[GreenKeys] Off subject but a good read!

[Don Robert House]

Thanks be to JV for this great story...

August 16, 2002

WASHINGTON, DC - John Ripley's worthless liver had left his skin a 
sickly yellow. Toxic fluids were collecting in his system, causing 
his lean frame to bloat: Once 175 pounds, he now weighed 425. His 
kidneys were failing.  An incision glared from his abdomen, closed 
with staples in case surgeons had to rip it open fast. Eighteen IV 
lines fed into his unconscious body.

One of the Marine Corps' greatest living heroes was dying.

In the intensive care unit at Georgetown University Medical Center, a 
son of the retired colonel, Tom Ripley, sat vigil. It was 7 a.m. when 
the phone rang: A donor liver had been found, but his father might 
not live long enough to get it.

That's when the Ripleys understood that the delivery of the liver, 
from a 16-year-old gunshot victim in Philadelphia to the dying 
veteran in Washington, would take too long if left in the hospital's 
hands. Their only thought: Call in the Marines.

Over the next hours on that day last month, saving John Ripley's life 
became a military mission. It would involve the leader of the Marine 
Corps and helicopters from the president's fleet. Support teams would 
come from police in two cities, a platoon of current and former 
Marines, the president of Georgetown University and even a crew of 
construction workers.

"Sir, this is my dad's last chance," Tom Ripley said in a call to the 
Marine commandant's office. "I'm measuring my father's life in hours, 
not days."

The extraordinary efforts to save the 63-year-old Ripley, recovering 
from transplant surgery at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in 
Washington, shows how far the Corps will go to protect one of its 
own.  Marines will say they'd do this for any fallen comrade. But 
Ripley is no ordinary Marine. In a messy war with few widely 
recognized heroes, he is a legend. And at his moment of need, the 
Corps treated him like one.

"Colonel Ripley's story is part of our folklore - everybody is moved 
by it," said Lt. Col. Ward Scott, who helped organize the organ 
delivery from his post at the Marine Corps Historical Center in 
Washington, which Ripley has directed for the past three years. "It 
mattered that it was Colonel Ripley who was in trouble."

A heroic effort

On Easter Sunday 1972, Col. John Walter Ripley - swinging arm over 
arm to attach explosives to the span while dangling beneath it - 
almost single-handedly destroyed a bridge near the South Vietnamese 
city of Dong Ha. The action, which took place under heavy fire over 
several hours as he ran back and forth to shore for materials, is 
thought to have thwarted the onslaught of 20,000 enemy troops.

His tale is required reading for every Naval Academy plebe. In 
Memorial Hall, Ripley, a 1962 academy graduate, is the only Marine 
featured from the Vietnam War: A diorama shows him clinging to the 
grid work of the bridge at Dong Ha.

Ripley received the Navy Cross, the second-highest award a Marine can 
receive for combat. That decoration is surpassed only by the 
Congressional Medal of Honor, which, many in the Marine Corps 
vigorously argue, Ripley deserves.

But on this July morning, three decades after surviving combat 
wounds, Ripley was facing death from a transportation problem. His 
doctors tried four civilian organ transportation agencies and could 
not immediately be guaranteed a helicopter by any of them. The 
Ripleys say they were told that a civilian helicopter would not be 
available for at least six hours. Driving to Philadelphia was not an 
option because doctors worried that any traffic delays would ruin the 
organ.

Helicopter mission

Tom Ripley saw only one solution. From his father's hospital room, he 
called the office of the Marine Corps commandant, James L. Jones, and 
secured the use of a CH-46 helicopter, which is part of the 
presidential Marine One fleet.

The plan: The chopper would ferry the transplant team to the 
University of Pennsylvania hospital to remove the donor liver and 
then transport the doctors back to Washington.  Marine lawyers 
instantly approved the use of military materiel for Ripley, including 
nearly three hours on a helicopter that costs up to $6,000 an hour to 
operate. The commandant considered this an official lifesaving 
mission for a retired Marine still valuable to the Corps as a living 
symbol of pride.

Action was swift. The doctors rushed to Anacostia Naval Air Station, 
where the helicopter was waiting, rotors spinning. The chopper took 
off before the surgeons were even strapped in. By about 10 a.m., just 
three hours after learning that a new liver would be available in 
Philadelphia, the transplant team was swooping into that city. On the 
landing pad, an ambulance and a Philadelphia Highway Patrol car, both 
summoned by the Marines, were waiting. The motorcade took off, sirens 
blaring.

"When you're in a situation like this, and an organ becomes 
available, you use the fastest resource to get it," said Dr. Cal 
Matsumodo, a transplant surgeon from Walter Reed who flew on the 
helicopter to retrieve the new liver. "This turned out to be the 
swiftest and best-organized effort that I've ever seen."

Years of problems

Ripley's original liver had been ruined by a rare genetic disease as 
well as by a case of Hepatitis B that he believes he contracted in 
Vietnam.  After a year-and-a-half of hospitalizations and infections, 
Ripley had received a new liver from a D.C. area donor July 22. But 
within hours of the surgery, that donor liver began to fail.

