Michael Putzel

Thanking the docs on his “Alive Day”

Posted by Michael Putzel • July 29, 2018

Many soldiers severely wounded in war celebrate the anniversary of the day they didn’t die. They call it their “Alive Day.”

On July 25, 2018, John Fogle marked the 49th anniversary of his Alive Day by calling the surgeons who saved his life in a makeshift military hospital in Vietnam.

Fogle was a crew chief aboard an Army OH-6 scout helicopter until that day, when his low-flying aircraft surprised a group of North Vietnamese soldiers in a canyon. One of them fired up at the chopper with his AK-47 rifle and hit Fogle in the leg. The bullet ripped open his femoral artery that pumped blood out of his body in huge spurts. The wounded soldier surely would have bled to death without quick and expert surgery performed minutes later after he was raced to the 22nd Surgical Hospital, a temporary unit set up next to the air strip at nearby Phu Bai, an American base in northern South Vietnam.

Fogle got back most of the use of his leg, was discharged from the Army, became an electrical engineer and worked on helicopters, airplanes and satellites until he retired a few years ago. After seeing some old buddies at a reunion last year of his unit in Vietnam, C Troop, 2nd of the 17th Cavalry, 101st Airborne Division, Fogle decided to fulfill a long-ago promise to thank the surgeons to whom he owed everything. There were really two teams responsible: those at the 22nd Surg, as it was called, and four days later at the U.S. military’s 249th General Hospital at Camp Drake in Japan, where doctors reconstructed the shattered bones and saved the leg. It was just the beginning of a long recovery that included more than a year of in-patient traction and physical therapy at Fitzsimmons Army Hospital in Denver.

The temporary hospital at Phu Bai was closed a few months after Fogle was wounded, and he lost touch, but he never forgot his long struggle and those he credited with saving his life, especially Dr. Mo Levine, one of the surgeons who worked on him in those first hours. Levine is one of the masked figures in the photo snapped by another member of the medical team.

With modern technology, it didn’t take long to find several members of the OR team that turned out to be having a reunion in Florida in the spring. Fogle flew out from California to greet them and gave a talk about his recovery to the doctors who rarely saw the long-term results of their labors during the war. However, Levine was ill at the time and couldn’t attend, but Fogle waited until he recovered, then flew to Colorado to express his gratitude in person.

When his Alive Day came around, Fogle telephoned Levine and Terry Caskey, another member of the team he saw at the Florida reunion. He has another trip planned to see and thank two other surgeons, Drs. Clyde Kernek & Dr. Robert Thompson, who worked on his wounds at the 249th in Japan. That will take him from home in California to Virginia and West Virginia.

Dr. Kernek, who unearthed an arteriogram of the vein graft used to repair the femoral artery and fracture of the large upper leg bone, wrote Fogle, “I am so happy that you were able to go on and have a good life.”