THOMASVILLE – Every morning, Cpl. Larry Small, USMC, wakes up with the reminders of how drastically Vietnam changed his life.

The partial paralysis on his right side.

The slurred speech.

The intense, throbbing headaches, resulting from a bullet and shrapnel buried deep in his brain more than 40 years ago.

Some days he’s confused, even to the point that he doesn’t recognize his wife. He once believed she was a stranger intent on poisoning his food.

For decades, bitterness festered in Small’s soul and ate at his heart.

“I hated Vietnam,” the 62-year-old Thomasville man says in his slurred, halting voice. “I didn’t like the people. I didn’t like nothing. I had a lot of bitterness in my heart.”

And why shouldn’t he be bitter? Once a gifted athlete at East Davidson High School, where he was voted Most Athletic and Most Popular his senior year, Small had a world of potential ... until Vietnam changed his life.

Why shouldn’t he be bitter? He was only 21 years old on that day in September 1969, when a Viet Cong ambush nearly killed him. There were probably days he wishes he had died in that godforsaken jungle.

And yet today, some four decades later, the bitterness Small once felt is as far removed from his heart as he is removed from the country itself.

Ironically, one of the reasons for Small’s dramatic about-face is a pretty, diminutive South Vietnamese woman named ToKhanh (pronounced “toe-CAN”), who is more than 20 years his junior. ToKhanh sleeps on cushions on the floor, next to the hospital bed in Small’s bedroom, so she can care for his every need.

Her full name is ToKhanh Small – yes, she’s the old, wounded soldier’s wife – and she’s another one of those reminders he wakes up with every morning, reminding him how drastically Vietnam changed his life.

* * * *

The first time Vietnam changed Larry’s life was in 1969, when he was a young soldier assigned to the 3rd Battalion, 9th Marines, in the jungles of Vietnam.

On Sept. 25, 1969, Larry’s platoon walked into a Viet Cong ambush. Larry, walking point, took a bullet to the head from an AK-47 assault rifle. He lay paralyzed on the ground, unable to get up or yell for help.

“If I could’ve got up, I’d have got killed, because I was behind a big ol’ tree,” he recalls. “It kept me alive.”

Unfortunately, though, the bullet had blown the helmet off Small’s head, and small pieces of shrapnel lodged in his brain as he lay there. Bleeding and gasping, he drifted in and out of consciousness for a couple of hours before finally being carried from the battlefield and taken to a military hospital.

Doctors gave Larry little chance of surviving – much less actually walking and talking – but after about a year of intense therapy, he returned home to his native Thomasville, a hero with a Purple Heart.

And a bitter heart, too.

Partially paralyzed on his right side, Larry limped noticeably, slurred his words and battled terrifying nightmares and horrendous headaches. Doctors predicted he would live another 10 years at the most. His marriage failed, and Larry grew even more bitter – not only toward Vietnam, but toward God.

In 1972, when Larry hit rock-bottom, he looked up and saw God, and his cold, hardened heart began to thaw. He got involved in church, served as a deacon, taught Sunday school classes, spoke at church revivals and, eventually, began going on mission trips. He developed a passion for reaching the lost.

Larry’s heart was no longer bitter – it was better.

Or so he thought, until 1998, when he was invited on a mission trip to a land he’d been to decades earlier, only with a vastly different mission – Vietnam.

* * * *

“I didn’t know how bitter I still was until they asked me to go on that mission trip to Vietnam,” Larry says.

“I thought I had buried it, and I thought there was no way I had any bitterness in my heart, but my heart was full of bitterness. All of those feelings came back, and I did not want to go back to Vietnam.”

But he believed God wanted him to, so he eventually caved in and agreed to go.

“I did a lot of praying and asked the Lord to clear my heart, because I could not be a witness to help the people with all that bitterness,” Larry recalls.

As he arrived in Vietnam, Larry’s mind flashed back to his horrible memories from three decades earlier – including the fateful day he nearly died on the battlefield – and he broke out in a sweat. Why had he agreed to do this?

Amazingly, though, as Larry poured his heart into his reason for being there – to minister to the Vietnamese people – he felt his heart soften. He watched in awe as he saw one person after another accept the message of the Gospel.

Meanwhile, it was clear that Larry’s Vietnamese interpreter – a young woman named ToKhanh – did not like him. She had seen the Vietnamese government make her father do hard labor simply because he spoke English – fearing he might be a threat to the government – so she resented all Americans, because it was their language that got her father in trouble. Moreover, something about Larry’s personality rubbed her the wrong way.

“I have to say I hate him,” ToKhanh says now in her broken English. “He was American, and he so very serious in his work. I just don’t like him because he too hard all the time.”

Slowly, ToKhanh’s impression of Larry began to change as she watched him minister to her people. She saw him lead people to Christ. She saw him pray for the diseased and injured, some of whom she says were miraculously healed. Then she saw him lead her to Christ, and her family.

“Larry have compassion and he very emotional – he cry a lot,” she says.

“They say he cry because he Vietnam veteran, and he think they hurt our country. He hope he can pay us back because he think he hurt us. So I see Larry so good to the people. He down on his knees and he hold people’s hands and pray for them. All of a sudden it touch me, and next thing you know we engaged. I just surprised.”

She’s not the only one. Larry couldn’t believe he was falling in love with a Vietnamese woman. Only weeks earlier, he had hated the Vietnamese people, and now he was about to marry one.

“It’s a miracle,” Larry says, shaking his head in wonder. “You know how the Lord parted the Red Sea? It’s almost that big a miracle for me, because I was through with Vietnam. And now I’ve found my mate there. That’s a miracle.”

* * * *

Larry and ToKhanh live in a modest home in Thomasville, with a long wheelchair ramp in the yard, a handicap-accessible van in the driveway, and two flags – an American flag and a U.S. Marine Corps flag – flying from the front porch.

Ten years after they married, the Smalls well understand what it means to wed someone “for better or for worse.”

Larry’s health has deteriorated significantly, especially in the past few years. He’s no longer able to walk, and he still suffers maddening bouts of confusion from time to time. Twice since 2006, he’s been on life support in the hospital, battling pneumonia and related complications.

Through it all, ToKhanh has stood by her husband’s side, caring for his every need. When doctors recommended she put Larry in a nursing home, she adamantly refused, instead choosing to care for him herself. When he needs to move from the couch to his electric scooter, she helps him. She also helps him use the bathroom. She feeds and bathes him, and dresses him.

ToKhanh pampers her husband, too. She bought him a flat-screen TV, against his humble wishes. When he wanted to hear “The Marines’ Hymn,” she taught herself to play it on the guitar.

“She is so good to me,” Larry says softly. “I don’t know why she takes care of me the way she does.”

ToKhanh smiles and takes Larry’s hand, rubbing it gently with her thumb.

“Well, baby, it’s because I love you,” she says proudly. “He not just my husband – he my hero. I do this to see the smile on his face – that make me happy. It my goal to make him happy every day.”

Larry wipes a tear from his eye and says, “She don’t take good care of me – it’s excellent care. I’m a very lucky man.”

Yes, he calls himself lucky. This Vietnam veteran – who nearly died in the jungles of Vietnam, who grew bitter toward that country and its people, who grew bitter toward his God, who ironically married a woman from the country he once hated so passionately – calls himself lucky.

You see? Vietnam really did change his life.