As Losses Pile Up, He Stands Tall : Former UCLA football player Fowler is busy trying to save earthquake victims in Turkey, his devastated adopted homeland.

Dr. John Fowler is trying to explain what he feels. The pain and sorrow and total despair as his search team--a group of Czechs with rescue dogs and he, Fowler, once a UCLA football player and now Turkey’s most prominent emergency medicine doctor--went to find crumbled buildings and hoped to find people still breathing, hoped to reach out and grab a hand that was still warm, prayed to be able to make a father who was sobbing and frantic and standing outside his crumbled home where all his children were buried a father again by finding life.

How can Fowler explain this?

This--and then the joy and pride he feels.

A few days later Fowler is prowling the aisles of a makeshift emergency hospital set up by a Belgian medical-aid group and he hears his name being called, “Dr. Fowler, Dr. Fowler,” and a young woman with a tiny voice but big talent rushes up to Fowler to thank him.

Fowler, 45, was her emergency-medicine professor in Izmir and Fowler is thrilled for a moment because here is proof that what he is doing with his life is worthwhile and maybe fated somehow. How else to explain how Fowler and his wife, Dianne Frierson, the football player and basketball player from UCLA, have made a home and raised six children in Turkey, how Fowler has made it his work to bring a program of emergency medicine to Turkey, a humble country that had no such program, and how now his former students are the ones in the hospital saving lives in the midst of an unspeakable tragedy?

Fowler, a Hawthorne High graduate, a member of the 1976 UCLA Rose Bowl team and the fourth-leading tackler on the 1977 team, was staying with family in Indianapolis and collecting medical supplies before heading back to Turkey on Monday. Fowler, who earlier this summer attended his induction into the GTE Academic All-American Hall of Fame, was with his family in the United States when the massive Turkish earthquake hit Aug. 17.

Immediately Fowler, who is assistant professor of emergency medicine at Dokuz Eylul University in Izmir, flew to Istanbul. Having no plan other than to help, and arriving at an airport packed with others like him, people from all over the world who just wanted to do something, anything, Fowler met a group of young Czech men and their team of trained rescue dogs. The group hitched a ride to the earthquake zone where, Fowler says, he was too shocked to say anything. Even now, three weeks later, he can’t quite put into words the devastation he saw.

For 2 1/2 days Fowler and the Czechs searched for bodies. First in Kullar, a small village where, Fowler says, “It seemed like nothing was standing and we were the first ones to come and help the people search.” In Kullar, Fowler and his group went to a pile of rubble that had been a girls’ dormitory for a local school. “There were 22 girls in there,” Fowler says, “and everybody died.”

Along the way Fowler and his group of six Czechs and five dogs met up with a group of five Turks who had grown up in Germany and had come home to help.

After nearly three days of searching for survivors, “we didn’t find anybody alive,” Fowler says gently. “As a father myself, I can’t tell you how emotional it is to watch a father or mother standing outside a building begging you to find their children. At the end, people were digging through rubble just to find pictures of family members or some little piece of clothing, just to remember a family member by.”

After giving up the search for living people in the rubble, the next step for Fowler was to help treat survivors. Fowler began practicing medicine inside gutted buses parked in some crumbled neighborhood, where Fowler would use whatever rudimentary equipment was available, even if it was only Band-Aids and thread to stitch up cuts.

“By the sixth or seventh day,” he says, “I went to a medical ship that was anchored off the coast. It had begun raining so hard, people were scrounging for pieces of plastic to live under, all their energy just consumed with trying to keep dry.

“You know, as a teacher, I hadn’t smelled the smell of death for a long, long time. You forget that smell and then, boy, it comes back to you.”

In Izmit, the largest town hit, Fowler says that only one government hospital was functioning. “Pretty soon Canadians set up a makeshift hospital, so did the Belgians and I’d go around and visit the hospitals, help them set up operating rooms,” he says.

Izmir, where Fowler and his family live, is several hundred miles south of the quake area. After nearly 10 days, Fowler took a bus to Izmir because, he said, “I had been wearing the same clothes for 10 days and because people at my hospital had put together a package of supplies.” Deciding that acquiring more equipment and even simple things such as bandages, scissors and basic medicines was more important than helping in the hospitals, Fowler came back to the United States for a brief stop.

What’s next for this part of Turkey? Fowler isn’t sure. “I can’t imagine some of these communities can ever rebuild,” he says. “It would be almost futile in a way. The businesses are gone and there are no customers. They are all dead.”

After Fowler had graduated from UCLA and gone on to the University of Cincinnati, where he did his residency, he said he never quite knew what had called him and Dianne to Turkey. A friend had worked there, and John and Dianne had always enjoyed travel and experiencing new cultures.

But on that day when Fowler heard the little voice calling his name, his life absolutely made sense. “Her name is Serpil Topuzoglu,” Fowler says, “and this summer she had just finished her emergency training in Izmir. She had just become a graduated, certified emergency specialist when the earthquake happened. She’s my little baby, sort of. God, that was great. To see her running the emergency department of this temporary hospital.

“Oh, boy. How do you process grief on a gigantic scale? I was at a tent city of about 3,000 people. Every one of those 3,000 people had lost somebody. But maybe I’ve done some good. That’s what you try and think.”

On a weekend when UCLA opened its college football season with a victory, a former player was doing something so much more important. Scoring medical supplies for his devastated adopted country.

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Diane Pucin can be reached at her e-mail address: [email protected]