After 40 years, a man contacts the medic who saved him.

CORDELL — The snapshots in Larry Dobbs’ brain are as vivid as they are voluminous.

The former Army medic, who served in the Vietnam War, can still reel off the serial number of the rifle he inherited from a dead buddy. He knows, too, that he left Southeast Asia 21 minutes short of a year.

But more than places and things, Dobbs remembers people.

Soldiers such as Joe Gunn, whose gap in his teeth was the “perfect place to hold a cigarette.”

Or Victor Doddy, who despite being shot six times in the gut, told Dobbs to attend to the others first. There was best friend John Crews, his muscle-bound protector who dragged the medic from casualty to casualty.

And Frank Gonzalez, the skinny New Yorker whose face was rearranged by a mortar blast.

Dobbs, who tended to Gonzalez, recently spoke to him for the first time in 40 years.

“He said, ‘Do you remember me?’ ” said Dobbs, 61, recalling the phone call. “I said: ‘Listen, Frank. I can tell you what your blood tastes like. It squirted in my mouth. We’re brothers, wouldn’t you say?’ ”

Gonzalez, now a Long Islander, said he thinks of Dobbs all the time.

“When I’m alone sometimes or I’m watching a war movie, and I recall some of the things that happened to me, he’s always there,” said Gonzalez, 59. “I thank God that he did what he did. … If it wasn’t for him, I would be dead.

“I love this man. He never thought of

Finally making contact

Gonzalez’s younger sister, America Persico of Owasso, helped make the reconnection possible.

Over the years, she had listened to her brother’s intense desire to get in touch with the man who saved his life. So when Persico moved to the Sooner State from New York in 1979, she tried unsuccessfully to reach the Oklahoman.

Then about a year ago, she sought the help of Alan Hughes, a fellow Owasso Public Schools employee who, as it turned out, was the service o0cer for the local Veterans of Foreign Wars post.

Hughes said that he pushed aside her request to handle other matters, but he recently attended a reunion of fellow soldiers at Fort Riley, Kan., and that piqued his interest in the war.

Dedicated to finding Dobbs, who Persico knew was from a small Oklahoma town, Hughes inserted the soldier’s name into an Internet search.

Two phone calls later, bingo.

“The first words out of his mouth were ‘Is Frank having problems with the VA?’ ” said Hughes, a former machine-gunner and personnel carrier driver who served in Vietnam at the same time.

“The guy, 40 years later, is going to bat for Frank. It’s such a blessing to put him and Frank together.”

Persico said that finding Dobbs has had a profound effect on her brother.

“Frank is a big mush lately because every time we talk about it, he says, ‘I’m going to start crying, Sis,’” she said.

“He’s not that type of man at all. Vietnam made him very, very hard. And losing his son (at 11 months) made him very, very hard.”

Hell breaks loose

June 2, 1968, was a bright day near Pleiku in the Central Highlands of Vietnam.

Dobbs and two buddies in C Company, 4th Infantry Division, were playing cards in the bottom of an armored personnel carrier. Sitting next to Dobbs was Gonzalez.

The mortar shell that landed squarely on the carrier decapitated Sgt. Charles Farrell, a father of six, and left Gonzalez, who was exiting the hatch, spurting blood from his neck, Dobbs said.

The explosion claimed Gonzalez’s left eye and tore a hole in his jugular vein.

Using gauze and duct tape, Dobbs patched him up, siphoning enough blood from a fellow soldier to get Gonzalez to base camp.

“That guy is a hero,” Gonzalez said in a phone interview. “In my eyes, you couldn’t be a braver person than Larry. He would grab a medic bag when everybody else was grabbing weapons.

I come from the Lower East Side of New York. I thought I was a badass. But I don’t know if I could do the things this guy did.”

In addition to the lost eye, he still has lingering numbness in his left hand.

Gonzalez endured three reconstructive surgeries on his face, with bone from his hip used to repair a crushed cheek, he said.

“Right now, I think I’m pretty good-lookin’,” he said, chuckling.

After the death of his infant son, Gonzalez went on to father a daughter, “my sunshine,” Stacie — now 33 and a physician’s assistant.

After spending service time in Germany and three months in Vietnam, he has been a letter carrier for the U.S. Postal Service for nearly 30 years.

“I wound up going overseas twice for the government,” said Gonzalez, who lives in Port Je'erson Station on Long Island. “And I’m still in the government. I’m a mailman.”

Surviving with a smile

Following his 12-month stint in Vietnam, Dobbs dabbled in a variety of jobs, ultimately becoming a successful construction contractor.

Returning to Oklahoma to stay in 1991, he fell two stories from a scaffold the following year, a tragedy that cost him his left leg.

Now five years sober, Dobbs said he became an alcoholic trying to forget three critically wounded soldiers who successfully begged not to be saved. Every six weeks or so, he doubles over from phantom pain so profound that “I catch myself not wanting to live in the middle of them.”

But live he does.

Dobbs, who uses a wheelchair, is skilled in woodwork and gets paid — sometimes handsomely — for his oil paintings and watercolors.

He greets strangers with a smile and firm handshake and speaks giddily about projects he is working on. Following a recent visit with a Tulsa World reporter in Cordell, roughly 200 miles west of Tulsa, Dobbs perched on a sidewalk, inhaled the sunshine and paused to reflect.

“I’m probably the happiest sad man you’ve ever met because I do have deep-rooted hurts,” said Dobbs, who has five children and 13 grandchildren.

“If anybody would ask me, I believe in heaven and I believe in God and I believe in hell. And I wouldn’t care one bit to die today. It would be kind of cool. But if I’m going to live, I’m going to make it count.”

Rhett Morgan 581-8395
rhett.morgan@tulsaworld.com