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Roger Marshall first met Le Trinh in 1969, when the little Vietnamese girl showed up at a Quaker-run hospital located in war-ravaged Quang Ngai.
Le Trinh’s entire right leg and hip joint had been blown away in an explosion. Her injury was so extensive that Marshall, then a young British Royal Air Force medic and prosthetist, knew that crafting an artificial limb for the frightened child would require all the skills at his disposal. Once her tiny limb was built and fitted, Marshall and his Vietnamese colleagues watched happily as Le Trinh hobbled unaided from the hospital, her face lit by a nervous smile. Marshall never expected to see her again.
Marshall spent the next few years of the war training Vietnamese students in the art of prosthetics and orthotics on a voluntary basis. It was perilous work, performed under the steady barrages of bombs and napalm that devastated the countryside.
Marshall left Vietnam in 1972, and wound up in Bangor, where he worked for 15 years at Eastern Maine Medical Center, then opened a private practice in town. Though he’d left Vietnam, Vietnam hadn’t left him. Marshall never forgot the students so eager to learn what he had to teach, or the faces of the impoverished, resilient Vietnamese patients he treated and lived among in Quang Ngai. Though busy with his practice and family here in Maine, he long felt the need to do something for the struggling people he’d left behind.
In 1998, he received a letter. It was Le Trinh, who was now a wife and mother working at the agricultural bank not far from her childhood home. After nearly 30 years, she had somehow tracked down Roger Marshall in Maine to ask a big favor of the man who had allowed her to walk as a child: Could he possibly do the same for her now?
Marshall quickly made plans to return to Vietnam and fulfill her request. A Vietnamese prosthetist and wartime colleague arranged for Le Trinh’s difficult journey to one of the country’s few rehabilitation clinics. Marshall created a second leg for Le Trinh, who had outgrown her first so long before, and had the exquisite pleasure of watching his grateful patient set aside her crutch yet again and walk on her own for the first time in many years.
“There was a lump in my throat as big as a football,” recalls Marshall, now 71. “She just took off walking, without any fear. It’s hard to explain my emotions as I watched her. I had done something to help improve her life, yes, but she had done something for me, too, in a spiritual way. At that point I became more committed than ever to the idea of building a clinic to help so many other people like her.”
Thirty-four years after the Paris Peace Accords, the Vietnam War still continues to claim the lives and limbs of poor rural people. Since 1973, an astounding 30,000 deaths and 64,000 injuries have resulted from the estimated 350,000 tons of hidden bombs and 3 million landmines still strewn across the countryside. More than 26,000 people are disabled in Quang Ngai province alone, Marshall says, and over 4,000 of them require artificial limbs and bone-straightening devices. An unexploded-munitions mapping survey, launched recently by the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation with support from the Vietnam Defense Ministry, is a critical first step in the process of finally ridding the countryside of the war’s lethal legacy. Yet until all of the stuff is actually dug up, a process expected to take many years, farmers will continue to be maimed in rice fields, and women and children will go on losing limbs to decades-old mines and grenades unearthed by plows and monsoon rains.
And that’s where Marshall’s dream of a rehabilitation clinic in Quang Ngai comes in. Over the years, with a craftsman’s patience, Marshall has laid the groundwork for a center that he hopes will one day include an operating room, a manufacturing shop, lecture rooms, and even a patient dormitory. With the support of the American Friends Service Committee (the group which ran the Quang Ngai hospital where he first met Le Trinh), and others, Marshall’s project won government approval from Hanoi. He has been given the land for the facility, along with the Vietnamese government’s promise to provide student workers and medical staff for the rehab center once it’s completed.
Putting all of the many pieces together, however, has been a frustrating series of fits and starts. Last year, an American businessman and philanthropist in Hong Kong heard about Marshall’s humanitarian mission; he pledged to donate a building approximately 60-by-40 feet that would form the core of the center’s operations. To Marshall, the generous offer was “like manna from heaven.” A year later, however, the building has yet to arrive at Quang Ngai, though the building’s foundation is completed.
Raising funds, too, has proved difficult. While his nonprofit group, the Fund for Prosthetic-Orthotic Rehabilitation-Vietnam, has so far raised $50,000, it’s far short of the $250,000 needed to make Marshall’s dream a reality.
“Because of the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, and all of those many casualties, it’s been very difficult to get the money we need,” the soft-spoken British-born American citizen says. “So many people have forgotten about Vietnam.”
Marshall persists, nonetheless. He raised a bit of money by raffling off a guitar signed by members of the legendary rock band the Moody Blues. (His 41-year-old son, Gordon, has been the group’s drummer for the last 17 years.) A few years back he even made a parachute jump in Pittsfield as part of a fundraiser—a successful venture, except for his broken tailbone. Some of the money raised so far is being put to good use in Quang Ngai, funding a one-room operation where a young Vietnamese technician has already fitted some 300 patients with prosthetics that allow them to walk.
Still, Marshall admits to periods of despair, when he suspects that all the years of effort ultimately will be in vain. His wife, Margaret, a Philadephia Quaker whom he met in 1972 when she was working with refugees in Vietnam, occasionally urges him to ease up a little, reminding him of the good he’s done already.
When that doesn’t work—it usually doesn’t—she sometimes tacks up an inspirational saying on a wall of their Corinth home to buoy his flagging spirits. After one of his down days this summer, for example, Marshall woke up to find a new quote taped over a writing desk near the kitchen. Written by the novelist and playwright Jan de Hartog, it read: “Do not commit the error, common among the young, of assuming that if you cannot save the whole of mankind, you have failed.”
Marshall says he recognizes the wisdom in those words, though he never did set out to save the entire world. Helping just one small, needy pocket of it is more than enough for one man.
