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"Camel Red rekindled the impact of the day at Valley Forge Army Hospital when I recognized
a man I had known since high school days as a respected competitor on the playing field."
"It captures the essence of what this most courageous patient experienced, his pain, suffering, and
resiliency. It shows how against all odds this battlefield hero managed not only to survive, but to go
on to lead an exemplary life."
--Dr. Joseph E. Murray
1990 Recipient of the Nobel Prize in Medicine
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Lawrence J. Heron received dozens of scholarship offers from the nation's top colleges, including Notre Dame. His high school football team demolished opposing teams, including West Springfield, which was quarterbacked by the famous "Springfield Rifle," Angelo Bertelini. Angelo would go on to play six games for Notre Dame and win the Heisman Trophy before leaving to join the Marines.
Heron set records playing baseball for the American Legion and for a semi-professional team where he attracted offers from the Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees. But first there was a war to be won.
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In 1942, instead of the Fighting Irish, Heron joined a chemical weapons battalion, the Fighting 87th created to retaliate if the Germans launched a first poison gas strike. CAMEL RED reveals little known secrets regarding mustard and phosgene gas shells the 87th carried, and traces the fate of comrades as they fight in France and Germany ending the war at an infamous German death camp.
On September 26, 1944, a week after he turned twenty-four, Heron was the sole volunteer for a "suicide mission" in Cherbourg, France. His actions that day saved an infantry battalion, but the price of success was his ticket to hell, and that's where he would languish for the next fifty years, in his own private hell.
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CAMEL RED is the story of survival. And one involving chance meetings on the battlefield with two men he had competed with on the friendly fields of strife before the war, one was a chaplain called from another unit to administer Heron the Last Rites, and the second was a doctor who would receive the Nobel Prize in Medicine for performing the first successful organ (kidney) transplant in 1990.
The highest honor bestowed was when the Disabled American Veterans launched the Lawrence J. Heron Post, the first time in history when a post was named for a living veteran, a tribute to a great American patriot never before matched, nor repeated since.
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"Larry Heron is remembered for his obvious and remarkable physical strength, and the way he accepted his blindness with exceptional serenity." These were the words of the late Dr. Bradford Cannon, Professor of Surgery Emeritus at Harvard Medical, president of the New England Society of Plastic Surgeons and the American Association of Plastic Surgeons, and the man responsible for the establishment of Mass General's first plastic surgery residency. He claimed that his most rewarding task was rebuilding the wounded at VFGH, where he worked until the war came to an end, and the flow of wounded ebbed.
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