Daily News | 53 years after Vietnam, he’s still searching for the Marine who saved his life. Can you help?
Sometimes John Suzadail daydreams that he has already found Henry. Henry’s wife opens the door and directs him to a bar down the street. There he is — bartending, or sitting with a drink. It’s been 53 years; both men are in their 70s now, creaky with pain from the war and old age.Then the daydream dissolves, and Suzadail, 73, is still searching for the man who saved his life.
That was May 15, 1970. Suzadail, Henry, and the others set out to uncover a Viet Cong bunker they had spotted several weeks earlier. It was a misty day, cooler than usual; Suzadail offered to walk point, leading the patrol, because he knew where the bunker was. He traded with a Marine already in the lead, Steven Merrell, and began to scan the woods for danger. Then he felt a tug at his leg. He had tripped a wire connected to a grenade.
“For years I blamed his death on me,” he said of Merrell. They had switched places just 5 minutes earlier.In the decades since returning home, Suzadail married and got a job at the post office, where he worked for 24 years. The VA diagnosed him with PTSD and he has gone to group therapy and reconnected with some of the other men he served with.
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