William Family Stuff

Annual letter

2009-12-17T19:23:00.000-08:00

December 2009

Dear Friends,

This was a quiet year for us. Larry’s retirement finally “took” and he spent his time doing photographic projects, activities in support of the Fistula Foundation, volunteering at Ray and Rose William’s classes, and only a couple of brief trips to Ethiopia.

This past summer Judy and Larry travelled to Arizona to share time with Michael and Arlene William and cousin Esther. Together we drove to the spectacular Grand Canyon (our first time!) and in- between indulged our genetically-driven food talk and food activities. Larry, egged on by his dare-devil cousin Esther, also took a helicopter tour of the canyon. Later this intrepid quintet visited the renowned Taliesen West and Sedona. Michael and Arlene returned with us to northern California for some more vacation--especially seeing our kids and grandkids-- before heading home to N.Y.

Later in the summer, Larry and Lisa, Rodney, Leila, and Dahlia rented mules and horses for a pack trip into the Emigrant Wilderness in the Sierra Mountains of California. They camped in tents at an elevation of almost 9,000 feet and experienced the clear cold air and peace of the California wilderness. One day we hiked even higher and the girls were able to make snowballs to throw at their aged grandfather. (Click on the image to see a bigger view of it.)

Judy and Larry visited New York a few times to enjoy visits with family and friends, see Manhattan museums and go to the theater. Judy went to a Forest Hills High School reunion and both of us celebrated Cousin Laura’s 105th birthday party.

In December, Larry finished his Vietnam memoir and posted it, minus the photos, on this blog. Also, Larry and Judy, Paul, Suzie, Ray and Rose travelled to Club Med, Cancun in Mexico to swim, snorkel, play, sunbathe, and, for the grandchildren, take a flying trapeze course.

Judy continues to teach English as a Second Language but, starting in September, the California fiscal crisis led to her to alter her teaching schedule to only mornings on Mondays and Tuesdays. Although she misses having more time with her students, it's leaving her with more time for reading, aerobic dancing, socializing with friends, being an art docent in Ray and Rose's school and, starting in the new year, a volunteer reading tutor for a junior high student yet to be assigned. We also hope to take some extended-weekend jaunts.

Larry's at their school every Monday, when he works in the library doing, among other things, reading a story to their fourth-grade classes. He's come a long way from the first day when one brave student raised her hand and asked, like Oliver, "Please, sir, can you show us the pictures?" He has also enjoyed doing science with them, and going on field trips. We feel so blessed to have Ray and Rose nearby.

Leila and Dahlia are only 90 minutes away, so we aren't as closely involved in their lives, but when we do talk on the phone or get together--about once a month--it is a joy. We recently went to see 11-year-old Leila in a horse show, and it was exciting to see how comfortable she is riding Andvari, "her" horse. Dahlia, almost 8, is a wonderful combination of computer geek and social butterfly.

Below is a recent picture of Ray riding a boogie board in the surf of Cancun, Mexico. Below him is a snapshot of Rose as she sailed through the air on a trapeze at Club Med.

The Broken Man

2009-12-17T19:04:00.000-08:00

The Broken Man

"Don't let the Broken Man catch me. If the Broken Man comes, I'll hang onto the fence and won't let him take me." Gregory Dunne

© 2009 Lawrence A. William

Prologue

Often as I thought about my experiences in Vietnam during 1968 and 1969, I felt that I needed to write them down. My purpose was often muddled: I wanted to let some of the old ghosts out; I wanted the world to know what it really was like; I wanted to tell my family--especially Paul and Judy that it wasn’t entirely my fault that I was a curmudgeon; I wanted to nail me to the wall the bastards that did this to by describing in detail every word they had uttered and every disaster they had caused! For over 30 years I was unable to start this work because of uncertainty about who would be my audience and what form this narrative would take. Should this be a work of fiction-- to avoid possible litigation from named personages or should I try to detail this with everyone out in the open? Should this be written for the general public, or for a more narrow audience? Finally, Lisa said I should write this for her.
And so, in a sense, this is dedicated to Lisa--one who was not directly involved with Vietnam at all and who was not even born when these events took place, as well as to Paul, who lived through these times on the other side of the globe, but was too young to understand what was happening. However, this is actually written more broadly for my entire family.
I have tried to make this account as accurate as possible. I am aware that I am over 60 years old now and my memory, once almost flawless, is fading and sometimes even lying to me. There have been occasions in which years later I have clearly remembered something one way only to discover from an incontrovertible historic document that my memory must have been in error. All of the dialogue that follows is what I recall, granting the flaws of an aging mind and the passage of much time. All of the people described are real. One name has been intentionally altered—not to protect the individual, but because those facts were and are so hard for me to accept that I have repressed his name. Some of the details have been recalled with the help of old, moldering, mimeographed and typed papers, as well as hand--written notes and many spools of reel-to-reel audio tapes I made during those times. Some come from others’ recollections and documents from that time.

This, from a personal point of view, is very painful stuff. Vietnam changed me and many others irrevocably. When I went there, I was 27 years old. I was only two years out of medical school and was very much an innocent and an idealist. I trusted what others said and felt that my government, while not perfect, was really interested in making the world a better place. I am still interested in making this a better place, but now I know that there are evils in this world that one must carefully circumnavigate.

I lost my innocence in Vietnam. I have seen evil, stupidity, cunning, and bureaucratic indifference up close and personal, and I came back as a very different person.

Years later I heard an interview with Jerzy Kosinski, the as yet undiscovered plagiarist and psychopath, on public radio. The interviewer was asking Kosinski about his suspiciousness. Kosinski told of an experience where he had gone to Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center for a health problem. His doctor ordered a urinalysis and Kosinski went to the lab to get this done. A laboratory technician handed him a little cup. Kosinski was instructed to write his name and birth date on the cup’s label, go into a toilet and urinate into the cup, then come out and place the cup on a designated counter top. “But,” Kosinski asked the technician, “what if some one else comes and replaces my specimen with his own?” “Oh, Mr. Kosinski, who would ever do that?”
“I might,” he replied.
Kosinski’s comments resonated with some of my feelings after my Vietnam experience. To me, his thoughts were funny, sad and in some very odd way, quite true to my feelings. I brought back from Vietnam a belief that ordinary routines may go very wrong for a vast variety of unexpected reasons as well as skepticism about the benevolence of some human intentions and actions.

In which our Hero carefully Maps his Path through Life

For a long time I knew that I could determine my own future. Others just stumbled through life and took it as it happened; I planned, studied, schemed and carefully calculated the odds to best assure that I got the outcome I intended. Well then, how was it that I got to Vietnam? During my years at medical school and my time as an intern and resident in medicine at Bronx Municipal Hospital Center, I paid very little attention to what was happening in Vietnam. This distant, small country’s bellicose history was very remote to me then. The rapidly escalating U.S. military presence in Vietnam was something from which I was insulated----both by distance from that country and by my preoccupation with my medical training. The role that Robert Strange McNamara, the U.S. Secretary of Defense noted for his application of “systems analysis,” might have on my life was not even a remote suspicion. I, like most other medical students, received a student deferment from military service during the four years I was in medical school. Later, I learned through the medical grapevine that I might apply for further deferment by enrolling in the U.S. government’s “Armed Forces Reserve Medical Officer Commissioning and Residency Consideration Program,” commonly known as the “Berry Plan.” The Berry Plan was created to assure the military would always have sufficient predictable physician manpower. This program was designed to allow doctors to defer obligatory military service to permit them to complete their training. Acceptance into the Berry Plan might give a newly-minted doctor a deferment from the military for from one to three years. An article in JAMA (COUNCIL ON NATIONAL SECURITY,JAMA, Jan 1961; 175: 57 – 59) noted, “It must be pointed out, in order to view the situation in the proper perspective, that the motivation of physicians is similar to that of their fellow citizens and many of the “volunteers” may be stimulated by the threat of the draft law. Notwithstanding this consideration, more than 80 per cent of the young doctors coming into the Services through the “Berry Plan” are commissioned in the service of their choice and called at a prearranged time. All accepted applicants for deferment are permitted to complete their residency training.” However, I thought that it would be best for my career and life if I never went into the military at all.
I applied to the Berry program fully expecting to be deferred from the possibility of military service until my entire residency was completed. However, the process of my application to the Berry Plan seemed to have been scripted by Kafka’s ghost. The program required that any doctor who was to join the military must first obtain a security clearance from the F.B.I. and the National Security Agency. Since my life up to then was essentially apolitical and my principal activities consisted of trying to survive the 120 hour plus work week of a medical internship, I did not think for a moment that any security matter would be an issue for me. Wrong!
One day two gentlemen from the F.B.I. paid me a visit. They showed me their badges and asked if I could come to their office. Next there followed a series of lengthy interviews at irregular intervals over the next weeks to determine my politics, my views of the U.S. government, and my thoughts about Vietnam in general. Finally, they wanted to know whether or not I had signed an antiwar petition one or two years before.
This was all rather surprising since I had not signed such a petition. Eventually they produced a Photostat copy of the petition in question and showed me the name, “Lawrence Williams” on this document. However, I told them that it was not my signature and I pointed out that my name lacks an “s” on the William. They were not entirely satisfied.
Later I had a few similar interviews from men from the National Security Agency and I was asked if I would be willing to take a polygraph exam. “Sure,” I said. I was given a polygraph test where they asked and re--asked all of the questions I had been asked before plus a variety of questions that were not intended to be emotionally laden. They said nothing about whether or not I passed this test. I asked them what would happen if I did not eventually get the needed clearance. “Oh,” one said, “They will draft you and you will serve in the Army in the same medical capacity, but you will be a private first class.” Several weeks went by and the deadline for Berry Plan acceptance approached. Without this acceptance, I would have been inducted into the Army for sure then and there. I would not get to finish my internship or any part of my residency. Finally, very close to the deadline, I received a notice from the Berry Plan that my deferment had been granted. I suppose that eventually they decided that I was not a security threat, although no one ever contacted me to say this.
My Berry Plan deferment did not work out as I had hoped. When I applied, I understood that, if accepted, I would be guaranteed at least one year of deferment to allow me to finish my second postgraduate year of specialty training. And, if military needs allowed, I would be permitted to completely finish my specialty service before going into the military. Then I would be assured that I could practice my medical specialty once on active duty. Well, the military decided that their needs would preclude any deferment beyond one year of residency training. After that I would either be compelled to join the military, or else fulfill the U.S. compulsory military commitment that existed in the 1960s by joining the U.S. Public Health Service to work at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as a researcher. Or, if I could not find a spot in the NIH, I might choose the secondary choice of working with U.S. Public Health Service’s Indian Health Program. This would mean I would have to move to an Indian reservation far from home but this would be an exotic interlude, I thought. The better option for me, I thought, was to get assigned to a laboratory in the NIH for two years. If successful, this would help me in later academic life and would also keep me out of military service. With my excellent academic record, getting a job in a laboratory at the NIH should not have been a problem, and this would assure that I would never go to Vietnam.

