The story began on a downtown Brooklyn street corner. An elderly man had collapsed while crossing the street, and an ambulance rushed him to Kings County Hospital. The man repeatedly called for his son. From a smudged, often read letter, an emergency-room nurse learned that the son was a Marine stationed in North Carolina.

Someone at the hospital called the Red Cross office in Brooklyn, and a request for the boy to rush to Brooklyn was relayed to the Red Cross director of the North Carolina Marine Corps camp. Because time was short—the patient was dying—the Red Cross man and an officer set out in a jeep. They located the sought—after young man wading through marshy boondocks on maneuvers. He was rushed to the airport in time to catch the one plane that might enable him to reach his dying father.

It was mid-evening when the young Marine arrived. A nurse took the tired, anxious serviceman to the bedside. “Your son is here,” she said to the old man. She had to repeat the words several times before the patient's eyes opened. He reached out his hand. The Marine wrapped his toughened fingers around the old man's limp ones, squeezing a message of love and encouragement.

Nights are long in hospitals, but all through the night the young Marine sat there in the poorly lighted ward, holding the old man's hand and offering words of hope and strength. Occasionally, the nurse suggested that the Marine move away and rest a while. He refused. Now and then she heard him say a few gentle words. The dying man said nothing, only held tightly to his son through most of the night.

Along toward dawn, the patient died. The Marine placed on the bed the lifeless hand he had been holding and went to tell the nurse. While she did what she had to do, he relaxed—for the first time since he got to the hospital.

Finally, she returned to the nurse's station, where he was waiting. She started to offer words of sympathy, but the Marine interrupted her. “Who was that man?” he asked.

“He was your father,” she answered, startled.
“No, he wasn't,” the Marine replied. “I never saw him before in my life.”
“Why didn't you say something when I took you to him?” the nurse asked.

“I knew right off there'd been a mistake, but I also knew he needed his son, and his son just wasn't here. When I realized he was too sick to tell whether or not I was his son, I figured he really needed me. So I stayed.”

With that, the Marine turned and left the hospital. Two days later a routine message came in from the North Caroline Marine Corps base informing the Brooklyn Red Cross that the real son was on his way to Brooklyn for his father's funeral. It turned out there had been two Marines with the same name and similar serial numbers in the camp. Someone in the personnel office had pulled out the wrong record.

But the wrong Marine had become the right son at the right time. And he proved, in a uniquely human way, that there are people who care what happens to their fellow human beings.