Blood Brothers

By TAD BARTIMUS

Those who go to war cling to a hope that some day they'll return to their old world and it will be the same. But it never is, because they have changed. Veterans re-enter society and take up all its threads -- job, family, education, civic contribution -- but deep inside them something stays separate and apart, shared only with their comrades-in-arms. One survivor meets another and each knows, without saying it, that "you are one of us."

So it was with the photographer and the medic. Joe Zeoli was a 21-year-old draftee trying to survive his third month in Vietnam when his life intersected with news photographer Horst Faas in 1967 during a rocket attack. With blood pumping out of a gaping shrapnel wound in his left leg, Faas was dying as Zeoli tried to get more blood into him.

It was a sunny day, quiet and pleasant, no smoke, no fire, no blood. They were two strangers, prosperous and ordinary-looking, picking each other out of a crowd. But because they'd shared an intimate struggle against death -- because one had saved the other -- they embraced.

"I was having a tough time, it was taking too long, I couldn't find a vein," the medic remembers. "I just jabbed the needle and got lucky." Belly-down in the dirt, still under enemy fire, Zeoli worked on the photographer fewer than five minutes -- the most crucial ones of the German's 34 years.

As Faas was loaded onto a stretcher for a helicopter flight to a Saigon hospital the odds were against him. Zeoli later came across a Stars & Stripes newspaper story that included a photo, taken by another correspondent, of him ministering to Faas. He kept the clipping.

"Seven days later, after they'd saved my leg and let me out of the intensive care unit, I asked about the medic," Faas remembers. "Somebody told me he was dead."

Two months later Zeoli almost was when North Vietnamese troops ambushed the 60 men in his company near the Cambodian border. Five Americans escaped, including the medic, who was shot twice.

Faas and Zeoli survived the war to lead very different lives. The photographer, who was awarded his first Pulitzer Prize in 1965 for his Vietnam work, won a second in 1972 for documenting a bayoneting in Bangladesh. He moved to London and continued to cover wars. The medic was discharged from the Army in 1968 and went home to Geneva, N. Y., earned a master's degree in public administration while working for the state Department of Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities, married, had two daughters and a son and took up golf.

In 1997, Zeoli came across a newspaper story about the Vietnam photo exhibition "REQUIEM" at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. There was an internet web site, so he logged on -- and the first name he saw was Horst Faas, organizer of the exhibition and co-author of a book by the same name which memorializes photographers killed in Indochina. The medic sent an e-mail; the photographer answered.

Their reunion finally took place a month ago, in the parking lot of a chain restaurant in Rochester, N.Y. It was a sunny day, quiet and pleasant, no smoke, no fire, no blood. They were two strangers, prosperous and ordinary-looking, picking each other out of a crowd. But because they'd shared an intimate struggle against death -- because one had saved the other -- they embraced.

'Doc' Joe Zeoli: "Our bond came so hard, so fast -- none of my friends I grew up with here -- well --some of them got medicals, others were deferred because they went to college -- they tell me they feel like they missed something. I say, 'You did, but you're better off for it.' But I'm a better person because of Vietnam. I cherish the friends I made, the friends I lost -- I'm more appreciative of life. There must have been a purpose for me to survive. I try to give back... ."

Horst Faas: "I knew him right away. How? I don't know. I just did. I remembered his young face so clearly, trying and trying to find a vein, me thinking 'Hurry up!' and wondering if ... Then there we were, half a lifetime later, eating a fine lunch together as old men telling stories."

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