Problems with this game plan began when I was told I needed to undergo a physical examination. I had to pass this in order to be accepted into the U.S. Public Health Service. This was a precondition for acceptance by the NIH. As ordered, I reported to the Whitehall Induction Center, 39 Whitehall Street, in lower Manhattan on a dreary winter Saturday. There I found that there were about 200 other male doctors also there for their physical exams. Each needed this physical for entrance into any of the U.S. armed services. Not only did those going into the Army, Navy and Air force need to take this exam, but also those applying to the U.S. Public Health Service needed to pass a particularly rigorous physical exam standard.
All 200 doctors were directed to completely undress in a cavernous room, located within the inductions center. This room was uncomfortably cold to my naked skin. Then we were told to hand carry a one page preprinted physical examination form from one examination station to another. Behind flimsy folding tables of the various stations, military doctors and corpsmen sat waiting to perform a portion of a rather complete physical examination. At the first stop we were given plastic cups and directed to go into a large men’s room where, under the observant eyes of monitoring corpsmen, we were instructed to write our names on the cup and then produce a urine specimen. The monitoring was so the examiners could be sure we did not tamper with or falsify the specimen by adding blood from a pricked finger, for example. Then we had the remainder of the physical exam at a series of individual tables. The sight of 200 naked doctors moving in a slow out-of-step forward march holding cups of their own urine was bizarre, and soon some of the guys began to make jokes. One doctor, a big redheaded fellow named Tom Moran, got to the area where we were to have a rectal exam. The examining doctor told him to bend over and spread his cheeks. He did bend over but then placed the index finger of each of his hands in his mouth and pulled these cheeks apart to the loud laughter of all of the others who watched this spectacle. The examiner was not amused. He said, “Wrong cheeks! Now bend over and spread the correct cheeks!” After this we had our blood pressure checked, our eyes ears, and nose inspected, a cardiac exam and ECG, and all the rest of this detailed physical.
Unfortunately for me, there were two areas where I failed to pass the rather rigorous standards of the U.S. Public Health Service. First, my urine specimen disclosed microscopic blood cells. (This anomaly had been discovered two years earlier and had been thoroughly evaluated by a well--qualified urologist at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, who found neither an explanation for this or any signs of serious kidney problems.) And then, the coup de grace: I failed the vision test. When I walked into an unmarked room and saw on the far wall a fairly standard Snellen eye chart, I knew that I would be tested for my visual acuity. I rapidly set about memorizing the chart from the second line down. The Snellen eye chart is the familiar one with a series of letters or letters and numbers, with the largest single letter on the first line, usually an “E.” As the person being tested reads down the chart, the letters gradually become smaller. The Snellen fractions, 20/20, 20/30, etc., are measures of sharpness of sight. They relate to the ability to identify a letter of a certain size at a specified distance, in this case, 20 feet. The nurse who was checking my visual acuity had me cover first my left eye and asked me to read the chart. Starting at the second line, I quickly recited the series I had memorized. “No,” she said, “You must read the first line before you go to the second.” However, I had not memorized the first single letter since all Snellen charts I had previously seen began with the letter “E”. “But, I argued, I can read all the other letters! I can also read them with my other eye and I can even read them with both eyes closed!” “Start with the top line,” she commanded. I guessed it was an “E” but this was wrong. I failed the test and due to this medical flaw I, alas, became ineligible for any post in the U.S. Public Health Service.
An odd irony of failing this test was that although I was not a good enough specimen to have a job in a clean well--lighted laboratory at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda Maryland, I was fit enough to get assigned to a war zone. And that is exactly what happened to me!
The reason for this weird policy was that the US. Public Health Service found that they had an enormous excess of applicants for a relatively small number of job slots during the Vietnam War years. They decided to shrink the pool of eligible candidates for these jobs in an objective way by applying the most stringent physical acceptance requirements. On the other hand, the military criteria for service as an Army physician simply stated that if the physician could serve as a doctor in any civilian setting, he met the military standard for active duty. Wags summarized the Army medical and dental standard for doctors this way: the doctor must have a measurable pulse and respiratory rate, and one of these must be spontaneous; the physician must have both an upper and a lower jaw, and the latter must be moveable!
Of the roughly 200 doctors that went that cold, wintry day for their physical exams, only one was deemed to not be suitable for service as a physician in the military. He was a person who held a letter written by Robert Strange McNamara, Secretary of Defense, that stated that since he suffered from both active ulcerative colitis and undifferentiated schizophrenia, he was unsuitable. This guy giggled and simpered and openly boasted of this letter to the amazement of the rest of us.
During my first year of residency at Bronx Municipal Hospital Center I received notice that following my completion of that year’s training, my Berry Plan deferment from active military service would terminate and I would need to report to Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas for induction into the U.S. Army as a physician.

APO 96370 or a Fool’s Paradise

I completed my second year of post doctoral training at Bronx Municipal Hospital Center the last day of June, 1968. Judy and I filled the trunk of our ’66 Dodge Dart car with gear for camping, installed a portable crib for Paul, then 8 months old, in the back seat, and headed out for a leisurely several-week drive to Fort Sam Houston, Texas. We camped at multiple parks along the way; wandered duff--cushioned trails in the Appalachians and Smokey Mountains with Paul carried on my back in a Gerry baby carrier, and, except for a growing anxiety about my future life in the Army, enjoyed by day our first vacation in quite a while. Nights were different, however. Paul rarely slept through the night. During the days he chortled, beamed, smiled and happily cruised around the perimeter of his crib, which was tucked in the car’s back seat while we drove progressively further south and west. At night, however, Paul was inhabited by a dybbuk. He screamed, cried, and yelled sufficiently to keep one or both of his parents awake much of the time. Maybe he knew what was coming. When we got to San Antonio, we rented a small apartment with a swimming pool not too far from the scenic Riverwalk. Texas is hot in summer and the pool was quite welcome. There were many similar families that summer in San Antonio.

I, like hundreds of other doctors, had been ordered to report to this Army post in mid--July 1968 to take a 6--week--long course designed to transform us from ordinary civilian physicians into officers and military physicians. I learned that there were lots of differences between life in a civilian medical world and one in the U.S. Army. Undoubtedly the biggest was that an Army doctor was not supposed to concentrate on providing the best possible care for his patient. In lieu of that traditional role, the military doctor was charged with “preserving the fighting strength.” Military doctors were taught to triage patients so that those with the worst injuries, the ones with little chance of survival, would be put aside so that those most likely to be able to return to the war could be given medical preference.
In addition, Army doctors needed to know how to salute, whom to salute (any higher ranking officer), and how to wear a uniform properly. We learned the concept of military precedence—what your superior officer orders must be done. We began our understanding of the systems of special privileges that are attached to the three principal groupings of military types—enlisted men are at the bottom of the pecking order and are not to be fraternized with by officers. Officers are in the middle with much higher pay, special rights, their own clubs and dining areas. And, at the very top of the military order are the general officers, who ate separately from other officers and have very special privileges. Within each of these categories, ranks vary from low to high and each offers more pay and often special privileges summarized by the acronym, RHIP (rank has its privileges.) I learned the Geneva Conventions and under which circumstances a doctor could use a firearm (permitted only when necessary to protect the lives of their patients, U.S. property or our own lives). We began our education in the “Army Way.” (You see, there is the “right way” the “wrong way” and the “Army Way.”) We needed to be taught the Army way of treating war wounds. We needed training in the unique diseases of Vietnam. We learned about the varieties of malaria endemic in Vietnam, the need for regular malaria prophylaxis, the large number of tropical worms and the presence of illnesses that were almost never seen in the U.S. such as plague, both bubonic and pneumonic. And, along the way, we began our education in the special jargon and acronyms used by soldiers.
Each morning I would get up, dress in my new, crisply starched khaki uniform and drive from our apartment to Fort Sam Houston. I would park and then walk to a parade ground to assemble with doctors in my end of the alphabet. There we would march in military order, practice left and right turns to military commands and then divide up to go to the various classes to which we were assigned that day.
On our first day, after we had lined up on the parade ground, I found myself standing next to a serious appearing fellow with a strong Kentucky accent. He introduced himself to me as Daryl Wills and then mentioned in a soft voice that although he had been commissioned as a captain, he was really a colonel! Daryl then took a card out of his wallet that carried the official emblem of the Honorable Order of Kentucky Colonels that proclaimed that he was a colonel. I was quite impressed until he explained that all graduates of the University of Kentucky College of Medicine were given the honorary degree of Kentucky Colonel. This august position carried no real power and certainly no salary.

