Military man battles health issues

"A case worker once asked, 'To what do you attribute your ability to recover?' That's easy: military mentality," Cliff Davis said.

Davis' pancreatic cancer has spread through his blood to his lungs. His hospice nurse admires his fortitude but wishes he could admit that the intense pain is unnecessary.

His first stroke in 1996 was small, but it was quickly followed by a massive one that knocked out his legs, voice, arms and most of one side of his body. He fought back, though, only to suffer two more strokes.

Today, he is in a wheelchair relying on extra puffs of oxygen provided through plastic tubes. His new pain medication is working, and it doesn't leave him so groggy.

Davis, 62, is not an ordinary man. Before these most recent health problems, he spent more than 30 years in the military: four tours in Vietnam, seven years in Special Ops, "visiting countries."

He's been shot twice, once in the leg, once in the arm, and stabbed in the back with a bayonet. He went down in a chopper that lost its tail rotor to small-arms fire in Vietnam, crushing vertebrae. He was the only survivor of a crew of five. He's received four Purple Hearts. Four.

As a combat medic, he dodged bullets to get to wounded soldiers. When he transferred from the Army to the Air Force, joining an air rescue and recovery team, his missions were to fly deep into North Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos to retrieve downed pilots.

In Charleston, Davis would become a physician's assistant. He would become a master parachute rigger, a dive master, an underwater photographer, a small-arms expert, a burn specialist.

He would join nine Masonic orders. He would clean up the mess at Jonestown, Guyana, where Jim Jones and more than 900 others committed "revolutionary suicide."

He would have two daughters, divorce and eventually remarry, in 1986, after meeting Sherri, after "walking on air" during the first Thanksgiving holiday they spent together. He would go fishing three or four times a week. He loves fishing.

Later, Davis would volunteer at the VA hospital and help design a special line of utilitarian clothing for disabled people.

"It's amazing how, in his health predicament, he's thinking about others," Sherri Davis said.

Today, he tires easily, but he is clear-eyed, dogged and among people who love him.

"It's that military mentality that keeps him going, going, going," family friend Theresa Winger said.