By:Paul J. Condra
Bob Fountain rolled up his pants leg and showed off the quarter- inch divot in his lower right leg.
The 59-year-old Vietnam veteran, who now lives in Baldwin and commands Malverne's American Legion Post 44, said he was flying a Huey chopper on a rescue mission when a bullet entered the helicopter, passed under his left leg, through a bag full of maps and planted itself in his shin.
"You heard 'ping-ping-ping' all over the place," Fountain said.
But it wasn't painful, he said, shrugging. Fountain didn't even realize he had been shot until he felt his toes squishing around in his blood-filled boots. It wasn't until later that day, when the rescue missions were over, that his co-pilot wrenched out the AK-47 slug with tweezers.
"If you would have gone to a surgeon, you would have been grounded," he said. He is proud to say that he saved more people than he killed.
Indeed, Fountain is still at it, forging his own anti-establishment path in an effort to bring home the soldiers of overseas' wars: "getting our guys back," as he puts it.
Six years ago, Fountain was essential in bringing home the remains of a Merrick man, Sgt. Frederick Burns. Burns was imprisoned in a North Vietnamese camp in 1967 after he was separated from his platoon. He was 19 years old at the time, and the discovery of his body allowed the parents to have a funeral for their only son, and put his memory to rest nearly 30 years later.
It was that feat that led family members of other missing soldiers to contact Fountain.
Right now he's working on bringing home Private Alfred Perry. Perry's brother called Fountain and asked him to help. Fountain said he has been investigating Perry's whereabouts for about four years, and has discovered that Perry died in 1950 along with about 1,000 other U.S. soldiers in the Korean battle at the Chosin Reservoir.
As he showed off the inches of files he has amassed with documents, letters, topographical maps and other articles, Fountain explained that his dealings with the government can be the most frustrating part of his investigations.
"The MIA office and the forensics people, they are 100 percent doing their jobs," he said, "It's the bureaucrats and the mucky-mucks [who aren't]."
Fountain spoke disgustedly of tapped phone calls, intolerable politicians and incompetent investigations.
If the government agencies concentrated on one guy at a time they'd have more luck, said Fountain, pointing out the misinformation spread about Perry.
"I found out he didn't die where the government said he died," he said.
The task is tedious and consists of lengthy efforts to contact dozens of people who may, or may not, know something. For example, Fountain has only one photo of Perry with some of the men who may have been with him when he was lost. He said he'll have to start sending the photo out to Korean veteran groups and hope somebody will be able to identify the other men.
But if it seems daunting, for Fountain, it's a labor of love.
"You get hooked on this stuff, believe me," he said.
Wartime legacy
Born in Queens, Robert Fountain started flying helicopters in 1960, when he quit school in California to enroll in the Navy's STAR program which, if he had decided to return to college, would have paid his tuition.
He said he was eager to have the paying job, as he was already working two jobs: "I said where do I sign?"
His first training mission was to fly F-8U crusader jets, but he said he could never really perfect carrier-landings.
"I bounced it in a couple times, but they didn't like the way I did it," he said. "A carrier looks about like a postage stamp [in the water]."
As a helicopter pilot, he was sent to Guantanamo Bay in the early 60s during the Bay of Pigs crisis. During the cat-and-mouse standoff his carrier would chase Russian vessels back across the ocean.
In Cuba, he remembers how Fidel Castro, who had just come to power, used to try to antagonize U.S. forces. Once, he said, Castro pulled several tanks up to the base, announcing he was going to eat lunch in the U.S. officer's cafeteria. But during the night, U.S. commanders pulled up twice as many tanks, humbling the Cubans, who retreated.
Then, after the Vietnam war had started, Fountain 's sergeant altered his destiny.
"He said, 'You know, you're a wise-ass, I'm gonna straighten you out. You're going to Vietnam.'," Fountain recalled. "I said, 'big deal.'"
Fountain landed in Vietnam in 1965 and ended up extending his tour by six months, because, as he said, "they needed helicopter pilots."
He was a Medivac pilot, which meant he flew into occupied territory to evacuate wounded men to hospital ships near by. His helicopter was shot down once, forcing him to ditch it in a rice paddy.
Indeed, he said, in the air "everybody was gunning for you." Mabye that's why, when asked what he remembers about the war, he told a morbidly funny story about how he and the other soldiers would entertain themselves.
Once, Fountain had just picked up a wounded man and taken him to the hospital ship. The man appeared to have a bone sticking out of his leg. At the hospital, the doctor called Fountain into the operating room to show him a new medical technique. The doctor grabbed the bone, and ripped it out of the man's leg.
While Fountain stood stunned, the doctors and nurses, as well the wounded man, started laughing, then they explained the bone didn't actually belong to the patient. It was the bone of another soldier who had been killed by a grenade explosion. Apparently, the bone had stuck to the wounded man.
After his tour, Fountain returned to New York to be with his wife, whom he had married a day before he left for Cuba, and raise a family. He opened a restaurant in Brooklyn called, of all things, The Fountain, that his brother now runs. His son is 37, and his two daughters are 35 and 22, the youngest having just graduated from the Universty of Washington in Seattle.
As Fountain sat in the cozy sideroom of his house drinking cans of Coke and smoking Chesterfields, CNN reported the latest updates on the anthrax saga.
Fountain recalled the giant gun-vaccination shots he had to get before going to Southeast Asia.
"I couldn't lift my arm for days after that thing," he said.
