70-Year-Old Vet Won’t Surrender To Leukemia
By Greg Johnson
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Del.icio.usMat-Su Valley Frontiersman
WASILLA, Alaska (AP) - Maurice Bailey lives each day like it could be his last - because it might be.
The 70-year-old career Army mechanic and pilot spends his days working tirelessly for Alaska’s veterans community and trying not to allow cancer to dominate his life.
Bailey, the founder of the nonprofit Veterans Aviation Outreach, has acute myeloid leukemia (AML).
Sixteen months ago, his doctors gave him 12 months to live.
“I said to myself, ‘Well, if that’s the hand I’m dealt, then so be it,’” Bailey said about first learning of his illness. “(Doctors) keep hammering on me about going on chemo (chemotherapy), but I say chemo will kill you. I started eating right and I’ll be around here for awhile.”
Bailey stopped taking the battery of medications prescribed for him and has monthly blood transfusions. But he knows AML, characterized by the fast growth of abnormal white blood cells in the bone marrow, is a killer.
“I feel great, but I’m not in denial,” he said. “I know I have leukemia. I know I’m going in once a month for blood transfusions.”
Just don’t suggest to Bailey he begin making preparations for his passing.
“I feel as though I’m probably on somebody else’s time, but that’s OK,” he said. “I’ll just borrow somebody else’s next. There is no quit. No way, no-how. I’m never going to prepare myself to die. Never. I’m going to die when I’m supposed to.”
BIG DREAMS
It’s that never-say-quit attitude that led Bailey to a career in the military. Born in 1939 in Memphis, Tenn., Bailey said he knew early on he wanted to fly. He enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1956 at age 17 after forging his father’s signature on the consent form.
“There was a Naval base near my house when I was a kid and B-17s would fly over the house,” he said. “I said, ‘You know what? I’m going to be flying one of those things someday.’ Black people there said they didn’t think that would ever happen. They said this guys is nuts. But at 7 years old I knew that this is the United States of America and you can do anything you want to do. That was my heart’s desire.”
It was his military service that brought Bailey to Alaska in 1968, and took him to see combat action in Vietnam.
A crew chief and gunner, Bailey was also in charge of keeping the aircraft sound mechanically.
“I had a gunner and I was a gunner, but I was also the mechanic,” he said. “Not only that, but sometimes when I was on the bigger helicopters we did retrievals of aircraft that had been shot down.”
Although he remembers many of his missions, Bailey’s closest call with death is one he doesn’t.
“What really scared me was this one time when I hadn’t gotten a lot of sleep and we went on a mission at night,” he said. “I had passed out. It was what they called an emergency mission, I was sleepy, plus I’d been at the beer garden. I was full of Pabst Blue Ribbon. In my little cubby hole in the helicopter, I passed out in the middle of a fire-fight. When I got back the next day, I looked and there were bullet holes all around where my head would’ve been.”
OUTREACH
Bailey retired after 20 years in the Army in 1976, which is when he said his life “really got busy.”
He continued to fly and be an aviation mechanic, and his work would often take him to bush areas of the state, where he would meet other veterans.
Along with friend and colleague Chuck Moore, “We were just going to villages and people would know we were veterans,” he said. “They’d ask things like, ‘I’ve got a funeral, but don’t have any money. Can you bring me in?’ Or, somebody would have a medical appointment and we’d bring them in. It got to the point people were calling us. We were doing it out of our own pockets and decided we can’t keep this up, so we decided to for a (nonprofit group).”
In 2005, Veterans Aviation Outreach was formed with the simple mission of helping any veteran who needs it. Sometimes that help is transportation to medical appointments, other times it’s building a wheelchair ramp or providing food for a village.
“One guy in Sutton is a Navy veteran,” Bailey said. “He had to go to dialysis three times a week, and the reason for that was his pipes had broke and (officials) said he didn’t have sanitary conditions for (doing home dialysis). So, we took two house cleaners over and got a plumber to volunteer to fix his pipes, and now he’s able to do his dialysis at home.”
In 2007, Bailey was presented with the Governor’s Veterans Advocacy Award, which he calls “the greatest day of my life.”
Bailey prefers to fly under the radar and is uncomfortable with publicity.
“That’s not what I’m motivated by,” he said. “I see too much of that. It’s something that’s hard to explain what motivates me. Helping people is just what seems natural for me to do.”
And he’s not shy when talking about his AML, although he said others are more focused on his deadly disease than he is.
“I get up in the morning and I ask God to let me get up and do what I need to do for that day,” he said. “I do that, then I don’t worry about it. I try to do the best that I can. It’s all good.”
Not surprisingly, Bailey’s heroes are patriots - Gen. Colin Powell, Gen. Douglas MacArthur and Winston Churchill. He especially likes Churchill because “he always said we’ll never, ever surrender.”
Bailey hopes others facing tough situations may find some inspiration from his story, but is quick to say nobody should feel sorry for him.
“Don’t take anything as a death sentence. Don’t do it,” he said. “I was in the Army for 20 years. There’s no such word in my vocabulary as ‘quit.’ No surrender here, and leave no veteran behind.”
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