Medical professionals say the organ donation process is safeguarded 
to keep powerful people from skipping to the top of the waiting list. 
It was Ripley's critical condition - caused by the failure of the 
first donor liver, his doctors say - not his personal story, that put 
him first in line for another liver July 24.

Still, most new organs are never granted military escorts.

"It was clearly extraordinary, what they did," said Roger Brown, 
manager of the Organ Center at the United Network for Organ Sharing, 
a clearinghouse for organ procurement and allocation. Sometimes, 
Brown said, patients will die because available organs cannot be 
transported to them in time.

"There's a lot of work that goes into matching a donor with a 
patient," he said. "If you can't find that one piece of the puzzle, 
it's just devastating."

In Ripley's mind, the mission that day reflects the strength of the 
Marine Corps fraternity. As he convalesces at Walter Reed, where he 
went after his operation and is listed in stable condition, he 
summons his booming voice long enough to insist that Marines would do 
the same for even an unknown grunt.

"Does it surprise me that the Marine Corps would do this?" Ripley 
said from his hospital bed, his dog tags still hanging around his 
neck. "The answer is absolutely flat no! If any Marine is out there, 
no matter who he is, and he's in trouble, then the Marines will say, 
'We've got to do what it takes to help him.'"

A battle plan

In Philadelphia, though, the Marine pilots knew exactly whom they 
were helping, and they called it an honor. On the helipad, the flight 
crew stood ready as the transplant team rushed back with a box marked 
"HUMAN ORGAN: FRAGILE."

Moments later, Tom Ripley, traveling with the doctors, got an update 
from his oldest brother, Stephen, at his father's bedside. Their 
dad's condition was worsening. The organ had to get to Washington, 
fast.

Tom and Stephen, both former Marine captains, debated the quickest 
"rtb" - return to base, which in this case meant the Georgetown 
hospital. In pager messages fired off like battlefield dispatches, 
the chopper became "the bird" and the doctors the "pax," slang for 
passengers. As the day wore on, the brothers drew from their military 
roots, comforting each other with the Marine motto, Semper Fidelis.

Their father, meanwhile, lay still. His dog tags, fastened with the 
same tape he'd used to keep them from clanking on secret missions in 
Vietnam, had been removed. Twice, the family had summoned a Catholic 
priest to deliver last rites. Now, the Ripleys wondered whether a 
third might be needed.

The hours ticked away, and the family learned that the Marine 
helicopter was too big to land on the Georgetown hospital helipad. 
But the doctors feared getting stuck in traffic on the drive from the 
Anacostia helipad to the hospital.

The delivery

A well-connected Marine buddy of Ripley's called the president of 
Georgetown University and got permission to land on the school's 
football field. A construction crew standing nearby was soon ripping 
down fencing to make room.

But the Marines rejected that makeshift helipad after sending another 
helicopter to survey it. The area was deemed too crowded for a 
landing. At one point, the Ripleys suggested landing at the Marine 
Corps War Memorial, across the river from Georgetown, by the statue 
that depicts Marines raising the flag at Iwo Jima. But that fanciful 
notion went nowhere.

The answer finally came in the form of a D.C. police helicopter pilot 
- Sgt. Thomas Hardy, a former Marine. A Corps official found him and 
asked whether he would take the team from Anacostia to Georgetown on 
his smaller chopper.

"This was a Marine Corps mission," said Hardy, a Vietnam veteran who 
agreed to fly without hesitation. "Once a Marine," he explained, 
"always a Marine."

The organ delivered, the surgery could finally start. The next day, 
Ripley's recovery began.  Slowly, he is gaining strength and 
returning to a normal weight. Despite the surgery's success, risks of 
infection or other problems remain. His family expects him to be in 
the hospital for up to three more weeks.

Ripley rests quietly, unable to accept visitors. His wife of 37 
years, Moline, sits with him amid pictures of their four children and 
their grandkids.

Repaying an old debt

The sons who orchestrated this rescue operation call it a culminating 
moment in their father's military life. John Ripley was shot in the 
side by a North Vietnamese soldier and during two tours of duty was 
pierced with so much shrapnel that doctors found metal fragments in 
his body as recently as last year. After Vietnam, Ripley continued to 
serve, losing most of the pigment in his face from severe sunburns 
while stationed above the Arctic Circle.

The Marines, his family believes, repaid a longtime debt.  "Dad gave 
32 years of his life to the Marine Corps," said Stephen Ripley. "When 
he really, really needed the Marine Corps, they were there for him."

Even from the quiet of his hospital room, the Marine Corps still 
defines Ripley. His family has packed a cabinet by his bed with 
copies of a book that John Grider Miller wrote about Ripley's 
heroics; Ripley says he will give complimentary copies of The Bridge 
at Dong Ha to the medical staff.

Not long ago, a military color guard held a bedside ceremony for him, 
placing in the room the Marine Corps colors that normally hang in 
Commandant Jones' office. Ripley was urged to keep the flags in his 
room until he leaves the hospital.

On a recent afternoon, Ripley looked past his IV machine, past the 
uneaten hospital lunch, past the plastic cup of pills, to the flags. 
He was, at that moment, John Ripley, grateful warrior, awed by what 
his sons, and the Marines, had done.

"They reached over the side," he said, "and they pulled me back in the boat."

Semper Fidelis