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thedrifter
11-12-06, 08:41 AM
Marine paralyzed in Vietnam made the best out of life

By Ryan Mills

Sunday, November 12, 2006

The sky was a bright electric blue as 157 U.S. Marines exited their helicopters and descended on a South Vietnamese village complex called Phong Dinh as part of Operation Texas.

The date was March 21, 1966, and for 19-year-old Randy Kington, a radio operator from Tennessee serving with the Second Battalion, Fourth Marines, it was a day that would completely alter the direction of his life.

From the air the village appeared as a green oasis of thatched huts and rice paddies, but when the Marines entered the village they were ambushed by 1,500 of the Viet Cong's finest soldiers. Kington took a position with his lieutenant, Gary Brown, on top of an old dike.

"Two enemy soldiers about 150 feet in front of us raised out of their fighting hole and began firing at us," Kington recalled.

Brown was hit in the arm. Kington, in the neck.

"It was like a mule kicking," Kington said of being shot. "It lifted me up in the air and the next thing, I'm rolling, rolling over the battlefield. ... The first thought I had was, I'm going to die."

When Kington regained consciousness, he found himself in an upside-down fetal position, paralyzed from the neck down. His ammo belt squeezed into his stomach, making it almost impossible to breathe, he said.

Just as a Viet Cong soldier prepared to fire on Kington again, Brown grabbed Kington's rifle and shot the soldier.

"Gary Brown was probably the bravest, most courageous man I have ever met," Kington said.

Kington returned to the United States and recovered in a Memphis, Tenn., veteran's hospital, where he met a volunteer named Patty. He and Patty married seven months later. Eventually Kington regained the use of his arms, but he remains paralyzed from the chest down.

While in the hospital, Kington, who had dropped out of high school when he was 17 to join the Marines, earned his high school diploma. He and Patty then went on to college together in Tennessee and, eventually, graduate school at the University of Alabama, where he earned a master's degree in accounting.

Kington went on to be a tax partner in a large CPA firm, a college accounting professor and the owner of his own CPA firm. For the past nine years he and his wife have been part-time residents of East Naples.

Even though he was always proud of his service in Vietnam, for 36 years Kington wiped Operation Texas from his memory.

"I forgot about the battle," Kington said. "I didn't think about the battle, I didn't want to talk about what had happened."

That changed, however, on April 6, 2002, when a local Marine reintroduced Kington to his old friend, Brown, who was by then a general. Kington and Brown, also a Florida resident, talked about old times, including the battle where Kington was wounded.

"That changed my life," Kington said. "I unlocked all these memories and anyone who would listen to me, I would talk about it."

Kington started writing his war stories down, and eventually those stories became a book, "What a Life: How the Vietnam War Affected One Marine," which was published in 2003 and has sold more than 10,000 copies. Kington's book is available at www.randykington.com.

Even though he has had to spend more than 40 years in a wheelchair, Kington, now 59, said joining the Marines and serving his country was still one of the best decisions he's ever made.

"For me to serve my country for two years, it was the highlight of my life," Kington said. "I know who I am by what those two years did to me. I would have never met Patty and I would have turned out different."

Ellie