Col. Shadrick our HMM-262 CO in Nam, an IWO JIMA, KOREA and VIETNAM veteran is fading: Just received the below email from Mary Shadrick.

This e-mail is to Jake and to all the men who ever served with Bill Shadrick in Viet Nam. I am sorry it is so long, but Bill is dying and I love him very much.

I need your help. Bill is in his (remarkably) sixth year of Alzheimer's disease. He was admitted to a nursing home very close to our home. THIS morning he was readmitted to the hospital. He has not opened his eyes for several days and has very little awareness of his surroundings. He has had a Living Will and an Advanced Medical Directive for a number of years. There is, of course, with Alzheimer's Disease, no hope of recovery.

He is resting comfortably, but is very ill with congestion in his lungs and a fever. He has oxygen and antibiotics and is not in need of much pain killer. Thank you, God. However, there will be no effort to keep him alive for a few more days with a respirator, and he would not want that.

This morning at about 10:30, our Episcopal priest from the church where we were married twenty-five years ago (minus nine days) gave him the short, sweet, rite, "Prayers For the Dying," from the Episcopal prayer book, and extreme unction, with his finger dipped in oil making the sign of the cross on Bill's forehead.

Bill cannot live long, and I have been searching the internet for appropriate photographs from Iwo Jima, Corsairs off of carriers in the Korean War
(conflict?!), and from his helicopter squadron 262 in Viet Nam.

When your helicopter squadron had, a few years ago, what I think must have been, for many of you, a quite memorable reunion in Washington D.C., with copters flaring over the mall and about 20,000 Boy Scouts there that Saturday morning, I know it was, in part, a tribute to Col. Ural Wescott "Bill" Shadrick, and it has been a joy to me to know that that squadron has been reinstituted in Iraq.

If anyone has read this far, here is my request: Please send me your memories

Mrs. Ural Wescott "Bill" Shadrick (Mary)
6546 Mapledale Court
Falls Church, VA 22041

703-354-8003

mshadrick5@msn.com