Medical corpsman still trying to heal Vietnam warriors' scars

Medical corpsman still trying to heal Vietnam warriors' scars
Veteran's play to help raise funds for suburban shelter for homeless veterans
5/15/2012
By Burt Constable

Virtually blind in one eye and barely topping 100 pounds, suburban teenager Bob Adams never thought he'd be shipped off to combat in Vietnam with the unenviable task of trying to save the lives of wounded warriors.

Forty-five years later, the 64-year-old Adams, a playwright and a counselor, is still doing the same job, only this time from the relative comfort of his cramped office in the Midwest Shelter For Homeless Veterans that he founded in Wheaton.

“Everybody needs a hobby, and mine is making errors in judgment,” Adams says dryly, noting that he and a buddy joined the Navy solely as part of a misguided scheme to avoid getting drafted and sent to Vietnam. The vision in his left eye was so bad he couldn't read any part of the eye chart during his induction physical.

“I had been taking eye tests since I was 3 years old. I knew that the big letter is an E,” recalls Adams, who passed his physical and endured boot camp and training before he left for Vietnam in the spring of 1968 to serve as a corpsman providing medical services for the Marines based in Khe Sanh, home to some of the war's longest and bloodiest battles.

“Corpsmen were an endangered species,” he says, noting that he rose through the ranks from a newbie to senior corpsman in about 2½ months as his superiors were killed, wounded or succumbed to malaria and other dangers.
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