By Larry Briscoe
Correspondent
It is May 2, 1967, the day before Jerry Porter’s 20th birthday. He is a passenger in a U.S. Army helicopter over the rice paddies in Vietnam. The chopper blades click overhead as the green fields pass beneath.
“They don’t know for sure what happened — if we were hit or what happened,” Porter said.
Crash! The chopper hits a rice paddy.
“It bent me over backwards,” he said. “A man isn’t built to do that. It was one of those wonderful ideas of the Army. We were going to go out, surround and capture all of them.”
He adds the enemy knew they were coming a long time before they started the operation.
That was the last thing the teenager remembered before waking up as a 20-year-old — paralyzed from the chest down.
The ordinary Army Private 1st Class did not know he would soon take on an extraordinary life of giving to others.
Fortunately, the crash was close enough to the field hospital at Da Nang Air Base, Jerry was there within 20 minutes. From there, he was flown to the hospital ship USS Repose where fragments were removed from his back.
“They woke me up long enough to award me with a Purple Heart,” he said. General Lewis Walt awarded the medal to Pvt. Porter — but years later he learned he did not get it. The Army decided since the accident could not be proven to be combat, it would not be awarded on official records.
Jerry was then flown to a transition base, Travis Air Force Base, in California for a couple of nights before going to a Fitzsimmons Army Hospital in Denver, Colo., — an old one where President Eisenhower had been treated. Jerry remembered the former president’s room had been kept the same way as when he was there.
Finally in September, he entered the VA Hospital for rehabilitation that was supposed to take six months.
“I went to the hospital in Memphis,” and reality was about to set in.
“A doctor there told me, ‘Mister, I want to tell you one thing. You’re never going to walk again.’ That was a shock to my system. That hurt.”
The doctor later told him he had learned if he was not that direct with people, they would not learn and would not be ready for the outside world.
“That was tough when he told me that.”
“We’re going to put you in a hurry-up program,” he was told, and he would go home within three months. “It was the hardest work I ever did. All we did was PT (physical training) all day. But with the hurry-up program I was home for Christmas.”
“In the hospital, there was a kid really down,” Jerry remembered. “The lieutenant asked me to just talk to him. I went over to him and started to talk to him.
“’You’re not as hurt as much as I am. I am, paralyzed from the waist down,’” Jerry quoted the young soldier.
Jerry answered, “I’m paralyzed from the chest down.”
Jerry was able to turn him around.
“It made me feel good I had helped him along.”
One of the guys in the PT department at the VA wanted to go pheasant hunting. Porter was from Nebraska, and his family’s farm was loaded with pheasants.
The offer came. “We’ll take you home if you’ll let us hunt.” And that’s how he got home.
“It helped they were PT,” he said. They instructed his family how to take care of him and advised them not to do everything for him.
“I still wasn’t old enough to buy a beer when I got home,” he laughed, just old enough to fight a war.
“When I got hurt, I lived in a town about the size of Quinlan in Nebraska,” Porter said. He was engaged to a girl named Lynn. She learned of his accident the day before she graduated from high school.
Jerry’s conversation always drifts back to Lynn. They grew up together in towns about 20 miles apart. His was Creighton, Neb.
“She’s the one that saved me,” he said.
She went to the hospital to see him. Because of what she saw there with the maimed and wounded, he said, “she came in as a teenager and went out an adult.”
“When I was a teenager, a band showed up in town,” he recalled. “The band was supposed to play at Creighton University, two hours away.”
They had mistakenly arrived in the town of 1,100 instead of Creighton University in Omaha.
It was too late for them to get to Omaha, so we had a big-time band play in Creighton.
“My first new car I got, I ordered a car from the dealership in my hometown,” Jerry said. “First day, my dad went with me. It had hand controls. It kept going faster and faster. There was some ice on the roads. It got up to 70 to 75 mph. My dad said you better do something.
“I looked, and my foot had fallen onto the foot feed. You have to watch your feet. I had grown up on a farm and everything had different controls. Learning to drive with hand controls was simple.”
Jerry and Lynn were married June 29, 1968, the following year.
Lynn, along with the rest of his family, learned that Jerry needed to know how to do things for himself.
“She’s figured that one out real good,” he laughed. “I’ll be trying to get her to do something for me. She’ll say, ‘You’ve got four good wheels. Do it yourself.’”