“I have faith that it can be done, despite the obstacles,” he says. “It may take the rest of my life, but bit by bit it’s getting there.”
Le Trinh’s entire right leg and hip joint had been blown away in an explosion. Her injury was so extensive that Marshall, then a young British Royal Air Force medic and prosthetist, knew that crafting an artificial limb for the frightened child would require all the skills at his disposal. Once her tiny limb was built and fitted, Marshall and his Vietnamese colleagues watched happily as Le Trinh hobbled unaided from the hospital, her face lit by a nervous smile. Marshall never expected to see her again.
Marshall spent the next few years of the war training Vietnamese students in the art of prosthetics and orthotics on a voluntary basis. It was perilous work, performed under the steady barrages of bombs and napalm that devastated the countryside.
Marshall left Vietnam in 1972, and wound up in Bangor, where he worked for 15 years at Eastern Maine Medical Center, then opened a private practice in town. Though he’d left Vietnam, Vietnam hadn’t left him. Marshall never forgot the students so eager to learn what he had to teach, or the faces of the impoverished, resilient Vietnamese patients he treated and lived among in Quang Ngai. Though busy with his practice and family here in Maine, he long felt the need to do something for the struggling people he’d left behind.
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In 1998, he received a letter. It was Le Trinh, who was now a wife and mother working at the agricultural bank not far from her childhood home. After nearly 30 years, she had somehow tracked down Roger Marshall in Maine to ask a big favor of the man who had allowed her to walk as a child: Could he possibly do the same for her now?
Marshall quickly made plans to return to Vietnam and fulfill her request. A Vietnamese prosthetist and wartime colleague arranged for Le Trinh’s difficult journey to one of the country’s few rehabilitation clinics. Marshall created a second leg for Le Trinh, who had outgrown her first so long before, and had the exquisite pleasure of watching his grateful patient set aside her crutch yet again and walk on her own for the first time in many years.
“There was a lump in my throat as big as a football,” recalls Marshall, now 71. “She just took off walking, without any fear. It’s hard to explain my emotions as I watched her. I had done something to help improve her life, yes, but she had done something for me, too, in a spiritual way. At that point I became more committed than ever to the idea of building a clinic to help so many other people like her.”
Thirty-four years after the Paris Peace Accords, the Vietnam War still continues to claim the lives and limbs of poor rural people. Since 1973, an astounding 30,000 deaths and 64,000 injuries have resulted from the estimated 350,000 tons of hidden bombs and 3 million landmines still strewn across the countryside. More than 26,000 people are disabled in Quang Ngai province alone, Marshall says, and over 4,000 of them require artificial limbs and bone-straightening devices. An unexploded-munitions mapping survey, launched recently by the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation with support from the Vietnam Defense Ministry, is a critical first step in the process of finally ridding the countryside of the war’s lethal legacy. Yet until all of the stuff is actually dug up, a process expected to take many years, farmers will continue to be maimed in rice fields, and women and children will go on losing limbs to decades-old mines and grenades unearthed by plows and monsoon rains.
And that’s where Marshall’s dream of a rehabilitation clinic in Quang Ngai comes in. Over the years, with a craftsman’s patience, Marshall has laid the groundwork for a center that he hopes will one day include an operating room, a manufacturing shop, lecture rooms, and even a patient dormitory. With the support of the American Friends Service Committee (the group which ran the Quang Ngai hospital where he first met Le Trinh), and others, Marshall’s project won government approval from Hanoi. He has been given the land for the facility, along with the Vietnamese government’s promise to provide student workers and medical staff for the rehab center once it’s completed.
Putting all of the many pieces together, however, has been a frustrating series of fits and starts. Last year, an American businessman and philanthropist in Hong Kong heard about Marshall’s humanitarian mission; he pledged to donate a building approximately 60-by-40 feet that would form the core of the center’s operations. To Marshall, the generous offer was “like manna from heaven.” A year later, however, the building has yet to arrive at Quang Ngai, though the building’s foundation is completed.
Raising funds, too, has proved difficult. While his nonprofit group, the Fund for Prosthetic-Orthotic Rehabilitation-Vietnam, has so far raised $50,000, it’s far short of the $250,000 needed to make Marshall’s dream a reality.
“Because of the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, and all of those many casualties, it’s been very difficult to get the money we need,” the soft-spoken British-born American citizen says. “So many people have forgotten about Vietnam.”
Marshall persists, nonetheless. He raised a bit of money by raffling off a guitar signed by members of the legendary rock band the Moody Blues. (His 41-year-old son, Gordon, has been the group’s drummer for the last 17 years.) A few years back he even made a parachute jump in Pittsfield as part of a fundraiser—a successful venture, except for his broken tailbone. Some of the money raised so far is being put to good use in Quang Ngai, funding a one-room operation where a young Vietnamese technician has already fitted some 300 patients with prosthetics that allow them to walk.
Still, Marshall admits to periods of despair, when he suspects that all the years of effort ultimately will be in vain. His wife, Margaret, a Philadephia Quaker whom he met in 1972 when she was working with refugees in Vietnam, occasionally urges him to ease up a little, reminding him of the good he’s done already.
When that doesn’t work—it usually doesn’t—she sometimes tacks up an inspirational saying on a wall of their Corinth home to buoy his flagging spirits. After one of his down days this summer, for example, Marshall woke up to find a new quote taped over a writing desk near the kitchen. Written by the novelist and playwright Jan de Hartog, it read: “Do not commit the error, common among the young, of assuming that if you cannot save the whole of mankind, you have failed.”
Marshall says he recognizes the wisdom in those words, though he never did set out to save the entire world. Helping just one small, needy pocket of it is more than enough for one man.
“I have faith that it can be done, despite the obstacles,” he says. “It may take the rest of my life, but bit by bit it’s getting there.”
