# "Crippled and blinded" - April 1947

Though he confided to an unpublished autobiography dictated in 1972 that "I am the last person to advertise war", Ron's heroic war service has been a staple of Church of Scientology-produced biographies for many years. (Oddly, it has been omitted almost entirely from his latest biography, Images of a Lifetime.) A key document which new Scientologists are given to read, and which is on the walls of many Scientology churches, is a piece by Hubbard called "My Philosophy". It states:

> `Blinded with injured optic nerves, and lame with physical injuries to hip and back, at the end of World War II, I faced an almost non-existent future. My service record states: "This officer has no neurotic or psychotic tendencies of any kind whatsoever," but it also states "permanently disabled physically".

> And so there came a further blow - I was abandoned by family and friends as a supposedly hopeless cripple and a probable burden on them for the rest of my days. Yet I worked my way back to fitness and strength in less than two years, using only what I knew about Man and his relationship to the universe. I had no one to help me; what I had to know I had to find out. And it's quite a trick studying when you cannot see.

> I became used to being told that it was all impossible, that there was no way, no hope. Yet I came to see again and walk again.

> `

In other words, if you apply Ron's discoveries, you too can recover from your physical ailments. There is only one problem with the ringing statement above: none of it is true. To summarise:

- Ron was not blinded or physically injured.

- His service record does not contain the comments which he attributed to it.

- He was not "abandoned by family and friends": his wife Polly had effectively left him and moved back to Bremerton, Washington, but by January 1946 he already had a new lover - Sara Northrup, whom he soon bigamously married.

- He did not "work his way back to physical strength": he was still claiming to suffer from physical ailments as late as 1951, a year after the publication of his bestselling book Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health.

The following document shows his medical history and what he claimed to be suffering from, as of 17 April 1947. It sharply contradicts his later claims:

Last updated 13 Dec 1996