Alan Allen - Souvenirs & Documents
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This is the front and back of a letter for his wife that Alan Allen dictated to a Linda Weeks while at an air-up-like-a-balloon hospital in Da Nang. The letter is dated 29 May 68, the day after he was wounded. He lied in the letter to protect his wife--he didn't tell her he was completely paralyzed from the waist down and couldn't walk, or that he had no bladder or bowel function, or that he required a urinary catheter. A doctor had told him he might never walk again, but he evaded that subject. He even claimed he was hit by shrapnel or a mortar, knowing that would sound less serious than a bullet wound--especially since his wife knew he'd been hit by shrapnel twice before. "I felt like hell," says Allen, "and my back was one solid, dull ache--but at least the pain wasn't horrible, I guess even paralysis has a silver lining. Yet the full implications of my predicament hadn't hit me--and wouldn't fully until 35 years later, and I likely don't understand it all even now." Allen signed the letter himself, in a weak, scrawly hand; Weeks wrote on the back of the page, "Linda Weeks, MA 7 3237, Camp Zama," as did a "Recruiter, Reserve, Red Cross, Jo Jones." Is the MA 7 3237 a phone number? Why did she write Camp Zama--because I was to be sent there? Any ideas would be appreciated.
