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Life and Limb; After Risking Both, A Vet Gives Thanks for Still Having the First May 9, 2004 You can never know what life will bring, and Jim Mayer certainly didn't on April 25, 1969, as he began to step over a two-foot wall lining a Vietnamese rice paddy and heard a click and froze for a split second. How could he possibly have guessed that 35 years later he would find himself in a back room at Fran O'Brien's Stadium Steakhouse, a few blocks from the White House, surrounded by friends who'd gathered to celebrate what happened -- or to be more precise, what didn't happen -- on that day. He heard that click and froze, but it was too late. He was standing on a 60mm mortar shell, American made, that the Viet Cong or the North Vietnamese had wired up as a land mine. It blew him straight into the air. When he hit the ground, he saw that the bottom of his left leg was gone. He stayed conscious through the whole thing: through a buddy reaching him first and then the platoon medic, through getting a tourniquet and being upset with the medic for not letting him smoke, through being medivac'd to the 25th Infantry Division hospital at Cu Chi, through triage, all the way to the operating room table where the shock wore off and the pain kicked in. "Put me out," he said. Move the toes on your right foot, the doctors told him. "I can't move my right toes." Try it, they said, and then: You're moving them! "Good. Put me out." When he woke up two days later, he had no toes left to move. Now here he is at 58, gliding through the crowd at Fran O'Brien's on two below-the-knee prostheses, shaking hands, cracking jokes, collecting hugs. After nearly two hours of this, he steps behind a small lectern at the side of the room, then pretends to change his mind. "Go buy a drink and we'll start the program in 25 minutes," he says. But the 70 or so people gathered for Jim Mayer's 35th annual Alive Day will have none of it. "Jim! Jim! Jim!" they chant. From the tables along the back wall, a cluster of Mayer's newest friends -- much younger men who lost their limbs in Afghanistan and Iraq -- join in. A Day Never Forgotten "Most guys I know, in a quiet way or otherwise, try to remember the day that they got hit," says Kirk Bauer, who lost a leg to a hand grenade in a Mekong Delta ambush on March 23, 1969. "It's a great feeling to realize that, hey, I've got a life still." "January 11th is my day," says Fred Downs, who lost his left arm in 1968 -- and almost lost his other limbs as well -- to a Bouncing Betty, a land mine that flies above the ground and explodes waist high. Downs celebrates the anniversary quietly with his family. Quiet celebrations seem to be the norm, in fact, at least among the wounded vets at Fran O'Brien's, but Max Cleland's Alive Days tend to be more public. Cleland is the former senator from Georgia, currently serving on the board of the Export-Import Bank, who lost both legs and an arm to a grenade in 1968. He borrowed the concept from Mayer, who has worked for the Veterans Administration (now the Department of Veterans Affairs) for 30 years and who served as Cleland's administrative assistant when the Georgian headed the VA in the late 1970s. "We all got on a bus, we got drunk as hell, went out to the shore of Maryland and ate crabs," Cleland says of the first Jim Mayer Alive Day he attended, and he has tried to celebrate his own every April 8 since. "Some years are better, some much worse, but in my mind it's always stuck that on that day, I should be grateful for being alive." As for Mayer, he credits the Alive Day idea to the beneficent effects of morphine and to an attempt to impress a pretty nurse back in that operating room at Cu Chi. Like many young men in the '60s, he'd volunteered to serve before he could be drafted. "It was my turn," he says. "Nothing heavily patriotic about it. It was like so many guys from my little town had gone." The town was Shrewsbury, Mo., population 6,000. Mayer was headed for a degree in business administration from Southwest Missouri State University. Because of this, an Army recruiter told him, he'd most likely wind up as "a personnel clerk or something." Right. "Grunt," he says. "That's how I went in." He'd been in Vietnam maybe 2 1/2 weeks when he experienced his first firefight. "That was like -- wow. I mean, right in the middle of it, you're going: This is worse than they told me." One thing he wasn't prepared for was the fact that his enemies were not only shooting at him; they were yelling insults. He made some quick friends, among them a medic named Kindler and an engineer named Abbott. "We called ourselves the Rat Pack because we thought Sinatra and all them was cool." At night they could see the distant, lethal light show over what was called the Parrot's Beak, where the border of Cambodia and Vietnam bends in a beak-like shape. "Red tracers going down, green coming up," he recalls, "and we'd go: whoa, something big over there." Two and a half months into his tour, he stepped over that rice-paddy wall and tripped that mine. Later, he would learn that Abbott, too, had tripped a mine that morning and had died in