by Robert B. Robeson


THE BLESSING OF FLEXIBILITY


When our everyday life is wrenched into absurdity or irrelevance, we are pressed into developing strengths.


OTHING ESCAPES CHANGE, and most change demands struggle and often pain. One profound example of this occurred in early 1970 near Da Nang, South Vietnam. I was a U.S. Army medical- evacuation helicopter pilot. Our crew had just evacuated a num- ber of South Vietnamese soldiers from intense fighting on Barrier Island—a vast expanse of sand and dangerous real estate 20 miles south of Da Nang


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that joined the South China Sea to the east. One of these men had lost the major- ity of his right arm below the shoulder by small-arms fire only minutes before. When we were at cruising altitude, I turned in my armored seat to see how he was doing. He was sitting cross-legged on our cargo deck and he smiled at me, as if he felt no pain. My medic was in the process of hooking up an IV to his left arm. I returned to flying, and a few minutes went by as we headed toward the battalion aid station at Landing Zone Hawk Hill.


“Sir, I can’t believe this guy,” the medic said over the intercom. “He must have bled a bucket, but he’s sitting here with his wallet out showing me pictures of what I guess is his family.” It was much later before I compre- hended the significance of this soldier’s actions. Why was he so buoyant after having been badly wounded? Why did he choose to share family photos with strangers of another race and nation? The answer: Many of his contempo- raries had been fighting wars there for 30 or more years. Life as Vietnamese infan- tryman could last a lifetime, or until a person was killed or wounded so severely he could not return to action. This troop- er was young. He suddenly realized his days as a soldier were over. He had lost an arm for the cause, and now he’d be


24 EVANGEL • AUG 2010


Captain Robert B. Robeson stands beside a sign facsimile of their unit patch, adjacent to the unit orderly room at Red Beach, in Da Nang, South Vietnam, on March 7, 1970 (photo by Bild am Sonntag).


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