CBS News reports on Vietnam veteran keeping bones as keepsake?

Some reporters have just lost their minds! I read this whole article and all I could think about was how terrible this story is. While as a doctor, the Vietnam veteran operated to save a North Vietnamese soldier's life. That part is good. Especially when they did not return the favor to our troops. The problem is what came afterwards. Other medics took the amputated arm and boiled off the flesh so he could keep it as a "keepsake" but it seems like a strange choice of words for an even stranger action.

U.S. doc returns Vietnamese veteran's amputated arm
CBS News
July 1, 2013


HANOI, VIETNAM An American doctor has arrived in Vietnam carrying an unlikely piece of luggage: the bones of an arm he amputated in 1966.

Dr. Sam Axelrad flew into the Vietnamese capital, Hanoi, on Saturday from Houston. He was traveling through central Vietnam with his sons and two grandchildren Monday to meet the amputee, Nguyen Quang Hung, a former North Vietnamese soldier.

After Hung was shot in the arm by American troops, Axelrad, then a 27-year-old military doctor, amputated his infected right arm at a military hospital in Phu Cat in central Binh Dinh province. His medic colleagues boiled off the flesh, reconstructed the arm bones and gave them to him, he said.

Axelrad, now a urologist, said he brought the skeletal keepsake back to the United States as a reminder of doing a good deed. They sat in a military bag in Axelrad's closet for decades, and he didn't look at them because he didn't want to relive his wartime experiences, he said.
read more here