Daryl received orders that sent him to Vietnam as a battalion surgeon with a unit of the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, commanded by Col. George Patton IV. Fortunately Daryl survived this and we reconnected when we were both assigned to Fitzsimons Army Hospital in Denver a year later.

At the end of each day’s training at Fort Sam, I would drive back to the apartment where Paul and Judy were, eat dinner and lounge around the pool or explore San Antonio with my family. We visited the nearby Alamo and walked along the picturesque but hot and humid River Walk. My evenings and weekends were mellow and pleasant for the first week or two.

The need to know about Vietnam, its special tropical illnesses and the care of those wounded in the war was, in my own circumstance, not very important since I believed I was not going there. I was inwardly elated each time when I read and re--read my orders and learned that they were sending me to some place in or near San Francisco! These orders clearly stated that my permanent duty station was to be APO San Francisco 96370. I had no idea where exactly this was but so what, as long as it was not Vietnam!
When all else got their orders and learned from them that they were heading to the Republic of Vietnam, they were naturally rather despondent. A standard tour in Vietnam lasted 365 days and only allowed one brief stay out of that country. There would be a forced separation from loved ones (wives were not permitted to accompany husbands in a war zone) and friends, as well as a risk of death, injury or serious illness. I kept a discreet silence about my own special stateside destination with my colleagues at Fort Sam, since my orders meant that I was not going to Vietnam—I had been assigned to APO 96370 San Francisco!
Because I was heading for San Francisco, it was not terribly upsetting to be told that a member of the judge advocate general corps would be meeting with each of us to make sure we completed our wills and final testaments, before our deployment. We were all issued individual metal “dog tags.” I was presented with two almost identical stamped aluminum identification tags which bore my name, my military identification number, my social security number and my listed religion, “none.” One of the tags misspelled my first name. Both were to be always worn on a chain around my neck so that if I were injured and hemorrhaging, the medical personnel could transfuse me with the correct major blood group and notify my next of kin were I to die.
Fort Sam trainers taught us and then watched in surgical laboratories as we practiced how to manage gunshot wounds of the chest (dogs had been newly shot for this lesson). Learning how to do an emergency tracheotomy on a goat (practice for what those heading for Vietnam might need to do for a soldier in the field) was for me only an irrelevant and macabre laboratory exercise.
When we went to the firing range to be “familiarized” with the M14 rifle and the .45 caliber automatic hand gun, I had fun with the soldier who asked, after seeing my obvious incompetence with the M14 weapon, “Sir, begging the captain’s pardon, sir, could I ask the captain a question, sir?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Sir, how did the captain become a captain, sir!”
“Marksmanship, soldier, marksmanship!” I told him.
As I walked away from him I saw a look of total disbelief and amazement pass over his face.
Oddly enough, very few soldiers in Vietnam ever were issued the M14 rifle that we had trained with in Texas—the Army in Vietnam only used M16s, a very different weapon to handle, fire, clean and maintain. The only exception to this was that snipers were given carefully calibrated and prepared M14s for their specialized jobs. I suppose the Army in the U.S. was short on M16s so we trained with the older weapon instead. Learning how to fire the M14 was totally useless for those of us who eventually went to Vietnam.

I was quite happy for the first weeks at Fort Sam until I had a crucial conversation with my new friend, Daryl Wills.
“Where are they sending you?” he asked.
“Someplace near San Francisco,” I replied.
“Oh,” he said, “Let me see your orders.”
I pulled the sheaf of flimsy mimeographed sheets from the manila envelop that held them and Daryl quickly read through the jargon--laced prose and then burst out laughing.
“Nope,” he said, “Old buddy, you are heading to ‘Nam’ just like the rest of us.”
“But, what about that part in the orders where it says that my permanent duty station is APO San Francisco 96370?”
“That, my friend, is the address for your mail. It is designed so that if the enemy learned this address, they would not really know exactly where you were going to be. All mail going to that APO San Francisco 96370 postal address and all personnel assigned to APO San Francisco 96370 as their permanent duty station are heading to someplace in Vietnam and to no other spot!”
I confirmed that he was right. I explained this to Judy and later in letters to my family and friends. From then on life felt as if I were the first guest at my own funeral.

Lots of people just happened to “drop in” to see me in our rental apartment in San Antonio. My mother and brother Dan dropped by from the East Coast because they “always wanted to see Texas.” My brother Michael stopped in for the same reason. Michael was also in the Army. He was a newly minted 2nd Lieutenant in the artillery, stationed at Ft. Carson, Colorado and was training to be an artillery forward observer. My college roommates also visited. They all were fond of me, to be sure, but they only deepened my sense of deepest, darkest gloom by saying what were clearly, to me, their final goodbyes.

The courses increasingly became more clearly aimed at those who would be serving in a war zone. Our group of trainees was moved by bus to Camp Bullis, a roughly 44 square mile chunk of sun-baked desert northwest of downtown San Antonio where we slept in military barracks. Wives and families did not travel to Camp Bullis for these field exercises. Bullis was much hotter, drier and dustier than San Antonio. Its largely unfenced terrain was studded with cacti and cratered with armadillo burrows. Shade trees were very rarely seen. We awoke in the morning to the bugle call of reveille, and at night the last sound we heard was taps, with its mournful call to put out lights and go to sleep. There was a required day infiltration course where we were taught to crawl on our bellies using knees and elbows for forward propulsion. As we traversed the hot Texas sands under multiple low strung strands of barbed wire, gunners fired off machine gun rounds over our heads. Then we crawled through this same course at night as the machine gunners fired tracer bullets, which left long red linear streaks overhead. I never knew if these were or were not real bullets. This infiltration course was particularly hard on our non-calloused knees, elbows and forearms. Those who had passed through this ordeal days earlier told us the best way to minimize personal injury while doing this reptilian scuttling over rocks: tape Kotex super pads on our forearms, knees and elbows. I did this and found this course to be sweaty but manageable. All of the docs in our group followed suit and survived. One doctor, one who fortunately I never got to know, ground his way through that course chanting out loud his mantra of “Kill!, Kill! Kill!”
We also had a day compass course where we had to navigate an irregular loop through the hot, dusty desert and then a similar course at night. The night course was more of a challenge both because of the cacti, with their very numerous sharp thorns, and the scattered holes in the dirt dug by armadillos. Two of our class of physicians became real early casualties of this training course—one tripped in an armadillo hole in the dark and as he fell, a stick poked through his eye. Another fellow got a kidney stone after he was baked and desiccated by the Texas desert sun during the compass course. After being treated in the hospital, he was required to re--trace the day compass course from a jeep while a medic, who accompanied him, forced him to drink large volumes of Kool-Aid.

There was a final ceremony on the parade ground on August 30 during which we all “graduated” from the Army Medical Service Officer Basic Course and were told that we would be sent to our permanent duty stations the following day.

That was yet another hot humid day in San Antonio, Texas. It was Saturday, August 31, 1968----exactly 35 days from the start of my time in the Army. The coarse, cyclic rasping of the cicadas rose to an almost dirge--like intensity as Judy and I, with Paul in my arms, walked to our Dodge Dart for the drive to the airport from where I was to begin my journey to the Republic of Vietnam. Judy’s nose was already beginning to redden—a sure sign she was going to weep. A lump was in my throat. We drove fairly quietly to the airport exchanging last-minute reminders: remember to write, remember to not do anything dangerous…. The departure terminal was full of servicemen in uniforms, crying babies and wives and girlfriends trying to be upbeat even though all thought this might be a final goodbye for some of them. Our plane, chartered from Trans International Airlines, was a Boeing 707. The T.I.A. staff began to assist in boarding the passengers. Judy and I hugged and kissed, she wept, and Paul, age 9 months, alternately babbled or looked puzzled. I assured her that I was going to be “just fine,” but neither of us believed this. We kissed for a last time—by now her nose was quite red; her face was hot and damp. Tears were running down her face. That was my last visual memory of what would soon be known as “the world” as I walked out to the plane.
On board the plane, taped music was playing the soundtrack from Stanley Kubrick’s film, 2001:A Space Odyssey. I sat down and heard the opening measures of Strauss’s “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” and felt that nothing would ever, ever be the same.

