Chicken Soup for the Soul: Reader's Choice 20th Anniversary Edition

by Jack Canfield

  ~Steve Jobs

  I Was Prepared

  Oh, my friend, it’s not what they take away from you that counts. It’s what you do with what you have left.

  ~Hubert Humphrey

  We had recently married and we were expecting a baby girl in the summer, but first, I had to say goodbye to my Army husband. He was sent to Afghanistan on March 15, 2011 for a twelve-month deployment.

  He didn’t have to go, because his military service was ending over the summer. But he wanted to serve in Afghanistan so badly that he extended his duty so he could go.

  I used to read Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul and bought every one I could find in the series. When I learned there was a book called Chicken Soup for the Military Wife’s Soul, I immediately went to buy it and read it every single night.

  About a week after I bought the book, I read “Newfound Heroes,” a story about a military wife like me who got a call from her husband while he was deployed because he had been shot and seriously injured. While reading the story I kept stopping to think about how I would react if I received a similar phone call. When I read that, despite his injuries, her husband could still walk, I wondered what we would do if my husband called to say he had lost his legs. Our lives flashed before my eyes and I thought about how we would manage, how difficult it would be, and how our lives would change. I imagined the two of us with our little girl, only she was about five and playing at the beach. My husband and I were holding hands and smiling. Everything was okay and it didn’t seem so different after all.

  I told myself that no matter what, things would be okay. That I would have the strength to stick by my husband through it all. I finished reading this story, closed my book, took a big breath, and fell asleep.

  The next day (exactly four weeks after he had left), I received a phone call from my husband. I had been sleeping when he called but I sat straight up to talk to him. He sounded normal and I felt so relieved to hear from him because I hadn’t heard from him for about a week.

  He asked if I would like to talk to him for a couple of minutes. I said yes, of course. Then he fell silent, and I could tell he had something to say. He told me he was coming home. I was so shocked and confused that I thought maybe a miracle happened and they were starting to send the troops home. I had to ask him why a few times, though, before he told me what happened.

  He had been hit by an IED.

  In tears, I asked if he was okay. He assured me he was, but it didn’t make sense. He had been hit and injured by an IED during his earlier tour of duty in Iraq, but still stayed and finished his tour. I knew they wouldn’t send him home if he were okay. Then he told me that he had lost a leg.

  Of course I cried. But I also realized this must be so much harder on him and I tried to hold it together as much as I could for him. It wasn’t until after we got off the phone that I let myself cry until I couldn’t any longer.

  After a day of waiting for information, I learned the extent of my husband’s injuries. He had lost his right leg from the knee down, his ring finger on his right hand, and the tip of his pinkie. He also sustained multiple shrapnel wounds on his left thigh and both hands.

  At some point in the day, shortly after talking to my husband, I realized everything happens for a reason. As unfortunate as this is, my husband still has his life. He came home to me and our unborn child. He got to witness his child being born and he won’t have to worry about missing a thing.

  My husband was meant to serve in Afghanistan because that’s what he always had wanted. He needed to go for his sake. He would have always had regrets if he had decided to not go.

  Reading that story in Chicken Soup for the Military Wife’s Soul was the one that gave me the foresight I needed. It was the one that gave me the strength to see the big picture. It prepared me for what was to come. You never know your strength until being strong is the only option. And you could never guess how you will act in a certain situation; you can only prepare for it. I don’t know how I would have reacted if I had not read “Newfound Heroes,” and thought about being in a similar situation, the night before my husband’s call. It may have been more difficult for me to see the big picture.

  We will get through this. And someday, when our daughter is five, we will be at the beach holding hands, smiling, as if nothing ever happened. I just know it.

  ~Tracy Fitzgerald

  Newfound Heroes

  No matter what accomplishments you make, somebody helped you.

  ~Althea Gibson

  In September 2003 my husband Bill left for Iraq. This deployment was to be different: he was heading to a war zone where our soldiers were being killed and injured. I tried to calm us all by telling the children and myself that he would be okay. He was an excellent soldier. He was part of a well-trained unit with a good command group. He would be fine. The children were scared, they missed him terribly, but we were managing.

  On April 14, 2004, that all changed. The telephone rang, and I heard Bill’s voice. He was asking me what I was doing, as if it was a normal call home. I could hear in his voice that something was wrong, and asked him if he was okay. He told me that he had been shot, but that everything would be all right. I felt my stomach drop and my blood run cold, one of my worst fears becoming a reality. He had been hit in the left side, the bullet exiting the right side. When he called, he had just arrived at a Baghdad hospital and been stabilized. Some wonderful individual had given him a satellite phone to call me. He was able to talk for a few precious moments and then had to go. He was being flown out to Landstuhl Hospital in Germany.

  As I hung up the phone, a deep sense of panic set in. I had so many questions that I had not thought to ask while he was on the phone; I didn’t know when I would hear from him again and didn’t know what to do. I have never felt so helpless in my life. I wanted to be by his side; however, that was not possible. The waiting began.

