Hot Damn! And Then There Are Vets! Uh, Make That Military

[Annie]

http://rockymountainnews.com/drmn/local/article/0,1299,DRMN_15_4230594,00.html

At 71, he's still standing tall for Army
Surgeon keeps on answering the call of replacement-strapped U.S. military
Click here to view a larger image. Chris Schneider © News

Dr. Everett Spees muses about his next assignment with the Army in the backyard of his Boulder home. Spees, 71, a retired colonel, came back to buttress the Army medical corps during both the first Gulf War and the Iraq war. He's told the Army he's ready to do it again.

By Ann Imse, Rocky Mountain News
November 11, 2005
Old soldiers no longer fade away. One got called back to active duty at the age of 71.

Dr. Everett Spees, a cardiothoracic surgeon at several local hospitals who helped to develop the field of organ transplants, was a bit startled to find the Army calling, asking if he'd volunteer.

A retired colonel, he'd offered his services on the day after Sept. 11, 2001, but no one called back for more than two years - after the military was thoroughly embroiled in Iraq and needing more soldiers.

"I said, 'You know, I'm 71 years old?' "

The Reserve officer replied, "Are you physically fit? Are you still practicing?"

Spees said yes. And soon he was back in uniform - 27 years after he first retired. He served a year in a military hospital in Texas, from July 2004 to July 2005, just days before turning 72.

"Since I retired again, they've called me twice to see if I could come back again," Spees said. "I said yes." But the Army hasn't yet offered a specific new assignment.

With a shortfall of 24,000 troops in the Army Reserve and Army National Guard, the military is trying new ways to fill the gap.

Spees said he was told the Army Reserve called all 5,000 retirees from the Army medical corps, and he was the 101st to agree to return.

He is the oldest soldier he's met, though there are reports of a 72-year-old surgeon serving back East. Army officials didn't respond Thursday when asked the age of the oldest person recalled to duty so far.

"You know, I'm regular Army - you're supposed to be available all your life" for a call-up, Spees said.

"I didn't want to be looking on, having nothing to do with it."

Spees was born into a military family and moved to Denver in 1938 at the age of 5 when his father became the 13th person assigned to the then-new Lowry Air Force Base.

The family transferred to Germany in 1946 and ended up next to a military hospital. "So, from an early age, I was aware of war injuries," he said.

After two years of college at the University of Tennessee, he went through an accelerated program developed in World War II to train doctors in just three years of medical school.

He joined the Army and served for 21 years, moving from repairing chest wounds in Vietnam to coronary bypass and lung surgery. He eventually moved into the new field of organ transplants, earning a doctorate in immunology and then becoming chief of the Army transplant program.

After retiring from the military in 1977, he went to Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, and then to Denver as a transplant surgeon at Presbyterian-St. Luke's and University Hospital. Along the way, he was a pioneer in developing new transplant programs and a founder of the organization that facilitates organ donation in Colorado and Wyoming.

His first abrupt return to the Army came in 1991 with the first Gulf War. A surgeon at Fitzsimons Army Medical Center had been deployed overseas, and the base needed a replacement fast. The Reserve office called and asked, "Would tomorrow be too soon?"

That time, he could serve his military duty at Fitzsimons and then drive across Denver to perform his civilian medical duties.

By the second call in 2003, though, Spees was semiretired. So, he brushed up on surgical techniques at Denver Health for five months.

"He spent many nights on call with us," said Dr. Ernest Moore, chief of surgery at Denver Health, who marvels that such an experienced surgeon would be modest enough to seek new training. "He was a sponge" in absorbing new information, and with his extensive surgical background, "he taught us a lot," Moore said.

When Spees re-entered the Army this time, he was assigned to Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio. It is fast becoming the Army's premier hospital because the famed Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington, D.C., is being phased out because of its age. The assignment to Brooke freed up a younger, regular Army physician to go to Iraq.

"There are people who need me, and there's no way I can legitimately turn that down," he said.

He operated on just one soldier who'd been injured in Iraq but consulted on the 40-bed burn unit, which was full of soldiers with burns, lost limbs and head injuries caused by roadside bombs.

The wounds in this war are worse than he'd seen previously. But the treatment is far better, and 70 percent of the Iraq war wounded return to active duty, he said.

Spees found his knowledge useful on a case of drug-resistant tuberculosis, teaching younger doctors how TB was treated before the days of antibiotics.

That means cutting out ribs to collapse the lung capacity to help it heal, Spees said. Later, the nubs of the ribs grow back.

His wife, Ann Boyer, had to stay home in Denver to care for her ailing mother. Their six children are grown.

Spees enjoyed being back in camouflage, boots and beret, where the uniform told everyone immediately who he was and what he did.

And he found his years of experience as a civilian surgeon and more recent training as a hospital chaplain brought a different dimension to the military hospital.

Few realized his age, and he didn't tell them. "Because I was in, obviously I must not be 71," he said.

But working 10- to 12-hour days as a surgeon with very ill patients would be too hard to do again at his age for that long. "I said I'd come back, for three months, not a year."

"My sister asked, 'When you're 80, are they going to call you back?' "

"I said, 'We'll see.' "