By Hank Simons
S&S Staff Writer
OSAN AB, Korea—A three year old Korean girl
left the Air Force hospital here recently with ten dolls and a couple
of stuffed toy bears. She took one other thing back to the little
Korean village of Chico—her life. The dolls were the gift of
airmen on the base. Her life she owes to luck, the compassion of several
U.S. servicemen, and the medical skill of a Korean doctor working
with a team of Air Force doctors.
ON OCT. 17, little Choi Hyo-Ok was playing in the
dirt road that runs through Chico, a town outside the gates of Osan
AB. Suddenly, an unidentified truck roared down the road and struck
the child, then drove off without stopping. It left behind an unconscious
child with a broken leg, a shattered pelvis, and deep multiple gashes
of the legs. Under normal circumstances in a country like Korea where
transportation is slow and hospitals few and distant, Choi Hyo-Ok
was as good as dead. But, what happened next rose above “normal
circumstances.”
An Air Police patrol drove through the village
and found the grief stricken mother and grandmother huddled over the
injured child. The APs put Choi Hyo-Ok in their jeep and drove off
for the base hospital.
THE CHILD was checked into the hospital, the cuts
in her leg stitched and Bryant traction applied to her broken bones.
“I really can’t encourage this sort of thing,” says
Col. Spencer A. O’Brian, commander of the base hospital and
flight surgeon for the 58th FB Wing. He explained the Air Force does
not have facilities to give medical care to Korean Nationals. Then
with a twinkle in his eyes he adds: “Of course, when you find
the patient already in bed in Bryant traction, there’s not much
you can do.” “Still,” he continues, working hard
to repair his sternness, “I really can’t encourage this
sort of thing.”
During her two months in the hospital, Choi Hyo-Ok
was cared for by O’Brian and Dr. Yeong-Cheol Koh, as 32 year
old graduate of Seoul National Medical College who served five years
as a doctor in the ROK Air Force and is now employed at the base hospital
to give outpatient care to Korean employees of the base.
THROUGHOUT her hospitalization, Choi Hyo-Ok was
watched over, according to Oriental custom, by her grandmother, who
stayed almost continually at her bedside to feed her, do her washing
and give personal care. And pretty soon, airmen on the base began
to drop by with gifts of candy and soon the dolls and two stuffed
bears began to appear and take up more room in the bed than did Choi
Hyo-Ok. The chubby Korean baby has gone home now and according to
Dr. Koh “will be walking again by the beginning of the New Year.”
SSA-877
