Nation: A Walk in Ward 34

"Don't move, fellows," implored the President. "Please don't." Many wounded servicemen struggled nonetheless to sit upright as Johnson walked through the door of Walter Reed Hospital's Ward 34. "I just want to tell you how much your country thinks of you," he called out. "How proud your country is of you. How grateful your country is to you."

A personal visit to the wounded veterans of Viet Nam—many of them amputees—was the President's only means of showing his own gratitude, and he was visibly moved by the experience. Walking through Ward 34 and the officers' Ward 1, shaking hands with each man, his voice sank to a strained, barely audible whisper as he murmured over and over: "Your country is grateful to you."

And time after time, they in turn told their Commander in Chief that they were ready to return to Viet Nam—though most all too clearly were not. "I'm in good shape," insisted Major Boyd Parsons, 43, an adviser attached to a Vietnamese infantry regiment, who had lost one eye and part of the other, as the President pinned a Purple Heart on the left collar of his pajamas. "There's no problem at all. I'm ready to go back." The 1st Infantry Division's Pfc. Antonio Dell' Osso, 23, who had been torn apart by a land mine, was just as positive. "Sir," he said with tears in his eyes, "I'd do it again."

For Chief Nurse Colonel Katherine Jump, the President had one command: "Take good care of my boys." She promised she would. With Lieut. General Leonard Heaton, Army Surgeon General, he was more specific. "General," he ordered, "give them the best."