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.
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."
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.'"
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.
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.
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."