After their marriage, he went to work for an electronics firm making resistors. A year later, a technical school opened that later became a college. His professor was the president and got the college started.
He also provided Jerry with whatever he needed. “I needed a drafting table. He got me a drafting table. He built a ramp and got me up to it.”
He graduated and soon went to work as a plumbing and heating estimator, a position he kept for many years.
One day leaving work, as he headed home, he was busting snowdrifts in 30 mph wind and zero degrees. There was a big drift in his driveway. “When I got to the drift, it was so hard, I just drove on top of it,” he said. After about an hour of trying to figure out how to get in the house, a neighbor with a tractor pulled him off it.
He went in the house; the news was on and reported the temperature in Texas was in the 70s.
“My wife said, ‘I’m moving to Texas. You moving with me?’”
That was how they arrived in Texas and now live in Point.
“That snow is not good for a person with a wheelchair,” Jerry said.
Jerry learned giving early as revealed by the Nebraska Handicapped Employee of the Year Award that was presented to him by the governor of Nebraska.
“When I joined the First United Methodist Church of Quinlan, Wally Williams was the preacher. He said, ‘You need to do two things outside of church.’”
Jerry said the church sponsored the Angel Food program at that time. That transitioned into a food pantry, sponsored by local churches.
He said George and Wanda Douglas were working the food pantry at its former location on Quinlan Parkway at a smaller facility.
“He got me started,” Jerry said. “We learned from each other. I enjoyed the work — interviewing people. It’s sad, but it’s good. You can help people. If you can’t help people, it really hurts. There are a lot of them out there hurting.”
He said, “I found out you never have a spare moment. It’s fun. It’s a blast.”
The conversation moves back to Lynn and how she helped with campaigns to have handicapped ramps installed in places that did not have them.
“It’s a different world than it was 46 years ago.” He and Lynn have been instrumental in having ramps installed in many places, especially government buildings.
“She looks out for me. We’re retired. We can travel a little bit now. I got her involved in the food pantry. She would not have anything to do with computers, and now, she does all the ordering for the pantry.”
With a Czech ancestry, Lynn is locally famous for her kolaches. In fact she made 52 dozen of the tasty pastries for a food pantry fundraiser.
In addition, Lynn was hauling the food every month for the pantry. Now the facility distributes more than 10,000 pounds monthly, and three guys — Joe Fox, Gary Cannon and Bill Nash — pick up the food free of charge every third Wednesday.
“I started in 2005,” Jerry said. “I’ve been at it eight years. I really enjoy it. After we moved into this building, we’re able to help more people.”
The food pantry grew to the point where two interview offices were needed.
“At the old building, 12 was a big day,” he said. “We’ve had as many as 26 here. We have a great group of volunteers.”
Jerry said he enjoys the opportunity to work with his daughter who teaches in Dallas. “We do crafts at Bible School together every year,” he said.
Jerry and Lynn have twin daughters, Tina and Sandra. One grandson, Dylan Knight, has opened his own business, motorcycle parts, Flip Mfg., in Greenville while still going to college. He is to graduate in the spring.
Jerry builds whatever is needed — tables, shelves and not just for the food pantry. He has also built items for the Lake Tawakoni Regional Chamber of Commerce and others.
“Building wheelchair ramps is something else I enjoy. I know the need,” he said.
Jerry is a member of the local Methodist Ramp Crew, headed by Pat Taggert. The team builds ramps at homes of local handicapped residents to provide access for their wheelchairs.
“We’re going to break 100 soon,” Jerry said. “The last one was number 93. I want to stay busy — or go berserk.”
In 2013, Jerry received the Trestle Masonic Lodge No. 534 Quinlan Community Builder Award of which he is very proud.
After 46 years in a wheelchair, has it changed you?
“I’m basically the same person,” Jerry said. “Funny thing, I can get up and talk to people. I don’t have to stand up. Bill Slaughter asked me to do it. At first I said no, but Bill had done so much, I called him and said, ‘Okay, Bill, I’ve got to get out of the box.’ You can be bitter. I’ve seen a lot of guys let their bitterness destroy them.
“I want people to understand. No matter what your situation, you can deal with it. You get down, but you can do it.”