Former VA administrator lost three limbs in Vietnam blast
ATLANTA — Former U.S. senator and Veterans Administration leader Max Cleland died Tuesday more than 53 years after a live grenade dropped by a fellow soldier in Vietnam robbed him of three limbs.
The injuries, however, did not take the unfettered optimism and grit that helped him climb from Georgia politics to some of the nation’s top offices.
A Democrat bound to a wheelchair most of his adult life, the 79-year-old Cleland was one of the first veterans from the killing grounds of Southeast Asia to enter American politics. He took a state senator’s seat in 1971, three years after his wounding, and went on to serve as top administrator in the U.S. Veterans Administration, as Georgia Secretary of State, a U.S. senator and an appointee in other federal agencies.
Cleland died at his Atlanta home from heart failure, according to a close friend and caregiver.
President Joe Biden saluted his Senate colleague Tuesday as someone with “unflinching patriotism, boundless courage, and rare character.”
“His leadership was the essential driving force behind the creation of the modern VA health system,” Biden said in a statement.
President Bill Clinton praised Cleland as an extraordinary public servant, saying “I will be forever inspired by the strength he showed in supporting normalization with Vietnam.”
Cleland’s public career was forever identified with the conflict that, along with the fight for civil rights, defined the 1960s. In “The Vietnam War,” the 2017 documentary directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, the voice first heard is his.
“To live is to suffer. To survive is to find meaning in the suffering,” Cleland told the camera, quoting philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. He told friends he could not bring himself to watch the entire 18-hour series — the memory was still too raw.
Cleland found his meaning in the public service he threw himself into as enthusiastically as he had volunteered for combat duty.
Even when voters turned him out of office in 2002 after a nasty, hyper-polarized campaign that caught national attention for the way his opponent assailed his patriotism, he fought through the tailspin of depression and returned, finally, back to his crowd. His final job was heading the American Battlefield Monuments Commission
— overseeing U.S. military monuments and cemeteries in foreign lands.
A gregarious extrovert, he surrounded himself with a sprawling network of friends and acquaintances. Visitors to his senate office often remarked on the Mickey Mouse watch he wore — a reminder, he told them, “not to take life too seriously.”
Cleland never married. In retirement, he indulged his fascination with early TV westerns, never shy about his admiration for Clayton Moore of “The Lone Ranger.”
Throughout his public life, Cleland never called himself a hero, in part because, for decades, he thought his wounds might have been of his own making.
On April 8, 1968, during the battle of Khe Sahn, as he exited a helicopter, he saw a live grenade that had been dropped on the ground. He bent to pick it up with his right hand, intending to toss it quickly away, and was shattered by its blast.
For more than 30 years, Cleland thought the grenade had fallen off his belt.
But in 1999, he was told the grenade had dropped from the belt of an unnamed private exiting the chopper with him.