When Frank Willes agreed to be filmed for a television documentary last summer about his Korean War experiences, he had no idea it would reunite him with a man he says God used to save his life.
Drafted into the Army with the 108th Signal Repair Company, Willes, then a corporal, was helping construct a shower near Chunchon, Korea for fellow soldiers in October 1954, when he began to feel dizzy and developed a severe headache. By evening he had become delirious, and by the time he was delivered to a MASH unit his right side was paralyzed.
As his condition continued to deteriorate, he was flown to a bombed-out hotel in Seoul that served as a hospital, where a spinal tap confirmed he had contracted encephalitis. When he asked a doctor "just what that meant to me, he replied in a very diplomatic way, 'Oh, you'll probably die.'"
A member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Willes asked the hospital chaplain to locate two LDS elders, and soon two LDS chaplains came to visit. After learning that Willes had a wife and young son waiting for him at home in Idaho, the two chaplains laid their hands on his head and gave him a blessing, telling him "that I would live to return home and see my newly born son; that I would again see my lovely wife and other loved ones."
"They even said that I would completely recover and that I would have no lasting effects from the illness. Such a blessed relief!" he would write of the experience.
One of those chaplains was Richard Henstrom, who recorded the incident in his Army journal. "It was one of those times when you come away wondering about the promises that were made in the blessing," he wrote, noting that he had voiced the promises to a gravely ill man.
As the two chaplains were leaving, they told the attending physician they planned to return the next day upon the ill soldier's request, but the doctor told them he would likely die during the night. Some 50 afflicted Americans and hundreds of Koreans would die as the disease swept through the area.
Doctor amazed
Despite the doctor's dire prediction, Willes awoke the following morning "feeling much better … ," he recorded. The doctor "told me that he was amazed by the almost immediate improvement" but said it was "likely I would never regain complete us of my still-paralyzed right arm or that some other effect would make itself known. … He predicted permanent paralysis."
But within the week, "my whole right side was back to normal, and I was able to eat my meals in the hospital mess hall." Within two weeks, men from his outfit arrived to accompany him back to the unit. "The doctor kept repeating his amazement. He told me that it was a miracle that I had survived with only one scar — I had developed a severe stutter.
"It was no more than a week or two until I had completely stopped stuttering, and as the Lord, through his servants in uniform had promised, I had completely recovered."
Meanwhile, Henstrom and his fellow chaplain returned at their earliest chance to the hospital in Seoul looking for Willes, only to find he had returned to active duty. "I felt this was amazing, considering his condition when we first made contact and I gave him the blessing."
Separate lives
Nearly 50 years passed. Each man returned home wondering about the other. They had failed to exchange names, and through the years, as the two shared the story with their children, they continued to think about the fate of the other.
Willes and his wife, Karen, settled in Provo and had seven children. He earned a master's degree in Russian and became a public school teacher at Farrer Junior High, then Provo and Orem high schools, before retiring several years ago from Mountain View High School. He served his church as a bishop and high councilor, and returned five years ago after he and his wife served an LDS mission in Siberia.
Henstrom returned to Utah upon his discharge and, with a master's degree in communications, went to work for KLUB radio, and then KSL radio and television, before accepting a job with Brigham Young University's Division of Continuing Education. There he met his wife, Martha, and they also had seven children. He served his church as a bishop and as a member of several churchwide committees, including adult correlation. He retired 10 years ago as associate dean of Continuing Education.
During the decades that separated them, neither knew he lived within just a few miles of the other.
When Robert Freeman, with the department of church history and doctrine at BYU, contacted them and hundreds of others about participating in an ongoing project called "Saints at War," documenting the history of LDS service personnel, each man submitted a written history of his war experience. What both believed to be the miracle that Willes had experienced was part of their accounts.
Last summer, after project personnel had read the independent stories and concluded they chronicled the same experience, they called Henstrom and asked him to participate in the filming of a documentary about LDS veterans who served in Korea and Vietnam. When they showed him Willes' account, Henstrom knew he had been the chaplain that gave the blessing.
He wanted to contact Willes, but he was asked to wait.
An emotional day
Meanwhile, Freeman's researchers called Karen Willes and told her what had happened, asking if she could keep a secret. She agreed, then accompanied her husband to the Modern Image Film studio that day last summer. Henstrom was waiting in the wings.
After asking Willes about his background and his early military service, the interviewer listened as he recounted becoming ill and asking for the elders. When he had finished the account, he was asked if he knew the two men who had blessed him that night in 1954. When he said no, the interviewer asked if he would like to meet them.
Surprised at the question, he responded, "Of course!"
When Henstrom stepped onto the set, the cameras kept rolling as he told Willes he was one of the chaplains. Henstrom had had time to brace himself for the flood of emotion, but Willes broke into tears.
By the time it was over, there wasn't a dry eye left in the studio.
Recalling the emotion of that day, it is tears that come all over again instead of words, even as Willes and his wife smile out from a recent family portrait, surrounded by their seven children.
For Frank Willes and Richard Henstrom, there are no adequate words for what they consider a miracle.
E-mail: carrie@desnews.com