Six agonizing years of recovery have taught Rory how to wait. Horribly wounded as a soldier in Vietnam in 1968, he was shuffled out of a Veterans Administration hospital after three years of treatment and some 40 operations. He was blind and crippled, barely able to talk and could eat only liquids squirted down his throat with a syringe. But the VA said nothing more could be done.
Rory's case, regrettably, was not unique. Last month fifteen demonstrators, including five Vietnam veterans in wheelchairs, spent a night in U.S. Sen. Alan Cranston's Los Angeles office to protest VA hospital treatment they called a "national disgrace." And a 1973 report by a Ralph Nader group found VA facilities disturbingly understaffed and hampered by red tape—better suited to providing caretaker services for older veterans, it said, than to treating men wounded in Vietnam.
Rory Bailey had been in Vietnam for only 10 days that morning in May 1968. He was Pfc. Leroy J. Bailey then, a good-looking 21-year-old draftee from East Machias, Me., who was asleep in his tent about 30 miles southeast of Saigon. He doesn't recall the rocket that came ripping in. He only remembers trying to cry out, "God help me, I'm hit!"
"I thought it was just my elbow," he recalls now. "I came to—or they allowed me to come to—a few minutes in Japan and again touching down in Anchorage and maybe in Cleveland on my way to Walter Reed Hospital. Somehow I knew it must be bad."
It was. Rory was in critical condition—not just from rocket fragments in his elbow and leg, or the massive flesh wounds in his chest and shoulders, or any of the other injuries listed so matter-of-factly in his medical record. Rory's face was gone. Between his ears, below his eyes, and above his lower lip and tongue, there was a gaping crater three inches deep.
One month later, still critical, he was discharged from the army and moved to a VA hospital in Hines, Ill., outside Chicago. "When I left Walter Reed they told me it would be a year and a half and I'd be eating steak again," Rory recalls. That was at best wishful thinking. A photograph taken in 1969, after Rory had received a year of treatment, shows a man whose wounds had begun to heal but whose face was nothing more than a featureless scar.
Two years later the VA let him go. His brother Eldon, who has a wife and two small children, had moved from Maine to the suburb of LaGrange to be near him. Rory moved in with them.
"He had his VA pension," says Rory's sister-in-law Grace, "and the people at the hospital gave him lots of other material things—a braille wristwatch, a stereo. But they told us they couldn't do any more for him." Luckily, through friends at church, the Baileys met Dr. Charles Janda, a plastic surgeon. "He made no promises," Rory recalls, "but he thought he could help."
Dr. Janda's first operation, performed in a private hospital, was on Rory's tongue, so his speech could be more easily understood. Later Dr. Janda hoped to do more, but then came a grotesque bureaucratic snafu. The VA announced stiffly that it would not pay for the surgery; Rory's injuries somehow had been misclassified as "not service-connected."
Rory's plight came to the attention of Chicago columnist Mike Royko, who described it in a nationally syndicated article. If the country could afford $5 million to prettify the presidential compound at San Clemente, Royko seethed, it could certainly pay whatever it might cost to give Rory Bailey his face back again. Letters poured in from all over the country, some addressed simply to "Leroy Bailey, LaGrange, Ill." One was from President Nixon, inviting Rory to the White House, assuring him "I am determined everything humanly possible shall be done to assist you."
Under such pressure the VA relented and readmitted Rory to the Hines facility for tests. But there was no encouragement. "They gave him exactly the same answer as before," his brother says bitterly. "They could partially fix his face, but they couldn't get his mouth to close, so they didn't think it would be that useful just to make him look better."
Though disillusioned, Rory and his family are not bitter about the VA, and they realize that no one set out to bungle his case deliberately. Perhaps the cruelest effect of the foul-up is that it may have shaken Rory's faith in the future. "He used to tell us, 'In a year, maybe two, I'll be beautiful again,' " says his brother, but lately Rory's goals have become more modest. "The only thing I ask for is the ability to chew and swallow my food," he wrote the VA in an appeal. "The cosmetic effect is of little importance." Recently, the VA agreed to pay for any further plastic surgery Rory has done by private doctors.
Eldon and Grace Bailey's two little daughters, 4-year-old Debby and two-and-a-half-year-old Becky, accept their uncle naturally and without reservation, and to see Rory bask in the glow of their loving attention is almost to overlook the devastated face. But without the softening effect of the children's adoration, Rory Bailey is a hard man to look at. He wears a puzzled expression as he gropes in the darkness for something as simple as Debby's toy frog—or as elusive as his life's new direction. "There is a girl back east Rory likes quite a bit," his brother confides, "but he doesn't dare be forward about his feelings until he gets out of this maze."
Though his spirits have occasionally faltered, and shyness severely limits his contact with strangers, Rory has come to terms with reality. Because he eventually hopes to open a carpentry and cabinet-making business, he and his leader dog Chip take the bus four days a week—with three changes each way—to Triton Junior College, where Rory is learning his trade. Communication can be a problem, but Rory usually makes himself understood. Explains instructor C. R. Strain: "Sometimes when I don't understand him, Rory gets a chuckle in his throat, and a laughing expression comes over that poor crippled face, as if to say, 'Here's a guy who hasn't gotten smart yet.' Then he'll say, 'the letter after L.' You see, he can't say the letter M. He can't say any letter that requires putting his lips together."
What Rory will eventually look like is difficult to foretell, although Dr. Janda feels that any functional surgery will improve Rory's appearance as well. Soon he hopes to operate to further improve Rory's speech, and perhaps allow him to swallow more easily and hold food on his tongue long enough to taste it. After six years on a liquid diet Rory longs for solid food. Steak would be nice, he says, although "one piece of meat is pretty much like another." Then he jokes: "But I'd kill for some corn on the cob."
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
