One-Armed Mission

The army truck lurched on the rutted Chinese road, the tailgate of the truck ahead rushed up suddenly, the driver jumped, and there was a crash. When Reuben Torrey saw his mangled right arm he thought he might as well cut it off with a penknife right there. But they drove him eight miles to an aid station, then flew him 400 miles to a hospital. Then the doctors amputated. There was plenty of readjusting for Reuben Torrey to do after that, but it was during that first eight-mile ride that he came to grips with his new situation. "I knew I'd face life maimed," he remembers, "but I knew the Lord still had work for me to do." It turned out that the Lord had a special task for a one-armed missionary.

"R.A.E." Man. The East is merciless to cripples. Their families hide them as a horror and disgrace, or turn them out to beg; they hop about on sticks, or crawl on all fours like maimed animals. Some 20,000 of these armless or legless were left in the wake of the Korean war. Three years ago a group of U.S. Christian missionaries set out to help them, and Amputee Torrey found the work for which his whole life seemed a proving ground.

Reuben Archer Torrey Jr. was born 67 years ago, son of a preacher who was head of the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. After graduating from Princeton Theological Seminary, young Presbyterian Torrey asked to be sent out to Korea, but the Korea quota was full and he drew China instead. With his bride of four months, he arrived there in 1913, for the next 28 years worked out of the Presbyterian mission in Tsinan. Shantung Province. After World War II he served as a civilian liaison man between the U.S. forces and Chiang Kai-shek's army. It was on this tour of duty that he lost his arm.

By the time Missionary Torrey got to Korea three years ago he knew all the problems of an "R.A.E." (right, above elbow) case. He had studied the latest techniques at New York City's Institute for the Crippled and Disabled, and he arrived in Korea with three spare arms for himself, plus 60 second-hand legs and the makings--joints, screws, webbing, leather strapping, billets of English willow --for 80 more. He was also ready to set up a limb-manufacturing plant in Korea.

"We're trying to keep it all on a simple, practical level," Missionary Torrey explains. "We could speed limb-making with power machinery, but we don't. There's always the electric-power problem here, and this foreign interest in Korea isn't going to last forever. When supplies from abroad are cut off. then what? Everything we're using now we get locally."

Abundantly Satisfied. The Rev. Reuben Torrey now lives in Taejon near a model farm operated by the Methodists, Presbyterians, United Church of Canada, and Salvation Army, which devotes part of its area to showing amputees how they can lead active, useful lives. In South Korea there are now four prosthetic stations; Torrey and his fellow missionaries have fitted more than 800 artificial limbs and treated nearly 1,000 amputees. There is little likelihood that the work will diminish: land mines, unexploded shells, unguarded railway crossings, and the dearth of safety devices on machinery will bring thousands more to the clinic.

Inside the Taejon clinic one morning last week the homemade kerosene stove was a center of warmth and hope for a little huddJe of maimed men. One sat with his stump tucked under him, an armless boy held his Bible in two hooks. Torrey slipped an elastic from around his Bible, parked it on his arm-hook, and then began reading the 36th Psalm:

How excellent is thy loving kindness, 0 God! Therefore the children of men put thei trust under the shadow of thy wings. They shall be abundantly satisfied . . .

When it was over, a legless man nodded in Reuben Torrey's direction and whispered to a visitor from the U.S.: "We Koreans feel he's a man sent here by God."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.