  The next day, there was still no word from him. After an hour of inquiries, transfers and wrong rooms, I was finally connected to his room in Germany. He was doing well, in a lot of pain, but alive. The bullet had missed all his major organs. There were shattered bones along the spinal cord, broken ribs and fragments throughout his lower back. It was a bad injury, but he was still able to walk. At that moment, I realized how blessed we were, how miraculous it was that he was able to talk to me at all on the phone.

  He arrived home on April 21. The doctors told us that this was going to be a very long recovery but that they believed he would make a full recovery. They also told us how incredibly lucky we were that he was in this condition. The fact that the bullet missed any vital organs was an absolute miracle, and we counted ourselves extremely lucky.

  My husband has always been a hero to me, but even more so now — he came home to me. I also found a new set of heroes that day: the soldiers who fought beside him. There was a soldier who lost his own life in that battle. There were others who were wounded beside him. There was the wonderful man who pulled my husband to safety amidst a barrage of bullets. There was the medic who worked on him, keeping him alive until help could arrive. And there were the medical personnel who evacuated him and kept him alive until he could be treated. All these people were heroes to me before, in spirit; however, after this day, they became so in reality. I will never meet them all, will never know most of the men who helped to save his life, but they are my heroes all the same.

  ~Carol Howard

  Postcard from My Past

  History never looks like history when you are living through it.

  ~John W. Gardner

  My medical evacuation helicopter crew of four wasn’t aware that we were about to be thrust into the middle of a major battle. It was late August 1969 in South Vietnam. The battle would involve four regiments of the U.S. Army’s 196th Light Infantry Brigade, two battalions of the U.S. 7th Marines and batteries of the U.S. 82nd Artillery that provided fire support from four firebases located approximately thirty to thirty-five miles southwest of Da Nang. Thes
e Americans would be facing 1,500 Communist soldiers.

  As operations officer for the 236th Medical Detachment (Helicopter Ambulance), headquartered at Red Beach in Da Nang, I’d assigned myself — from August 20-22 — as copilot for our field-site crew at Landing Zone Baldy, twenty miles south of Da Nang. As a rookie pilot, I’d barely been in the unit a month.

  In those two and a half days of devastating action, our crew evacuated 150 wounded Americans from the Que Son Valley near Hiep Duc on forty-two missions, fifteen of which were “insecure.” This meant that our ground troops couldn’t guarantee the safety of the landing zones because the enemy was in close contact or our friendlies were low on ammunition and couldn’t provide sufficient covering fire.

  On a majority of these insecure missions, helicopter gunships weren’t available to cover our unarmed aircraft because there was too much action requiring their services in other parts of this battleground. So our only alternative was to go in alone, because most of the wounded wouldn’t have survived if we’d waited for gunships to arrive.

  During the morning of August 21st, our UH-1H (Huey) was shot up by enemy AK-47 rifle fire while exiting another insecure landing zone. One of our three patients was wounded for the second time. A burst of enemy fire ripped into a can of oil our crew chief kept under my armored seat, spraying oil over my Nomex flight pants. Another round locked me in my shoulder harness when it clipped a wire on the unlocking device attached to the left side of my seat. We deposited our patients at the Baldy battalion aid station while another helicopter was being flown out for our use.

  Less than twenty-four hours later (August 22nd), we were shot up for the second time on another insecure mission while evacuating an African-American infantry staff sergeant who’d been shot in the back. Our medic was wounded in the throat on our way in. An AK-47 round tore out his larynx. Two of our three radios were also shot out and there were a number of bullet holes above my head in the cockpit and other areas of the aircraft.

  In the aid station I held our medic’s legs while a doctor performed a tracheotomy without anesthesia, because the wound had swollen so quickly he couldn’t breathe. Fortunately, he somehow survived but had to endure over a dozen follow-up surgeries . . . one of which ultimately gave him back a voice.

  Thirty-two years later, an intriguing chain of events began that would impact my life. It began with a story titled “The Postcard” by Rocky Bleier with David Eberhart in Chicken Soup for the Veteran’s Soul. This book caught my attention as I was browsing through displays in a Lincoln, Nebraska bookstore. As I glanced at the first paragraph of his story, the words “Hiep Duc, in the Que Son Valley of South Vietnam,” and “August 20, 1969,” stopped me in my tracks. These words instantly brought back decades-old memories of danger, darkness and death.

  Since that first paragraph of Bleier’s story had caught my attention, I purchased the book, read the entire story and then decided to do some additional research. I’d heard that Bleier had written an autobiography titled Fighting Back (with Terry O’Neil). This book covered his early life, the fact that he’d been drafted into the army in 1968 and details concerning his subsequent service in Vietnam in 1969 where he’d been severely wounded in both legs. He also provided the inspiring story of how he’d overcome his wounds, and a right foot that doctors thought — at one point — would have to be amputated, to win four NFL Super Bowls as a running back for the Pittsburgh Steelers in 1974, 1975, 1978 and 1979.

  I was able to acquire a copy of the 1995 edition of Bleier’s book through an out-of-print book dealer and I sat down to read it as soon as it arrived in 2002.

  Before reading the first chapter, I glanced at the “Contents” page. Chapter 7 quickly caught my attention. It was titled “August 20, 1969.” That was when things became nearly unbelievable.