The flight had a surreal quality to it: the airline’s acronym, T.I.A., reminded me of the medical condition of transient ischemic attack—a brief episode of absent brain function which often precedes a major stroke. The neat and polite stewardesses offered snacks and meals to soldiers dressed in standard “stateside,” heavy cotton, pond--scum green fatigue uniforms, with the same friendly attitude you would expect were you on a trip to Denver or New York. Current music was piped to the seats just as it would be on any commercial flight. We flew for a very long time both north and west. When we reached the airport at Anchorage Alaska we were ordered to wait outside of the plane on the tarmac while the plane refueled. It was cold, windy, and drizzly. The cotton combat fatigues we had been issued in Texas did not protect us from the climate, but this was the Army, and so we milled around enduring the frigid dampness in tight grumbling groups of mild misery for about 2 hours until we could re-board the aircraft.
Then we went back in the plane for another very long haul to Guam where we paused again for more refueling. There was more milling around, but this time we were in a tropical climate. Our heavy, cotton fatigues only added to the discomfort of the humidity.
We got back in the plane for the flight to Yakota Airforce Base in Japan for a final refueling. A mechanical problem with the airplane led to another delay in our departure time. Then we headed towards Vietnam.

Arrival in a Brave New World
S'io credesse che mia risposta fosseA persona che mai tornasse al mondo,Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondoNon torno vivo alcun, s'i'odo il vero,Senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo. (1)

The plane’s descent to Bien Hoa Airbase in Vietnam was announced by the pilot who ordered all to fasten seatbelts and then pitched the aircraft into a steep, sharp, downward scrotum-tightening spiral that took us from a cruising altitude of 30,000 feet to sea level in one long, breath-stopping swoop. Synchronous with this fast descent, my anxiety rose. Once on the ground the plane reversed engines and braked as quickly as possible. The pilot made a brief announcement, “Welcome to Vietnam--Bien Hoa Airbase is expecting a mortar attack. When the aircraft stops, gentlemen, you will have three minutes to exit the plane. Your crew hopes that you enjoyed your flight and thanks you for flying Trans International Airlines.” After we deplaned we climbed onboard Army “deuce-and-a-half” trucks for the short fast drive to the terminal. When I looked over my shoulder I could see a stewardess was quickly closing the plane door so the flight crew could turn the plane around to fly out of harm’s way and get back to the States.

Vietnam’s foreignness struck me as I exited that plane. Bien Hoa Airbase sat on a great flat alluvial plain. Scattered palms announced that we were in the tropics and ominous, darkening, cumulus clouds hung overhead. The air that brushed past my face was hot, heavy, and almost palpable. There was no breeze but coarse smells of JP-4 aviation fuel, burning diesel fuel and shit were unmistakable. At the terminal, we gathered our duffel bags of gear and personal effects, as well as our fears, and walked past soldiers in combat fatigues, past multiple concertina wire encircled, sandbagged machine gun emplacements; past tiny, squatting Asian people selling trinkets as we moved to waiting trucks. By the time we reached the trucks I was sweating profusely and my pulse was racing from the heat, anxiety, and exertion of carrying two full duffel bags. I had been traveling for close to two days and as yet had not slept since I left Texas. We were driven to the 90th Replacement Battalion though a unique urban landscape. Streets were lined with small wooden shops where shopkeepers displayed their goods outside on rough, unpainted, flat wooden racks. It seemed everything was for sale at these shops or nearby: Zippo lighters with military insignia on them, ceramic elephants, framed jade bas relief displays, vases, boots, rainwear, tropical fruits I had never seen before, clothing, and Vietnamese pimps hawking “whatever you want, G.I.!” This fast, rough, bouncy ride over pot-holed and sometimes unpaved streets lasted for less than an hour. My anxiety rose. The people on the streets were very foreign looking and had what I took to be grim or flat expressions on their faces. No one smiled or looked at us directly.
The 90th Replacement Battalion was entered through a sturdy steel barricade gate that was briefly swung open to give the trucks access, and then clanged closed. Military Police sentries armed with M16 rifles guarded this entrance. The compound, known as Camp Long Binh Junction, was surrounded by barbed wire strands that gave me the impression that I was being remanded to a high security penitentiary. Inside I was told to put my gear down on any vacant bunk and to listen for my name on the public address system. The 90th Replacement Battalion held soldiers who were waiting for their transportation to their permanent duty stations. You stayed there from hours to days while waiting to be called to the front desk. Flood lamps continuously illuminated the entire region, making it hard to tell if it was day or night. The P.A. system blared Armed Forces Radio Vietnam music programming (Glen Campbell’s Wichita Lineman seemed to recycle every 5 minutes) alternately with inarticulately blurred, terse announcements like, “Sergeant Adam Smith, Captain mumble mumble mumble report immediately to the front desk.” The bunks were triple decked military beds arranged in three rows inside wooden barracks with open but screened sides. There were no trees or grass around the buildings—just hard--packed sand. Toilet facilities consisted of a standard Army urinal (three half--height walls of corrugated iron roofing used to visually shield the gravel--filled cylinder cut from an oil drum and sunk in the ground so that its top rim was just above soil level), and an enclosed “5 holer,” burn--out latrine (a wooden plank had 5 holes cut in it to serve as toilet seats for up to five men simultaneously. (Privacy is not usual in the military.) Under each hole was large metal pot that had been formed by cutting a steel 55 gallon oil drum in half.) Both the urinal and the latrine reeked.
There was a place where you could wash up and a line where you could get meals served three times a day. Large coolers of Kool-Aid flavored with medicinal-tasting halizone (iodine tablets used to disinfect the water) were always available for drinking. You could lie on any vacant bunk until you were called to the front desk. The bunks felt hard, slightly damp, and were bowed from the hundreds of bodies that had previously waited on them. I picked a bunk and waited and waited and waited. I feared going to sleep since my name might be called at any moment.
After what seemed like a day or two, I thought I heard my name called out on the P.A. system. I went to the desk and was told to report along with my gear and my mimeographed order sheets to a truck waiting to take me to the airport. The earlier journey was reversed and after a bumpy 45 minute drive I was back at Bien Hoa Airbase and escorted to an Air Force C-7A Caribou. Our flight was brief----no more than ½ hour. I walked out of the plane with one leaden duffel bag in each hand and found myself with 5 or 6 others at a smallish runway in a place they told me was Vung Tau. I walked to an official--looking desk near the edge of the runway and handed over my pages of cryptic orders to the soldier sitting behind this.
After a very long time studying my orders, he looked at me and said, “Sir, this is not the place you are supposed to be.”
“Well,” I said, “Where is the place I am supposed to go?”
“Damned if I know, sir!”
The plane that brought me to this location was now moving back onto the active runway with doors closed and engines revving. There was no other airplane on the runway and the sky was darkening as the very short tropical sunset was in progress. It was clear then, at least for the present, that I was going to be staying in Vung Tau. I was very hot, very tired and more than a bit worried about the uncertain nature of my current location.
“Where should I go now?” I asked.
“Beats me, sir. Maybe you could go into town and see if the B.O.Q. (bachelors officers quarters) could put you up for the night.”
“But I don’t know where this town or the B.O.Q. is.”
“Not to worry, sir, just hire a cyclo driver from over there and tell him to take you to the B.O.Q.--they all know where that is.”
So, reluctantly, I dragged my duffels to the area where he pointed and sure enough, there were several thin, wiry Vietnamese men lounging about with their cyclos. These were rough home- welded tricycles which consisted of a double wide bench seat for the passengers in front of a single bicycle saddle where the cyclo driver sat and pedaled. All of these men were eager to take me to wherever I wanted to go. Using very simple English, I hired one to drive me. He loaded my duffels up front and I climbed up onto the remaining space on the forward-facing bench. My sense of vulnerability was magnified by my place in front of the cyclo driver as well as by my obvious foreignness and Army uniform. As a passenger on a cyclo I felt as if I were more of a living human bumper or blast shield than a customer. The traffic that swirled around us and intimidated me consisted of large trucks, jeeps, some motorcycles and bikes. Honks, backfires, bicycle bells, and screeches of brakes merged into a rising and falling cacophony. I cringed involuntarily and moved as far back in the narrow cyclo seat as was possible. As the driver pedaled me into town, night abruptly descended. Kerosene lamps began to appear in the roadside shacks and shops. I could smell the odors of cooking and something very fishy or rotten mingled with the scent of the South China Sea. Shortly, I could hear the ocean’s surf as well. After only 20 minutes or so, we arrived at the B.O.Q. I told the driver to wait and went inside.
At the front reception desk I explained that I had gotten lost on my way to my permanent duty station. I asked if they had some place for me to stay the night.
“No sir, we are completely full.”
“Well, what should I do?”
“Well sir, why not have the cyclo that brought you here, take you to any of the hotels in town and see if they have a room that you could rent for the night.”
I had no other option and so I went back to the cyclo driver and explained that I needed a hotel.
“No problem, Đại úy bác sĩ, (captain doctor) I will take you!” He grinned through black, betel stained teeth.
His salutation terrified me. I had been told before my arrival that there was a bounty of $1,000 offered by the Viet Cong for each dead Army doctor. Now this fellow clearly was able to accurately read the insignia on my uniform and had noted both my rank and my profession. I felt very much a vulnerable sitting duck in the front of his cyclo, but also thought I had no choice but to go where he pedaled me.