triage on the concrete slab right next to him -- he'd seen him die, in fact; just hadn't known who he was at the time -- and that Kindler had been killed the next day. Before he learned these things, though, a priest came to visit him. This was right as he woke up after being out for two days. A nurse was in the room, too. The priest mentioned that he'd given Mayer last rites on the operating table. He made him look down so he could see that both legs were gone. Finally, he leaned close and gave him the good news: "The shrapnel stopped right here, so you can still raise a family." "That's great, Father," Mayer said. "Got anybody in mind?" The priest turned to the nurse. "This soldier's going to be okay," he said. Mayer laughs as he thinks back on the scene. Morphine doesn't just relieve your pain, he says, "it has these side effects. Things become really pretty. She was a very pretty nurse and she kept getting prettier, too." Their conversation went something like this: "Well, soldier, what are you going to do when you get home?" "I'm going to go bowling." "Why bowling?" "Well, we were state champs when I was 15." "That'll be good. What else you going to do?" "If I live, I'm going to have a party every year. I'm going to call it a Thank God I'm Alive party." "Well, that's a real good idea, soldier." "Okay, ma'am. You can come too!" New Vets, Old Vets "Now I'd like these heroes to kind of work their way to say hello to you," Mayer says. "Everybody mingle for like two minutes. Mingle! Mingle!" He singles out Delgado, a Marine in a wheelchair. "Mingle, Hector!" Thirty-five years and counting: So far, Mayer has kept his promise to celebrate Alive Day every year. He almost forgot the first one, though. He'd had what he calls a "cheater Alive Day" in his parents' back yard, a party to thank all the people in Shrewsbury who'd reached out to him during his 10-month recuperation in a military hospital in Texas. But it hadn't been on April 25. A few days before the real anniversary rolled around, a friend reminded him, and a hastily organized bash resulted. "We didn't know what a roast was," he says, "but it was a roast." Abusing Mayer became an Alive Day tradition. "People just make fun of me. It's great." His injury was changing his direction in life. Before the war he'd been headed for a career in sales, but in 1972 he moved to Washington as an unpaid lobbyist for the National Association of Collegiate Veterans, doing work he's still proud of. "We knew we were getting screwed compared to past wars," he says, and "we helped get a 23 percent increase in the GI Bill education allowance." A couple of years later, he signed on with the VA, where he has worked ever since and where he now runs an executive training program called Leadership VA. Meanwhile, the Alive Days kept on coming. Once, when April 25 fell on a Saturday, he had the party at his house in Silver Spring. "Big mistake. I invited everybody I knew, and they all showed up. Whoa." For many years, it was at Ireland's Four Provinces in Cleveland Park. Some VA friends once screened a film called "Captain Jim" there, which they'd made by dubbing audio over scenes from "Forrest Gump." Another much-remembered stunt featured a staged reunion between Mayer and an illegitimate daughter, Wilhelmina, who was said to look "just like Jim" and turned out to be a doll with no legs. Alive Day has calmed down a bit lately, Mayer says. It used to be "much more of a crazy celebration," but now it's more of a bonding ritual among friends -- a time to say, "Hey, why aren't we seeing each other enough?" The biggest change came in 1991 with the decision to include wounded veterans from the Persian Gulf War. That year, Mayer had gotten in the habit of visiting severely injured soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and Bethesda Naval Hospital, and he kept this up even after the flow of wounded from the Gulf ended. At Walter Reed these days he's known as the Milkshake Man because he shows up for his regular after-work visits carrying a tray of shakes from McDonald's. Another change: The 2004 party wasn't even on April 25. Mayer says he used to be a purist about this, but the real anniversary fell on a Sunday this year and Tuesday the 27th worked better for everyone. Back at the lectern, he introduces his old friend Mike Hughes, the evening's master of ceremonies, who tries to jump-start the make-fun-of-Jim thing by dissing the recent rehab job Mayer has had done on his head. "I knew him when he had a lot of hair," Hughes says. "And when he had no hair. And when he got hair again!" A bit later, Mayer's stepson, Skip -- Mayer is divorced but the two remain close -- gets a big laugh by complaining: "He raised me, and I never got a goddamn milkshake!" Then Kevin Moellenberndt, who sustained a horrific Gulf War wound 13 years ago, recalls a prank Mayer played on him when he hadn't yet relearned how to walk. It's a long story, but imagine a newly one-legged man abandoned by his pals with no chair in sight and a video camera recording his every move. Just as the roast seems to be heating up, however, Moellenberndt spoils the effect by getting serious. The moral of