Johnny Brown The following is an article published in The St. Ignace News February 11, 1971, about John Brown of St. Ignace being wounded in Vietnam while serving in the Marine Corps. Mr. Brown, a 1969 graduate and star football player for LaSalle High School, still resides in St. Ignace.

On February 10, Mrs. Claude Brown opened a letter from her son, Johnny, anxious to hear how he was, and she read...

“Hi, Mom It happened to me and I am in 1st Med.”

Mrs. Brown had had no official word, and still hasn’t. Because of his concern for his mother, and knowing what she went through just a couple years ago when his older brother, Ken, was hit in Vietnam, Johnny wrote the scrawly letter while still dazed and half-sedated in a field hospital.

“Last night we got hit pretty hard with B40 rockets and a lot of AK 47. I was on watch and I saw two V.C.’s and I opened up on them. They threw a bomb. After we were hit, we started running and we made it to a school house. Leaving the school, we had to run in an open area. I had the radio on my back and the guy ahead of me dropped some flares. I stopped to pick them up and I got shot in the leg. The Doc said it wasn’t too bad and that I will be coming home in awhile, I hope.

“That’s all for now, so don’t worry, Mom, it’s not that bad.”

He signed his barely legible letter with love, and in the lower corner, he scribbled, “Say prayer for m---”

Mrs. Brown waited, counting the hours, until Saturday night, February 13, and she still hadn’t received any notice of her son’s condition. She contacted the Red Cross and found out that he had been evacuated to a hospital in Okinawa. She placed a call with the overseas operator and after checking about six locations, the operator found Johnny at a U.S. Army medical ward in San Francisco.

They offered to bring a phone to his bedside and within about 20 minutes from the time she placed the call, she heard his voice. It was 10:30 p.m. Saturday here and 12:30 p.m. Sunday over there. Johnny said he barely remembered writing the letter. He said he’d been hit in the hip, shattering the bone and the corpsman stayed with him for three hours before they were able to move him. He found out that he’d been hit with a SKS shell. He is in traction now and expects to be in the San Francisco medical ward for two or three weeks before being transferred to a hospital in the States for surgery, which will probably entail a steel plate in his hip. The doctors said he might be left with a stiff hip the rest of his life.

Mrs. Brown said he sounded good – like himself – and she is so grateful to the overseas operator, who was such a help, and the personnel in the hospital who made it possible for her to talk to Johnny. She feels better now, but of course, she still worries about possible nerve damage, and so many other things she doesn’t know about yet.

St. Ignace is a small town and Johnny Brown is well known. Let’s bombard that hospital in Okinawa with cards and well-wishes for Johnny so that he’ll know we care.