During my entire Vietnam experience, I was never shot or wounded and I never got a purple heart. But I did have dysentery the entire time, probably from drinking unclean water (everyone else had dysentery too); and I somehow got a bad infection my left arm so that my entire arm swelled up, down to my fingertips. Our platoon corpsman tried to squeeze the puss and infection out, but that didn’t work; it just got worse. And I began to feel weak and nauseous and had a fever. So, they sent me to a Navy hospital ship by helicopter.

Well, those Navy boys worked a miracle on me. They gave me a couple of pills and my arm was back to normal in just two days. And because of the stool sample that I gave them, they…