Unit 1 Personal Relationships
The Gift of Life
[1] The bombs landed in the small village. Nobody knows what these bombs
were supposed to hit during the terrible Vietnam War, but they landed in a small
orphanage run by a missionary group.
[2] The missionaries and one or two children were killed, and several children
were wounded, including one young girl, about 8 years old, who suffered wounds
to her legs.
[3] A couple of hours later, medical help arrived. The medical help was a young
American Navy doctor and an equally young Navy nurse. They quickly found one
young girl to be very badly injured, and it was clear that without immediate action,
she would die from loss of blood and shock.
[4]
They saw that she had to have blood, but their limited supplies did
not
include
plasma,
so
a
matching
blood
type
was
required.
A
quick
blood
typing
showed that neither American had the correct blood type. Several of the uninjured
orphans did.
[5]
The
doctor
spoke
a
little
Vietnamese,
and
the
nurse
spoke
a
little
high-school French. The children spoke no English but some French. Using what
little common language they could find, together with a lot of sign language, they