off the pillow. It took him a year to learn to walk again, months to learn to drive a specially equipped car--and longer to persuade the motor-vehicle authorities to give him a license.

Last month, with his wife, two stepsons and their own young son, Strong moved into a five-bedroom, $47,900 house in Wheaton, Md., with extra-wide walks, a ramp from the low porch and extra-wide doors and hallways for his wheelchair. He operates this four-wheeled device with his right leg, which is fitted with a full-length brace. For going out, he has an artificial left leg, but must use two crutches. Strong's road back has been long and all uphill, battling with bureaucracies to get his benefits. With an assortment of VA and Social Security payments, his tax-free income is now $1,390 a month. The going at Prince George's community college is also hard, but he expects to get his associate degree in computer programming a year from now.

Far from being embittered by his disabling wounds, Strong has turned them into a source of strength. "It's possible for a man to lose half of his physical being and still become whole," he told a recent speech class. "Before I lost my limbs I was only half a man. Now I've developed some humility. I can look at the average person and understand him, where before I looked only at myself."

When he reflects on the war, Strong takes a similarly optimistic view. It is, he believes, coming to a "fair and honorable conclusion." "We do have victory," he says, "because we've guaranteed their freedom. We accomplished our mission."

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