Regrettably, finding an available hotel room in Vung Tau proved to be a somewhat difficult task. We went to seedy, seedier and seediest hotels before we found one with an empty room. On the third try I was in luck. They had a room and would rent it to me for what seemed very little money. The room was small with a sagging, damp, double bed, lacked mosquito netting and was not air--conditioned, but it was at least a room.
I paid my cyclo driver a dollar and then hauled my duffels to the seedy room. I closed and locked the door, closed the curtains on the small dirty window, flopped supine onto the bed and stared at the small geckoes stuck on the upper walls. It was hot and humid. I couldn’t tell for sure but it felt like at least 95°F. Beads of sweat slowly formed on my face and tricked down past my ears like so many hot tears. I was miserable, sleep--deprived, disoriented and worried. I could hear mosquitoes out for their evening feed buzzing close to me. Just as I began to wonder if the cyclo driver might have told others that there was a U.S. Army Đại úy bác sĩ in the hotel, I was startled by a loud knock at the door.
“Who is it?” I asked.,
A woman’s voice replied, “You want girl, Đại úy bác sĩ?’
“No, thank you.”
“You want massage, Đại úy bác sĩ? Very cheap, very good.”
“No, thank you.”
“You want girl for boom boom?”
“No, thank you.”
“You want two girl for boom boom, Đại úy bác sĩ?
“What you want, Đại úy bác sĩ, what you want? What you want we get you, Đại úy bác sĩ.”
Although I steadily refused to accept any of these offers or even open my door, the repeated knocking at my door and an endless variety of offers of inexpensive sexual favors continued intermittently throughout the night, making sleep impossible.
By dawn the next morning, I was a changed person. It was suddenly clear to me that the U.S. Army cared little about my well-being and that if I were to survive this ordeal I would have to take the initiative. But first, lugging around these two heavy duffels in this stifling, tropical environment must end here and now. I went through the contents of the bags on my bed and separated out all of the stuff I thought might have been useful in Vietnam from all the stuff I really must have. Civilian clothes, black dress shoes, texts of tropical medicine and general medicine were culled, leaving me with only one duffel to manage. All the other stuff I left behind in a heap on the floor of the hotel room.
Just past dawn, still exhausted, but in a white fury beyond reason, I marched to the hotel office, paid them and had them get a cyclo driver to take me back to the Vung Tau airport.
Back at the airport, I sat impatiently on a bench and waited for the first C-7A Caribou transport to land. When one arrived about 10 AM, I quickly walked to the plane, which happened to be full of various enlisted men, and asked where this flight was heading. “Cu Chi,” one of the passengers replied. I immediately told the crew that this was the destination I required.
“But sir,” one of the men sitting in the plane said, “This flight is full.”
“You,” I pointed to some hapless Spec 4, “Out!”
“But sir, I have orders.”
“Get out now! R.H.I.P.” (rank has its privileges)

The soldier left the plane, I took his seat and in minutes we in the air and on our way to Cu Chi. I had no idea of where Cu Chi might be or what it was, but it must be a better spot than Vung Tau, I thought.

Fireworks

Cu Chi proved to be the headquarters of the 25th Infantry Division. The headquarters was a roughly circular area of tents and bunkers set in the jungle about 40 kilometers northwest of Saigon.
Once on the ground again, I had someone take me to the battalion surgeon’s tent. There I pulled out my orders and explained my problem to the doctor and his senior non--commissioned officer. I was lost and needed some place to stay while I figured out where I was supposed to go and how I might get there. But, first, could they get me something to drink and point me to a spot where I could sleep?
These people were understanding and helpful. They offered me some beers and then I slept for the first time since leaving Texas.
When I awoke an uncertain number of hours later, the sergeant gave me a set of jungle fatigues. These were much lighter and cooler clothes than the heavy stateside fatigues that I had arrived with. It turned out that the stateside fatigues were never worn in Vietnam.
Another new battalion surgeon had just arrived at this aid station and so the two of us lounged around while the sergeant explained how things worked at a battalion aid station. We ate dinner at the mess hall and finished in time to see another tropical dusk rapidly turn into a night full of bright stars.
About 9 o’clock, as we were looking out over the camp perimeter, a gorgeous and highly entertaining fireworks display began. First there were popping noises accompanied by sprays of beautiful green streaks that moved in a linear array toward us perhaps 50 feet over our heads. Then these aerial marks were joined by red streaks moving roughly in the opposite direction, accompanied by the rapid pop pop of automatic gunfire.
The other doctor smiled broadly at the pyrotechnic display and told the sergeant that it gave him a good secure feeling to know that the U.S. soldiers were hard at work protecting us.
“Sorry, sir,” the sergeant said, “but those green streaks are incoming tracer rounds from V.C. firing at our position. The red ones are out--going rounds from our heavy machine guns and M 16s here at this base. I don’t know where these Charlies come from, but almost every night they fire off some shit and try to probe for weakness in our perimeter.” (Tracers are special bullets that contain a powder in their base that burns very brightly during their flight to show where the bullets are travelling.) This show didn’t last more than perhaps 15 minutes and it ended as abruptly as it began. Then it was followed by the low, resonant whump, whump and overhead screech of mortar rounds being fired. These then made a pop as they reached their apogee and were followed by brilliant, bright, persistent, yellow lights that slowly descended on invisible parachutes toward the ground. These illuminating flares were used to see where the Viet Cong soldiers were located. But, like magic, the attackers had disappeared by the time the flares lit up the countryside. I know there were no casualties on the U.S. side and suspect that in this engagement there were no casualties on the other side, as well. We were completely unaware that these Viet Cong soldiers were dropping into and hiding in an enormously elaborate network of narrow, subterranean tunnels that honeycombed the area underneath and around the Cu Chi base. (The 75--mile--long complex of tiny, dark, damp tunnels at Cu Chi have been preserved by the government of Vietnam, and turned into a war memorial park. Years later I visited this area and saw old Viet Cong veterans demonstrating how these tunnels were camouflaged in the jungle! )
Cu Chi was for me far more pleasant than Vung Tau. For starters, the sergeant who ran the battalion aid station helped me with adapting to this new reality. He showed me where I could get my meals, where the latrines were, gave me a cot to sleep on and in general looked after this odd FNG (fucking new guy.)

