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Cont.

Frenchy met her American husband-to-be in the American Embassy in December 1954. Handsome, with sandy hair and hazel eyes, Gene Amundson was an Army master sergeant stationed in Verdun. A quiet courtship ended in marriage.

In 1957 Amundson and his wife Rolande were transferred to the United States. At Fort Gordon, Ga., Frenchy discovered she was seriously ill with cancer. Her gallbladder was removed in the first of a number of agonizing hospital sessions that spanned the next four years.

The years of pain were offset by one happy event, though. President Eisenhower, who in 1960 heard Frenchy had been admitted to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., paid a spontaneous visit to her bedside. “The whole hospital was upside down,” she recalled. She remembers most his final words to her, “God bless you.”

Amundson, an expert electronics technician in the Signal Corps, served in Panama, Thailand, Guam and Okinawa, with Frenchy always at his side. In 1971 he retired from military service and the couple settled in Paso Robles.

It was at the airport in September 1976 that Frenchy made friends with LTC Jim Beard and his Green Berets. In December 1977 Beard invited Frenchy and her husband to a Special Forces banquet in San Francisco. Frenchy, who had suffered a heart attack in 1974 and was recuperating from a second heart attack in 1977, was worried about making the trip, but her husband encouraged her.

To her dismay, Beard introduced her at the banquet as the surprise guest of honor, citing her as “an extraordinary woman.” She was presented with a green beret and named an honorary lieutenant colonel in the Special Forces Association. With tears in her eyes, she listened to her life story being recounted to the crowd.

When Eugene Amundson died of cancer on June 13, 1980, the Green Berets served as his guard of honor at the military funeral. Heartbroken, Frenchy cried, “I have no more family.”

“We are your family,” Beard told her simply. “Just call on us. We’ll be there.” Five months later she learned she needed Green Beret encouragement badly. She was told by her doctors that without heart surgery she would die. But the Green Berets would listed to no talk of dying. They donated 21 pints of blood to help save Frenchy’s life. Many of them stood by at the Los Angeles hospital during the nine hours doctors performed a difficult triple bypass. “Frenchy is too valuable to lose,” explained CSM Stanley Parker.

In 1984 Frenchy underwent another heart operation. Yet she remains undaunted. In tribute to her adopted family, the Green Berets, she donated more than $12,000 to a Special Forces museum planned at Fort Bragg, N.C. “I want to show my thankfulness to these soldiers I respect and love,” she says.

Frenchy lives quietly in Paso Robles, sharing her modest two-bedroom house with a pet cat. In conversations with young and old alike, she speaks without hesitation of the ravages of her homeland during the war, and of the anguish of Indochina. But she never speaks with complaint. To Frenchy, hardship is what makes the golden part of life stand out in its goodness.

The solace she gives military wives and widows sums up her feelings. “Many of our countrymen never fully realize what they enjoy as Americans,” she points out. “They’ve never seen contrast. Because you and I have paid a price of sacrifice, we appreciate freedom. We recognize the joy of living.

“In that respect,” she suggests, “perhaps what we have suffered has really been a godsend.”
- (SFL) Website