  On August 20th, Bleier was an M-79 grenadier with the 196th Light Infantry Brigade. He was wounded twice near Million Dollar Hill east of Hiep Duc. His book mentioned that a medevac helicopter had already completed two previous missions to their location that night evacuating other wounded Company C comrades. Bleier was the next to last patient on this third and final flight to be evacuated to Baldy’s aid station at 2:00 a.m. on the 21st. That’s when it hit me.

  I went to my military file and pulled out my combat flight records. Then I retrieved a citation for the Distinguished Flying Cross that our entire crew had been awarded for those two and a half days of action. Everything fit. Our unit’s lone field-site was at Baldy and I only assigned one crew there at a time. Hiep Duc and Million Dollar Hill were in our area of operation and I suddenly recalled landing on the same hill three times in one night during that time. There wasn’t any doubt we were the medevac crew that had evacuated Bleier and his company comrades that hectic night.

  Bleier’s Chicken Soup for the Soul story made a big difference in my life. I had no idea who we were carrying that night. They were all wounded Americans and it was our responsibility to evacuate them from that dangerous mountaintop.

  None of us ever know whose life we will step into or who will step into ours. That’s one of the exciting and interesting wonders of life. Ernest Hemingway said, “The world (and also combat) breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.” Perhaps this is what happened to Bleier, our flight crew and so many others who’ve survived war. Adversity has a way of introducing us to ourselves.

  If I hadn’t come across Bleier’s story, “The Postcard,” in Chicken Soup for the Veteran’s Soul, I never would have discovered how our crew’s efforts — and other doctors and medical personnel — had an impact on football history. I will always be thankful we were given the privilege of assisting those courageous American warriors that night in Vietnam.

  ~Robert B. Robeson

  The Postcard

  Faith is the quiet cousin of courage.

  ~Judith Hanson Lasater

  The ambush came out of nowhere and everywhere. My platoon members and I were strung out and moving through the bush near Hiep Duc in the Que Son Valley of South Vietnam. It was August 20, 1969, and, as always, it was hot and wet.

  All at once, the distinctive angry staccato of the enemies’ AK-47 assault rifles filled the air. It was mixed with a different sound, that of a heavier machine gun. The incoming rounds slapped and tore through the foliage. Adding to the din were the shouts of the platoon sergeant to return fire. Company C of the 196th Light Infantry Brigade was in trouble.

  Suddenly, it felt as if someone had smacked me — hard — with a baseball bat on the left thigh. I had been hit by one of the incoming rounds! I tried to scramble out of harm’s way, but there was no escape from the withering fire. Then I heard the ear-splitting “ruuump!” of a grenade explosion, and the baseball bat smashed down hard again, this time pounding onto my right leg and foot.

  My memory after that is of crawling — for what seemed like forever. I later calculated that over the course of six hours, I had dragged myself across two miles of ground. I did a lot of thinking and remembering in that time.

  At one point during my slow and painful journey, it occurred to me that I’d had the peculiar fortune to have been “drafted” twice. In January 1968, I was a late-round draft pick for the Pittsburgh Steelers, and in November of that year, the U.S. Army drafted me. In my weakened condition, I found this double-draft thing infinitely amusing.

  But the joke soon faded, and my mind once again tried to grasp the reason that I was in Vietnam at all. The political reasons for the U.S. being there were easy to understand. The difficult part for a soldier like me to comprehend was my role in this conflict. I had been over all this in my mind many times before, and I always came back to an incident that had happened early on in my tour.

  We had come across a village — not even a village, really, but just a couple of hooches inland. There was a family there — kids, an old man and an old lady. I saw that they didn’t have anything — except for an old tin can. They had filled the tin can with water and put it on a
n open fire to boil. When I looked inside the can, I saw a buffalo hoof. That pathetic soup was their sustenance. I decided right then that if I could help these people take a step forward, then my time in the country would be worthwhile.

  As it happened, my opportunity to follow through was cut short. My wounds got me evacuated to Tokyo, where the docs told me I had nearly lost my right foot and that I would never play football again. They informed me I was getting discharged with 40 percent disability.

  This was not good news. Football was my whole life and dream — a dream that had started in Appleton, Wisconsin, at Xavier High School and matured at Notre Dame, where I had been voted the captain of the Fighting Irish in 1967. There wasn’t anything else in my life I wanted to do. Football was something I identified with and that defined me.

  It was a black time for me. Wounded and depressed, I tried to contemplate a future without football. Then I received a postcard from Art Rooney, the owner of the Steelers. He had written only, “We’ll see you when you get back.”

  Such simple words, but their impact was immediate. It was then that I determined that I would be back — I would fight this thing with everything I had. The first thing on the program was learning to walk again on what remained of my right foot.

  With more patience and resolve than I knew I had, I succeeded. In 1970, I returned to the Steelers and was placed on injured reserve. By the following year, I was on the taxi squad. In 1973, I made special teams. That year, I began running. In 1974, I was still running — but now I wore the Steelers’ number 20 jersey.

  We won the Super Bowl that year. We won again in 1975, 1978 and 1979. Franco Harris and I ran and ran, setting some modest records along the way.