I spent about a week as the guest of the battalion surgeon at Cu Chi. By then we figured out that according to my orders, I was supposed to go to an isolated site in the southern most part of Viet Nam south of the U-Minh Forrest. This was a region where there was only a single U.S. Army battalion in a vast sea of Viet Cong dominated rural hamlets. There were no nearby air cavalry, protective gunships, or evacuation helicopters.
To reach this spot, I first had to travel to the 9th Infantry Headquarters at Dong Tam. In Cu Chi I learned that Dong Tam had been created by dredging sand out of a tributary of the Mekong River, the Son My Tho, and pumping it over the existing rice paddies. Silt and sand from the river bottom had been pumped six feet deep to create a stable hunk of land. On this sandy platform, the military built the Dong Tam complex. The project had started in 1967 and eventually covered about 600 acres. The Army named the site Dong Tam, meaning “United Hearts and Minds” in Vietnamese. Dong Tam's purpose had been dual -- a headquarters location for 9th Infantry Division operations but, more importantly, a political statement to the Communists. Its high central radio tower, topped with a blinking red beacon was a flamboyant digitus infamis raised to the V.C. The US Army was in the Viet Cong infested Mekong Delta, but they planned to stay. Dong Tam was made into a showplace of sorts –photographic darkroom, pool, athletic field, large post exchange, tailor shops, barbers, a hospital [Mobile Unit Selfcontained Transportable, aka MUST hospital], a heliport, an airport with a 1,000--foot runway, a manmade harbor, a snack bar, morgue, division tactical operation center, (DTOC) and more. Dong Tam was heavily fortified, ringed with high protective berms and guarded by men with machine guns, M16s, and grenades.
To me, when I learned where my orders were designed to send me, a posting to Dong Tam seemed to be my last best chance to survive the war. In sharp contrast, my assignment to the southernmost Mekong Delta where my orders were sending me, struck me as a formula for certain, nasty, and imminent death. I determined to make every effort to get these orders changed when I reached Dong Tam so that I might stay at this heavily-protected divisional headquarters.
Eventually I found a transport plane with a few empty seats that was heading to Dong Tam. I boarded it and in a short while found myself on the ground there. The site was hot, humid, treeless, and barren with brown dust--blown military buildings planted on packed-sand landscaping. The only greenery to be found on the site was an incongruous broad parade ground planted with a coarse, broad--bladed lawn which was located exactly in front of the Division Tactical Operations Center (referred to by its acronym of the DTOC.) On arrival, I hitched a ride on a jeep to the division headquarters where the division surgeon’s office was located. I walked in and introduced myself to the Medical Service Corps officer in the front office. He, in turn, showed me in to the little office in the Quonset hut where Ltc. Travis L. Blackwell worked.
“Captain William, reporting for duty, sir,” I said in my most military tone of voice.
“Fine, Fine,” replied Blackwell, “come in, have a seat and tell me about yourself.”
I gave him a brief, somewhat distorted biography of my educational background. That is, I emphasized my “extensive” training in tropical diseases at Columbia University College of Physician and Surgeons (P&S), my subsequent elective in tropical medicine in the Niger River Delta of Nigeria where I received intensive practical tropical medicine experience, and my current particular interest in the unique diseases of the hot and humid regions of the Republic of Vietnam. This touched a sympathetic nerve in Ltc. Blackburn.
“But,” he said, “Can you write?”
“Sure,” I said, “I majored in Colloquium on Great Books as an undergraduate and love to read and write. At P&S I created and was the Editor-in-Chief of the Aesculapian, the yearbook for the class of 1966.”
“Let me see your orders,” he said.
I passed them to him for his review. He scanned them briefly then said,
“Hmmm…there is a small difficulty. You see, we have a major problem here in the Mekong Delta with skin disease, and I am not a dermatologist and have no special training in tropical disease. You seem to be just the man we need for the post of battalion surgeon for Headquarters and the Headquarters Company (HHC) but your orders are sending you south of here. Meanwhile, we are expecting the arrival of another fellow, Sid Cohen, who is supposed to be the battalion surgeon for HHC but he has no training in tropical medicine.”
He then called in the MSC (Medical Service Corps) captain, Bill Bruce, and directed him to have my orders changed with those of Sid Cohen, so that I could remain in Dong Tam and the unfortunate Cohen would go to that miserable isolated unit in the southernmost portion of Viet Nam in my place.
And so I was reassigned on the spot to Dong Tam! For the first time in days, I was ecstatic! I tried not to think about what might befall poor Sid Cohen.
However, when I handed over my stateside military personnel documents that I had hand-carried with me to Vietnam, a new problem surfaced. Since this was a division headquarters and I was to be the battalion surgeon for Headquarters and Headquarters Company, I would be expected on various occasions to attend the briefings in the divisional headquarters. This required that I have a Secret clearance. My records from Fort Sam in Texas clearly specified that I had undergone both an FBI and a National Security Agency check. However, whoever updated the records failed to note whether my background had passed or failed the requirements of these agencies. One must pass these clearance checks to qualify for a Secret clearance. Furthermore, there was no data in the personnel file that said that I had been issued a Secret clearance. The standard operating procedures were both clear and final. If I did not have a Secret clearance I would be unable to function in the Division Surgeon’s office since I would be unable to have access to the sensitive information presented there. When I understood this, I felt my initial hopes of staying were nil. But, the Army works in strange ways. The Division Surgeon called the post’s head policeman, Philip L. Ash, the Provost Marshal, on the telephone. “We got this new battalion surgeon for HHC but he doesn’t have the needed Secret security clearance. His name is Lawrence William—do you have any records on him? Any records of driving under the influence or any traffic infractions here at Dong Tam?” I passed this standard and therefore the Division Surgeon had the Provost Marshall issue me a temporary Secret clearance that was valid during the entire duration of my stay in Vietnam.
Dong Tam at first seemed to be as good a post as could be wished for. Shortly after I was assigned there, I was issued an M16 rifle, helmet, automatic revolver and gas mask. Later, I was introduced to my driver, a Spec 4, who explained to me that “An officer is not supposed to drive. His driver checks a vehicle out of the motor pool and takes the captain any place the captain wants to go, sir!” The driver was instructed to take me and my gear to a spare room in the nearby B.O.Q. The B.O.Q. was an unpainted wooden two-story structure with a corrugated metal roof. Inside, each room in the B.O.Q. was a drab space about 12 feet by 10 feet which contained a narrow metal--frame bed, a vertical clothes locker made of steel and painted in regulation green, a small writing table, one chair and room for a trunk. Overhead was a single, hanging bare bulb. The walls were unpainted wood with nails for hanging my gas mask, canteen and M16 rifle. I thought then and now that most prisoners in American jails have more comfortable accommodations than these—they, at least, also have a flush toilet.
Unheated water was provided for showers and washing at a central building a few hundred feet to the west of my B.O.Q. Eventually I would be able to personalize my living space by the addition of a small electric fan, a large Amedeo Modigliani print of a reclining nude (Red Nude, 1917) which I tacked to the wall, a diminutive mini--bar refrigerator purchased at the Dong Tam post exchange, and a 5 gallon plastic jug with a spigot on the bottom to hold drinking water. Outside, about 15 feet away, was a urinal and about 200 feet further away was a 3-holer burnout latrine, which was shared by all of the residents of the B.O.Q.. I learned that once a week one of the division’s enlisted men (a volunteer known as a honey dipper) would pull out the cans from beneath each of these seats, mix the contents with diesel fuel and set the mix on fire. A pall of black, stinking smoke would rise from this. (The location of our division headquarters could be targeted from miles away in the flat alluvial fan of the Mekong Delta by searching for the telltale plumes of smoke. At night, however, due to the difficulty of seeing this smoke, the Army thoughtfully provided a red blinking light on top of the centrally--placed radio antenna to help enemy gunners orient their rockets and mortars!). Honey dippers at Dong Tam volunteered for this duty since burning out the shit was a better and safer job than trudging through the paddies in search of Charlie.
All in all, these living quarters would serve to shelter me from the sun and rain but were dismal, joyless spaces----very far removed from anything like home. When I lay down on my military-issued bed and stared at the blank pine plywood walls that first time, I felt like a prisoner who had been sentenced for the obvious crime of failing to burn his draft card.
Early on, I learned that the most important building for my personal longevity was a separate bunker which had been built to protect us from in-coming rockets and mortars. This structure was only about 30 paces around the corner from my B.O.Q. room. The bunker was made out of 4x12 timbers reinforced with vertical 4x4s. The open doorway to this bunker was protected by a similarly constructed blast wall. However, this sturdy structure was only the innermost barrier. A second, larger, duplicate of this boxlike building was built to totally encase this smaller structure. Between the inner and outer building walls was a space about two feet deep that had been completely filled with sand. The roof layer contained 3 feet of sand and was topped with a corrugated sheet of steel. This sheet of steel was a crucial design feature meant to trigger any mortar or rocket that hit the structure so that an in-coming shell would detonate immediately and dissipate its energy before it penetrated the underlying heavy sand layer. The roof’s metal sheeting was held down with sand bags. The bunker’s floor was also packed sand. There was no furniture or lights in the bunker. It was fairly easy, however, to sling a hammock between the beams, and one would be fairly safe there, even if the bunker were to suffer a direct mortar or rocket hit. The bunker was big enough to hold 20 to 30 men at one time. It smelled of a mix of mold and sweat—vaguely reminiscent of a men’s locker room. The air inside was humid, hot, and always stale since there was no cross-ventilation.
Since all of this was rather new to me, my driver patiently explained that if I heard in-coming rounds, or if someone called “In-coming,” or I heard a warning siren, I should run to the safety of the bunker as fast as I could and wait there until I heard an “all-clear” siren sound. If there was no bunker nearby, I should drop to the ground since all of the explosive charges that exploded on contact with the earth would spray their lethal shrapnel upward in an expanding cone. Being low to the ground presented the least target to an exploding rocket or mortal round.
It did not take much time for me to learn what an in-coming round sounded like. During the 329 days I remained in Vietnam, Dong Tam was mortared or rocketed on average about every third day. I might enjoy a week or two with no attacks and then there would be several attacks during the day or night or both. Although most commonly attacks took place at night, but there were frequent enough shellings during the day that I always made a mental note of the exact placement of the nearest bunker, wherever I was, so that if I heard the thump, thump or screech of incoming rounds, I could run to that bunker as fast as possible. When the shells landed close by, they made a deafening racket. When they hit far away, they almost sounded like the steps of some angry giant slowly walking towards or away from me. And, in addition to the sound, I often felt the shudder of the ground or the faintest shock wave from the concussion of the ordnance exploding. These periods of episodic attacks were always terrifying. Even though 98% of the time there was no attack taking place, that 2% of the time when I was running for my life or dropping to the ground from my bed to hide from incoming mortars seemed to leave no space for peace of mind. There was sufficient randomness to where the shells might land to make me never feel safe. Life for me in Viet Nam was uneasy at best—horrible at worst. I found that I had a persistent sense of outrage based on the knowledge that behind each missile and rocket were people who wanted to kill me and would keep trying to do so forever.
For years afterward the sound of a car backfiring or a firecracker would lead me to instinctively flinch and want to drop to the ground to hide under whatever cover was available. That first September when I returned from Vietnam to a suburban rental house in Aurora, Colorado there was an early heavy snowstorm at night. Branches of trees had not yet lost their leaves. Eventually, late at night, heavy snow-loading on these trees began making the branches break with loud snapping noises. Each time I heard these abrupt sounds, I rolled out of my bed and flopped on the floor to hide from the imagined incoming rounds.
In Which Disadvantaged Youth Are Prepared For More Productive Lives

