Casualties: C.O.R's Score

Created a year ago amid a flurry of woeful statistics, the Committee of Responsibility (to save war-burned and war-injured Vietnamese children) seemed less a medical project than an exorcism of guilt. C.O.R.'s first pleas for help were highly seasoned with mentions of napalm and bombs and inflated casualty statistics. The fledgling organization soon found itself wrangling with experts such as Manhattan's Dr. Howard Rusk, who questioned not only the number of potential patients but also the wisdom of gathering them up in large numbers and sending them for treatment in the U.S.

C.O.R. is now showing that it can practice the responsibility it preaches. It has brought its first Vietnamese children to the U.S. with a minimum of antiwar propaganda and a maximum of care. The first seven children are quietly receiving treatment at San Francisco's Mount Zion and Boston's Beth Israel hospitals and Los Angeles' U.C.L.A. Medical Center. C.O.R. has cut through mountainous Vietnamese red tape, raised $250,000, set up temporary foster homes for recuperating children, and has promises of donated services from more than 700 doctors available across the U.S. The children selected could not have been treated in Viet Nam's inadequate hospitals, and they needed sophisticated U.S. surgical techniques.*

What They Can Do. Nothing can save Nguyen Phat Luom's right eye, destroyed by a grenade, but Boston doctors are building him a prosthetic hand, powered by muscles in his upper arm. Tran Van Lam, 13, will get artificial legs. Nguyen Thi Thuy, 7, has her left arm temporarily attached to her face so that its skin may provide her with new lips to replace those blown away. Nguyen Van Ba, 14, no longer has testes, but a bomb-blasted urethra has been repaired.

Of the seven young patients, there is no better example of what C.O.R. can do than Tran Huu Nhon. When the car in which he was riding triggered a mine, Nhon, 14, was maimed by metal shards and searing gasoline. It took two days to reach Nhi Dong Children's Hospital in Saigon, and infection had spread across the burned one-third of his body. Skin grafts failed and Nhon's right hand was amputated, a typical last resort in Viet Nam. The raw burns on his head, arms and legs wept precious protein fluids he could not spare, a virus infection boiled up in one knee, and malnutrition took its toll for eight months as his condition worsened.

At Mount Zion Hospital, he is still a human disaster, his knee the size of a grapefruit in his frail, pipestem leg. He weighs only 48 Ibs., but has gained 10% more body weight in eight weeks at Mount Zion. His malnutrition is halted, the infection in his burns gone. Carefully engineered blood transfusions preceded a new round of skin grafts, this time successful. The virus-plagued knee cartilage is destroyed, but the joint will be fused; some day, Tran Huu Nhon will walk again in Viet Nam.