his story, he says, is that Mayer used humor to help him -- and many others -- through the hardest of times. When the more recently wounded vets take their turns at the microphone, they don't get with the roast program either. They tend to talk about how the Milkshake Man was there for them when nobody else was, and to say things like "This guy -- I mean, I never really had a hero before." Now up comes Andrea Davanzo, the girlfriend of Delgado, the Marine in the wheelchair who suffered crushed hips and lost both his legs when a fuel tank collapsed on him in Iraq last year. Davanzo calls Mayer an "unbelievable inspiration" and thanks him "from the bottom of our hearts for everything he's done for the two of us." And now there's a storm of applause as someone hands the microphone to Delgado himself and now Mayer can be heard calling out: "Hector! Five words: Please make fun of me!" No chance. Delgado talks about rejecting Mayer's initial offer of a milkshake and asking for a Wild Cherry Pepsi with three cheeseburgers instead -- which "lo and behold, he did come back with." Then he starts to choke up. "This wasn't going to happen," he says. "C'mon, Marine!" someone shouts. He gets through his remarks in a quavering voice, saying, "He's helped me out a lot, you know, and I've been through a lot," then hands back the mike. After he has recovered, he sums up what Mayer has become for him: "He's been the best doctor, the best psychologist, the best friend, family member -- he's been it all." Voices of Experience "I honestly right now don't understand what we are doing," one speaker says. "But I will always stand behind the men -- and women -- of our nation who protect the United States of America." "This is another quagmire, another Vietnam: long, protracted, drawn out, guerrillas," says Max Cleland, who has to leave before the speeches. Another similarity is that, as in Vietnam, American soldiers are facing "homemade bombs, what the Army calls IEDs," improvised explosive devices, which, as Cleland puts it, "fill your body with shrapnel, shred your arms, shred your legs, but may probably leave you alive, only to complicate your life for the rest of your life." One of the last to speak is Judge John Farley of the United States Court of Veterans Appeals. Farley, who served as an artillery officer in Vietnam, knows Mayer in part because he teaches wounded vets to ski at the National Disabled Veterans' Winter Sports Clinic, a program Mayer also helps out with. On his desk at the court, he keeps the tail fins from the mortar round that exploded three feet from him on Jan. 10, 1969. He lost his right leg above the knee, considerers himself "sheerly lucky to be alive" and celebrates what he calls his Life Day as "a family thing," with maybe a nice bottle of wine or some especially good Scotch. Farley joined the Army without hesitation when the draft loomed -- "first-born child, Jesuit-trained," he says by way of explanation -- but notes without disapproval that his younger brothers were dodging tear gas to protest the war as he was recuperating at Walter Reed. Asked about Iraq, he says, "I couldn't have sent troops in, from what I saw in the paper. I hope there was a reason." "Jim Mayer taught me how to walk!" he jokes now, taking the microphone and drawing an immediate laugh. "I was at Walter Reed in 1847 when Jim Mayer brought me my first milkshake!" Then he turns serious, addressing the newly wounded soldiers in the crowd. "We never thought there'd be another war," he says, but there was, so the Vietnam generation is doing its best to help. And this likely won't be the end of it. "I hope I'm wrong, but if not, you all will have your turn," he says. Mayer keeps his own views on the wars in Iraq and Vietnam to himself. He's focused on helping soldiers who are going through what he experienced, and on celebrating the fact that, 35 years later, he's still around to help. There's more to celebrate, he believes, than just his being here. He's been fortunate enough to touch a lot of lives. If he hadn't tripped that mine, he's not sure this would have happened. "I'd have had an entirely different path," is the way he put it earlier. "It's pretty striking to see the amount of friendships I have -- it's like this 'It's a Wonderful Life' kind of stuff, that Jimmy Stewart deal." Time to wrap this Alive Day up. "To everyone who served in Operation Iraqi Freedom, Operation Enduring Freedom, including Kevin, who served in the Persian Gulf -- we are so grateful to you," Mayer says. Alive Day is usually a time for humor, but since it got kind of serious this time, "I hope you remember the humor that you have shared and the camaraderie you have shared in the hospital in rebuilding your lives. Because we draw meaning from your lives." But enough seriousness. "Is Skip still here, my stepson? Skip, yes, you were right. I never gave you a milkshake. I bought you three goddamn cars!" One more friend appears. It's Vietnam vet Hal Koster, co-owner of Fran O'Brien's. Time for one more hug. "I'm glad you're alive," Koster says. Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved |
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