The division surgeon’s offices contained working space for about 8 people and the office mascot--a large dark grey leech in a gallon glass jar of murky Mekong River water. The men who worked there included a division aviation medical officer, Ed Schwartz. We had a division preventive health officer, a division sanitarian, one Medical Services Corps captain—Bill Bruce, the division surgeon, one driver, one medic and me. I filled the slot in the Army’s Table of Organization and Equipment (T.O.E.) of the battalion surgeon of Headquarters and Headquarters Company of the 9th infantry division. In the Army, the word “surgeon” designates a doctor in general and does not imply that this physician actually ever does any surgery. My principal job, I was told, was to assist the division surgeon in formulating division medical policy. But, since there was really no policy to formulate, there was no job to do. When I was not making “policy” I was expected to care for the approximately 200 men of the headquarters and headquarter company.
My clinic for seeing sick and injured was centrally located adjacent to the often busy Dong Tam mortuary and next to the office of the division psychiatrist in a long low Quonset hut. The mortuary was near a helipad where Army "Dustoff" helicopters, Bell UH-1 Hueys, would at irregular intervals unload sagging, waterproof green body bags containing the dead U.S. soldiers from the 9th Infantry’s field of operation. Roughly a third of the 2,624 men of the 9th Infantry Division who died in the Mekong Delta during my stay in Vietnam passed through this mortuary. I often wondered what it did for morale of the sick and injured to have the aid station next to this mortuary.
The adjacent psychiatrist’s office tried to create some incremental local cheer with a sign bearing a Charles Schulz “Snoopy” cartoon announcing that psychiatric care was available for 5 cents. Shortly after my arrival I met our lone division psychiatrist, Rodger Kollmorgen, and we soon became quite friendly. Rodger arrived in Vietnam about the same time I did. His initial concerns about functioning as a psychiatrist in Vietnam suggested he did not quite see how different life in Dong Tam was going to be for him. Rodger wondered at first about what he would do without the small white business cards he traditionally gave to his patients and their family to introduce himself as a psychiatrist. Also, he wondered if they would appreciate that he was really a doctor without the long white cotton coat he wore in his hospital practice back home. Without these props, how would he maintain his credibility? Vietnam changed all who went there, often permanently. Many months later when he was close to his DEROS (Date Eligible to Return from Overseas----the time when a soldier would be returning to the States) I came across Rodger rooting around in a large garbage can outside of our hooch (slang for room). “What are you doing there?” I queried. “Oh,” he said, “I’m looking for good stuff. Just last week I found an unopened can of Cross and Blackwell’s Date Nut Bread—there is really good stuff you can find in here if you only look. Lots of guys get stuff in care packages from home that they don’t want. And sometimes they just throw it away!” It only took a year to turn this model of professional propriety into a dumpster diver!
Gradually I came to understand during my first months in Vietnam that the military system of organization left me with very little work or meaningful activities to occupy my time. My daily routine gradually transformed the exotic into the mundane and boring. The mundane and boring were then intentionally slowed down and stretched to fully fill the 24 hour day. I would awaken and get dressed in my jungle fatigues and jungle boots. Putting on the latter involved a slightly different procedure from putting on my shoes back in the States: before I dared to put my foot in the boot, I gave it a jarring slap on the concrete floor to shake any unwanted critters loose and then I held it away for me, turned it upside down, and shook it again. These extra precautions were to lessen the chances of meeting an angry scorpion when my foot went into the boot. Next I would visit the latrine, shave, shower with the tepid, unheated water in the large communal officers’ shower, and dress again before heading to the officers’ mess hall for a long breakfast. Meals were served cafeteria style onto plates carried on plastic trays. Eggs were usually scrambled and were reconstituted from what looked like yellow plastic powder. Bacon was salty and often overdone. There was always cold cereal and hot oatmeal. On Mondays, a melamine bowl held the tablets of chlorquine--primaquine that were to be taken weekly for our malaria prophylaxis. Coffee, milk and juice were always available. I soon developed the habit of always covering my drink with the palm of my hand, in between sips since flies were ubiquitous companions everywhere in Vietnam, mess halls included. Usually I would sit at a table with guys that I knew and chat during breakfast. Breakfast was often a 2 hour affair.
After breakfast I would walk to the division surgeon’s office each morning. By the time I had finished this five minute walk, my boots would be covered with spatters of mud, (in the rainy season) or fine chalky dust (during the dry season) and sweat rings would be forming under my arms while the tropical sun would be rapidly rising. The rainy season was ongoing when I arrived in Vietnam and would deliver drenching rains, mainly in the afternoon and evening. Dong Tam received almost all of its roughly 80 inches of rain from May to October. Maximum daytime temperatures would be in the low 90s with humidity during the rainy season of 85%. The dry season, from mid December to mid April, meant that in place of the ubiquitous puddles and mud, fine tawny dust would coat everything and pile up in ruts in the road. Boots and lower pant legs would be covered with dust light as talcum powder after a walk of only a few yards. The relative humidity would drop to about 75%, but never really below this.
Once I arrived at the division surgeon’s office, I would banter with the non-commissioned officers and with Bill Bruce or Ed Schwartz. The biggest event of most days was the mail call when we received letters or tapes from home. In the beginning mail call was very difficult emotionally since it seemed that everyone but me got letters. This was not because no family or friends wrote to me but just that it seemed to take a few weeks for the mail to catch up with my current location. My mail didn’t start to arrive until I had been at Dong Tam a couple of weeks. The circuit of mail, once established, worked well with one difficult and permanent problem—it took a week or a bit more for a letter I wrote to Judy to reach her in New York. Then it was yet another week or so before her answer reached me. Therefore when I described what was happening to me or what Ltc. Blackwell was asking me to do, I might get a week of letters asking me to explain what was going on since she had not yet received my clarification. Our communications usually seemed out of sync.
Ltc. Blackwell was not very often in his office and had little work for me to do at first. While Blackwell was alleged to have had some surgical training, no one in the Division Surgeon’s office believed he had ever done any actual surgery in the past years. He was largely an administrator. After a few months in Vietnam, I found that much of his spare time was spent in an odd creative writing job: He would describe in detail fictional heroic episodes he engaged in. The purpose of his prose was to qualify him for medals. I learned a common expression that the career military officers used: “It’s not much of a war, but it is the only war we got!” This meant that achievement in Vietnam was the only vehicle they knew of to advance their military careers. And, medals were seen as a career boost which might help them acquire a desired promotion. I think that I first discovered Blackwell’s need when he asked if I could proofread one of his applications. While he used every bit of “heroic” military jargon available to him, his prose was stilted, sophomoric and unconvincing. Later Bill Bruce accidentally came upon a holographic draft of an earlier Blackburn document which Blackburn had submitted to apply for a Legion of Honor or Silver Star medal:
“Ltc. Travis L. Blackwell medical corps distinguished himself by exceptionally meritorious conduct in the performance of outstanding service while serving as Division Surgeon, mobile riverine force surgeon and project officer for Operation Safe Step 9th Infantry Division from 9 January ‘68 to 13 October ’68. Quickly taking charge on assumption of the position Ltc. Blackwell was confronted with a massive onslaught of the Tet offensive. He quickly instituted a program of more adequate utilization of organic medical facilities by material augmentation and close personal technical supervision he introduced a more sophisticated medical treatment capability to reduce personnel losses and prevent further overcrowding of Army level facilities. He adopted, with USARV approval, an increased holding policy in organic divisional medical facilities. He established an additional division clearing company aboard the U.S.S. Colleton and with augmentation of personnel and equipment that facility was given the capability of performing major resuscitative surgery. The policy of evaluation from one divisional medical facility to other facilities was instituted. These measures absolutely affected a reduction in the percentage of patients dying from wounds compared to the number hit by hostile fire under the most adverse circumstances of a brutal enemy offensive. The hospital in the city of My Tho was overwhelmed by 900 civilian casualties resulting from the enemy attack on the provincial capital. At the request of the senior adviser Ltc. Blackwell led a force into the insecure city. By diplomacy and skill he was given command of the hospital by the province chief and provincial medical chief. He then reorganized the hospital in a tactical posture increased the hours of work and opened a new operating room. Within 48 hours all the immediate surgery had been performed. Ltc. Blackwell worked tirelessly night and day in the insecure environment doing many major operations once the hospital had been reorganized. His leadership was an inspiration to all including assigned Vietnamese, Philipino and American medical personnel and they responded with super human efforts. This resulted in all casualties obtaining adequate medical care and the saving of many lives and limbs. Ltc. Blackwell prodigiously accomplished by his very high professional skill leadership and complete disregard of his personal safety caused a material increase in the success of the civil liberty program of the 9th infantry Division and the Free World Forces. As a Mobile Riverine force surgeon Ltc. Blackwell, working in close cooperation with the United States Navy developed and solidified concepts of deployment and utilization of medical personnel and equipment for adequate combat support delivering warfare. This resulted in a decrease by 50% of casualties dying from their wounds. At the request of combat development command this was drawn up a detailed document to be used to update training texts and to assist in writing field manuals….”
I offered to make some of his writing “flow a little more easily,” and I overnight became Blackwell’s golden boy.
Soon I was directed by Blackwell to describe his heroism for an application for some medal or award he coveted. I would invent some potentially useful text, for example, “This testimonial is in support of the attached application of Ltc. Travis L. Blackwell to receive the Silver Star for Valor. Ltc. Travis L. Blackwell ignored his own personal safety on the evening of November 14, 1998 when the mortar barrage hit the Division Tactical Operation Center just as the evening briefing had commenced. He found that the concussion of the impacting round had rendered Major General Julian J. Ewell senseless. Ltc. Travis L. Blackwell grabbed the unconscious general and dragged him along with General Ewell’s executive officer, Col. Ira A. Hunt, Jr., who was unconscious from a penetrating wound of the head, to the relative safety of a sand-bagged revetment. After placing a field medical dressing on the colonel’s hemorrhaging wounds, Ltc. Blackwell assessed the overall damage to the surrounding personnel and organized an immediate triage of the wounded…” Blackwell would read this stuff and tell me, “Nah--you got to move this out of the division headquarters and drop that stuff about General Ewell—they know he is just fine. Maybe it happened down by the motor pool or the battalion aid station….”
And so began my career in fiction. Later the colonel found another use for me. The war was increasingly unpopular at home and for those of us assigned to Vietnam, it was a perpetual misery. Sometimes unhappy soldiers would write their families letters that led these folk to fear that in addition to the risks of combat, there were problems with the level of medical care provided to the soldiers. And so a family member, or perhaps the soldier himself, would write a letter of complaint to his congressman, senator, or President Lyndon Baines Johnson. That politician would in turn demand an immediate investigation of the allegations. When allegations concerned the health of one assigned to the 9th Infantry Division, the Division Surgeon was directed to investigate. Then I was assigned to do the evaluation and create a written response to the relevant politician.
One rather memorable series of letters concerned a mentally retarded black infantryman. The congressional inquiry letter included a copy of the letter from the soldier’s mother which said, in part, “My son is suffering from black syphilis of the stomach and no one helps him….” I found where this soldier’s unit was located and had him flown by helicopter back to Dong Tam for a medical examination. He was unhappy, to be sure, but had no medical problems of any sort, other than his mental retardation. He had a child’s perceptions of how he got where he was----“I’m here ’cause the gook people want me to hep them.” I wrote a letter back to his congressman detailing my recent history and physical exam and concluded that he had no untreated medical problem and did not have “black syphilis.”
Well, after my evaluation the soldier who did not have “black syphilis” was flown back to his unit in the field. But, about two months later his mother wrote her congressman another letter reiterating that he still had not received the medical care he needed. The whole process was restarted and I was again directed to respond to a congressional inquiry about the man. The fellow was relocated and I had him flown back to the barracks in Dong Tam for me to examine again. Once more I carefully examined him and again found that he was not ill in any way. He went back to the barracks after my examination. That night Dong Tam was mortared. This man with but a child’s mind was in his bed sleeping when an incoming round hit his barracks building and killed him. He was the only fatality.
Unfortunately, this soldier was one of the troops referred to as McNamara’s Morons. Robert Strange McNamara, Secretary of Defense and principal architect of the Vietnam War, had needed to find new soldiers for the war effort. The conventional draftees had problems. Some military applicants failed the intelligence tests given to prospective soldiers. Often drafted personnel could elude the draft by getting married, having children, getting jobs in key war-related companies or even getting student deferments when they were enrolled in college. I suspect that McNamara probably reasoned that just by dropping the Army’s minimal mental intelligence and or physical standard, the pool of men who might then serve in Vietnam would be dramatically enlarged. I could imagine Mr. McNamara arguing that there were no data to show that dropping the longtime military minimal standards would affect the combat effectiveness of these troops. Better yet, he must have known that these morons would be much less likely to get student deferments and they often lacked the political or intellectual resources to duck the draft as the middle and upper middle class so often did. Thus McNamara invented Project 100,000, also called in governmental new-speak “New Standards” men. On August 23, 1966, at a meeting of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, McNamara publicly announced the beginning of this program, which would accept a portion of the men who were being disqualified for military service under previous mental standards as well as some men with physical defects that were correctable within a short period of time. Two publicly stated purposes of the program were to: “Broaden the opportunities for enlistment, thereby reducing draft calls and to upgrade the qualifications for disadvantaged youth to prepare them for more productive lives when they returned to civilian life.”
Under his direction, an Army within the Army was systematically recruited from the set of those who had always previously been rejected for failing to meet the military services' minimal mental and physical requirements. (Only 9% had failed the physical standard however 91% did not meet the previous minimal military mental standard.) A majority of these new recruits had failed one or more grades in school, most were below 6th grade level in their reading ability, and most were unemployed or making less than $60 weekly prior to their entry into the military. Recruiters actively canvassed urban ghettoes and Southern rural back neighborhoods, even taking at least one man with an IQ of 62. In all, 354,000 men were snared by Project 100,000 (an intentionally minimizing misnomer) before the program concluded in 1971. Touted as a Great Society program that would provide remedial education and an escape from poverty, the recruitment program offered most of them a direct one--way ride to Vietnam, where "the Moron Corps," as they were pathetically nicknamed by some other soldiers, entered combat in disproportionate numbers. A 1970 Defense Department study disclosed that 41 percent of Project 100,000 recruits were black, compared with 12 percent in the armed forces as a whole. What is more, 40 percent of Project 100,000 recruits were trained for combat, compared with 25 percent for the services generally. The death rate of these unfortunates was double that of the rest of the Army. All such men were given a service identification number that began, “U.S. 67” so the experimental subjects’ progress though the Army could be accurately measured. McNamara had the course of these men studied, compared, and contrasted with the other soldiers. However, he never published the crucial data showing their very high death tolls, or what became of the survivors of this program after they returned to civilian life. No reference to this program could be found by me in McNamara’s memoire, In Retrospect, and, to my knowledge, he never spoke of this program’s grim statistics publicly. I suspect that if the “Special Standards” soldiers really profited from the military’s remedial education in any substantial way and if this led to an escape from poverty for these men on their return to the U.S., we might have heard about this from Mr. McNamara. After all, Robert Strange McNamara was never shy about touting his successes.
In a New York Times Op--Ed piece published February 17, 2006, Kelly M. Greenhill stated, “…a 1991 study comparing Project 100,000 veterans and nonveterans with similar aptitude levels revealed that the former fared no better than their civilian counterparts and, in some respects, were worse off. For instance, non--veterans were employed at higher rates, earned more and were more likely to own their own businesses than Project 100,000 veterans. Moreover, low--aptitude non--veterans had marginally higher average levels of schooling than did New Standards Men…”
Years after the war ended, when Mr. McNamara wrote his memoir, In Retrospect—The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, not surprisingly, he never mentioned the horror of the slaughter of these American retarded men or anything at all about his Project 100,000. Presumably there were no moral or policy lessons McNamara learned from this program or its analysis worthy of inclusion in his memoir.

