An Indian American Cardiologist works to restore WWII jeeps

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An Indian American cardiologist in Minnesota, Guri Sandhu, uses his spare time to pay homage to the veterans of World War II.

According to a WREX report, Sandhu, who works at the Mayo Clinic’s catheterization lab in Rochester, Minnesota, restores World War II jeeps when he’s not working and has restored a 1945 Willys MB that had been sitting in someone’s barn for four decades.

“Once I got it home, I had to take the whole thing apart. For six months, there was no jeep. It was all in little Ziploc bags with carefully labeled parts and it took about 18 months to slowly restore all the parts, find old parts and then rebuilt it up from the ground up,” Sandhu is quoted saying in the news report. He said he built the jeep to honor the 11th Sikh Regiment of the British Indian Army.

“There were millions of Americans and about two-and-a-half million Indians who fought in the same battles – whether it was North Africa or Europe or Burma, Southeast Asia,” he added.

Sandhu is currently working on restoring a 1942 Willys MB jeep that was used in one of the parades when the World War II memorial opened in Washington, D.C. in 2004.

“To think about the contributions of the young men and women who fought for freedom, not just in one country but in multiple countries – an entire group of people across the Commonwealth,” the WREX report quotes Sandhu saying.

Sandhu is a graduate of the University of Delhi’s Maulana Azad Medical College.

He earned a doctorate in molecular biology from the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine Mayo Graduate School and completed his post-doctoral fellowship at the Mayo Clinic along with his residency at the University of Minnesota and separate fellowships – in cardiovascular diseases and interventional cardiology – at the Mayo Clinic.