Bruce Wiener, Who Received a Purple Heart in Vietnam, Is in Need of a Heart Transplant to Save His Life

Attached to Bruce Wiener’s belt is an ordinary beeper waiting to receive an extraordinary message.

Wherever Wiener goes--a park, a restaurant, a football game, the bathroom--he carries his beeper.

If it goes off, he’ll have two hours to make it to UCLA Medical Center for a heart transplant.

“I’m No. 2 on the list for my blood type, but if there’s somebody worse than me tomorrow, I become No. 3,” he said. “The doctor said it might take four to five months, but he doesn’t know. It’s just something you have to live with.”

Since November, Wiener has been waiting for someone to die so he can live.

“I try to stay as positive as I can,” he said. “There are moments I really feel sorry for myself.”

There are moments he cherishes, like every second he spends coaching at Taft High, where he works with shotputters and kickers.

“When I’m on the field coaching kids, I give them every piece of information I possibly can,” he said. “It’s the greatest therapy.”

Last fall, football Coach Troy Starr invited Wiener to speak to four of his life skills classes. The subject wasn’t sports or Wiener’s health. It was the Vietnam War.

Wiener, 54, was a decorated soldier. He was awarded a Purple Heart and won a Silver Star for retrieving seven wounded soldiers during a firefight.

“They were calling my name, so I helped them,” he said. “I was shaking and scared to death.”

He provided Taft’s students with insights and observations not found in a history book or seen on a projector screen. He made them think, listen and wonder.

“I never knew he was in a war,” shotputter Octavio Flores said. “I just thought he was a coach. You think about how these young kids could go through that kind of warfare.”

Said All-City receiver Steve Smith: “It seems like he’s been through so much but he’s so strong. Looking at him now, I don’t think I could have put myself in his situation.”

Wiener was attending Antelope Valley College when he lost his student deferment by failing to score high enough on a test. His Army draft notice arrived on June 6, 1967. He reported for basic training six days later. He was 20.

The next time he celebrated his birthday, he was landing in rice paddies and being shot at by machine guns.

He never wanted to be in Vietnam.

“I didn’t volunteer for anything,” he said.

He would rather have been attending UC Davis and preparing to become a veterinarian.

Instead, from March 21, 1968 to March 21, 1969, he was a soldier in Vietnam. It was no video game, where you can start over and bring people back to life with the click of a button.

“When you’re there, mentally you’re not going to come back,” he said. “So you do things that, if you had the opportunity to think about, you’d never do. I don’t think there was a day that went by that you didn’t want to cry, but you knew everyone next to you was the same way.”

The Tet Offensive by the Viet Cong had begun almost two months earlier. No longer was the war considered a police action. Americans were being killed in increasing numbers.

“In my first operation, they landed us in the wrong place and we were ambushed,” he said. “I was the second guy off the ramp. I remember the guy getting killed in front of me. I fell down and had blood all over me. They thought I was wounded, so they started ripping my clothes open. In the next 24 hours, everybody got wounded, everybody got shot.”

Wiener was shot in the hand and buttocks.

He became an expert in demolition, working with plastic explosives and creating booby traps. He spent 25 hours flying in helicopters on missions.

Dealing with death became almost a daily routine.

There was the time a soldier was wounded in the head and pleaded with Wiener, “Please, don’t let me die. Please, don’t let me die.”

“I said, ‘OK, I won’t let you die,’ like I had the power to save his life,” he said. “Then I had to write a letter home to his parents.”

Nothing compared to the tragedy he experienced days before his departure.

During a search-and-destroy mission earlier in Wiener’s tour, an 8-year-old girl walked out of a decimated village.

“She was crying and miserable,” Wiener said. “I picked her up and took her for the rest of the operation. I took her to an orphanage. I was just in love with her.”

Wiener wrote to his parents asking to help him adopt the girl. He went back to the orphanage hoping to retrieve her.

“I’m ready to go home,” he said. “I have three days left in the country. I call [out to] her, she’s running to me and she gets hit by a rocket.”

Wiener came home a changed man. War protesters called him “baby killer.” Backfires on cars made him flinch.

“My mom asked me, ‘What’s it like to kill someone?’ I said, ‘You get so hardened that if you gave me a gun and someone told me to shoot you, I could.’ You had no feelings for life,” he said.

Somehow, he healed. He met his future wife, Rochelle, who had fought in the Six-Day War in Israel. They were married in 1972 and have three children. He started coaching football in 1986, when his youngest son, Aaron, began playing youth football.

Aaron was a starting linebacker and center for Notre Dame High’s Mission League championship team in 1999. Wiener served as an assistant coach and nothing made him prouder than to hear his son call him Coach.

“That was fabulous,” Wiener said.

Heart disease has left his future uncertain. He lost close to 100 pounds so he could qualify for the heart transplant program. He carries his beeper and tablets of nitroglycerin, waiting to see if a match will be found.

“I was asking my oldest son, ‘Do you think there’s life after death?’ ” Wiener said. “He says, ‘Dad, don’t worry about it. If it happens, it happens. Just live your life every day.’ ”

In October, Wiener visited Aaron at Purdue University to surprise him on his 19th birthday. It was a risky decision, because if his beeper went off, he wouldn’t be able to return from Indiana within the required two hours to receive a new heart.

“I just said, ‘To hell with it,’ ” he said. “It was like Vietnam. When I got there, I had 365 days to go and there was no way I was going to make it, and I got lucky and did. I have the same feeling now. If I get a heart, then I’m supposed to.”

Wiener has survived trying times to live life to its fullest. He’s grateful for a loving family and thankful to work with athletes who appreciate his wisdom and contributions.

No one knows when there will be a final goodbye. Maybe that’s why Aaron gives his Dad a kiss whenever he leaves home.

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Eric Sondheimer’s column appears Wednesday and Sunday. He can be reached at (818) 772-3422 or eric.sondheimer@latimes.com.