The Soldier

        Frank Blair, 51

        Commander, Disabled Veterans of America Post 24/Student
                
        THE ANTI-TANK ROCKET caught the inside of his right thigh. One
        moment Frank Blair had turned to take a step, the next a cone-shaped
        charge designed to cut through a tank engine shot flames between his
        legs, flipping him airborne, upside down and backward.

        "I remember very slowly seeing the horizon reversed," said Blair, recalling
        the Vietnam memory more than 30 years later. "Then you see the ground
        coming up and you're thinking, 'Jesus, this is really going to hurt when I
        hit.' "

        That's the way it is when you're shot.

        A moment of surreal observation. Hot metal explodes through the
        nervous system. The brain slows to grasp what the body already knows.
        "You don't realize what's happening," he said. "It feels like getting kicked.
        You don't feel a whole heck of a lot at first."

        When he did meet the ground, Blair saw his own blood. "My first
        concern was a tourniquet," he remembers.

        "We had a conscientious objector in our unit who would not carry a
        weapon. He ran through a mess of crap I wouldn't have even crawled
        through to get to me. Don't know how the guy made it alive. But that's
        the way he always was - if you yelled 'Medic!' he was there."

        The year was 1967.

        Wounded, he lay in a ditch along the Cambodian border - the Iron 
        Triangle, they called it - helping direct an airstrike by radio. Waiting for
        more than an hour for a medical airlift during the heated buildup to the
        Tet Offensive.

        Later, learning gangrene had set in. The doctors told him that they'd taken
        off better legs. Blair managed to keep his.

        Skin grafts where the charge had chewed away his flesh and three
        months in the 249th General Hospital in Japan.

        The second of three Purple Hearts.

        Frank Blair is like a lot of military service veterans. He lives in the
        present, with an eye to lessons of the past.

        He doesn't offer up much about his war wounds. Scars were simply an
        occupational hazard.

        "Back then, no one gave a damn," Blair said. "I don't know. It was just
        that you're young, you think you're bulletproof; you find out you're not."
        Now, the scars are part of a life that goes on. "It bothered me and it
        didn't. I used to hide them around people I didn't know. Maybe I'm too
        old to be bothered now," he mused. "They've been there so long I don't
        even think about them anymore. When you're 6-3 and weigh 300 pounds
        and wear a handlebar mustache, you get used to being looked at ...

        "It's like, some people drive Cadillacs, some people drive Fords. My scars
        are basically who I am."

        Counselors who work with war veterans say battle scars are a curious
        thing. No one veteran feels the same way. There are those who find
        physical scars the easy ones to deal with - you see the dimension of
        damage, understand the finite scope of it. The harder scars, they
        contend, are the emotional ones. Other veterans shun wearing a
        prosthesis - to do so would deny their experience. Some cover the scars,
        say they only remind them of deeper losses that are tough to grapple
        with. Many simply accept them.

        As a part-time driver for Eugene's Veterans Administration clinic, Blair
        works with veterans. Through Disabled Veterans of America, he also
        does advocacy work for them, knows well the depth of their scars. He
        would never presume to tell their stories. He only knows his own.

        Blair celebrated his 20th, 21st and 22nd birthdays in hospitals. His first
        Purple Heart came when his arm caught shrapnel from a booby-trapped
        grenade.

        The final Purple Heart was earned in southern Vietnam's Mekong Delta.
        The bullet sliced across the back of one leg, hit the ground and spun back
        through the other. Though the wound opened daylight in his calf, the
        impact felt oddly "like having a 6-year-old come up and kick you in the
        legs," he remembers. "It just started adding up," said Blair, who took
        medical retirement from the Army after two 18-month tours of duty.

        Today, attitudes have changed about scars. He doesn't think twice about
        showing the tight, telltale wrinkles of his skin graft in public. "Society is
        more receptive about disabilities," he contends.

        Sometimes when he wears shorts around town, Frank Blair will see a
        stare, a glance. Catch the high pitch of a child's innocent question, a
        parent's hurried hushing.


        Written by Kimber Williams, Eugene Register Guard, November 22, 1998