Mental disabilities were not the only matters that were waived to meet the needs of grist for the Army’s mills. One day, I was in the little Quonset hut that served as my dispensary seeing the morning sick call. A very little person wearing a somewhat baggy private’s uniform walked in to see me. “What seems to be the problem, private?” I asked.
“This, sir,” he replied, with an abnormally high-pitched voice.
With that comment he gave his foot a flick and the too-large boot that had been on it flew off and bounced off the wall of my Quonset hut.
“Sir, my shoe size is 4½. I can take a size 5 in a pinch. But, sir, I have heard that the smallest boot they have in the Army is 6 and this size 7 they issued to me will not stay on my feet!”
Private Pennyfeather (I kid you not—that was his actual name) then explained that he had met with a recruiter and Pennyfeather had volunteered for the Army. (At the height of the war, recruiters would do almost anything to meet their quotas.) When he first entered the Army they noted that he was very short—actually he was less than 4ft. 8in. in height. While some dwarfs have abnormal bodily proportions, often with large heads, normal sized torsos, but short arms and legs, Pennyfeather had the proportions of a normal adult. However, these had all been decreased, as if by an invisible three dimensional pantograph. According to the Army tables of required physical attributes, he was too short to have been accepted into the Army. But he had volunteered and the recruiter happily ignored this small matter.
Each time Pennyfeather was given a uniform, it was way too big for him. Army uniforms were only designed for the size soldiers described in the relevant Army regulations. And every time he complained about his uniform not fitting, they reassured him that the Army would deal with this problem once he reached his permanent duty station. Dong Tam was his permanent duty station. He wanted me to get him the boots he needed.
Pennyfeather was to have been an Army cook. However, he was too short to reach to the top of the military range and way too short to stir one of the large pots used to cook the Army meals. His boots were too big to be worn safely and his uniform hung on him as if he were, well, a dwarf. Well, what could one expect?, I asked myself; he is a dwarf!
What to do???
I pulled out the military manual that spelled out the PULHES. This is the book where the detailed physical profile descriptions (known by its acronym of PULHES) describe the broad physical demands of each Military Occupational Specialty (MOS) and the physical ability required of an individual to perform the duties required by that MOS. The physical profile acronym PULHES classifies physical abilities in terms of six factors designated as follows:
· P—Physical Capacity or Stamina
· U—Upper Extremities
· L—Lower Extremities
· H—Hearing and Ears
· E—Eyes
· S—Psychiatric.
Four numerical designations are assigned evaluating the individual's functional capacity within each of the six factors. The basic purpose of the physical profile serial is to provide an index to overall functional capacity. Therefore, the functional capacity of a particular organ or system of the body, rather than the defect per se, is evaluated in determining the numerical designation 1, 2, 3, or 4. Private Pennyfeather did not meet the minimal standards for either induction or retention in the armed forces—he failed to meet the P.U.or L standards by a “small” margin.
Army regulations specified if one did not qualify to be in the Army due to a medical matter (and this meant you did not measure up to the standard for retention in the Army described by the PULHES system), the individual had to be evacuated out of the Army in the Army way. At each step along the complex rule-driven evacuation procedure the medical personnel were required to see if they could cure or correct the medical problem which necessitated the medical evacuation, and if not, to transfer the soldier to a facility which would have a higher level of care available.
Therefore, I completed a field medical tag, the first step in this process, which attested to the fact that he was being medevaced because he was a dwarf. He was instructed to lie on one of the canvas litters available for wounded. “Can’t I just walk out?” he asked. “Nope, regulations say that if you are to be evacuated, you must lie on the gurney and take off your boots and socks.” I twisted the soft wire tie of the field medical tag around private Pennyfeather’s great toe on his bare right foot.
As we waited for the next step in his medical evaluation, we got to talking. Pennyfeather said he was married to the most wonderful woman in the world. She would be waiting for him whenever he retuned to his home in Pennsylvania. I was curious—“What makes her so special,” I asked.
“Well, sir, all the other guys worry about their wives possibly cheating on them with other men while they are away in ‘Nam but I know that my wife would never do this for sure!”
“How can you be so sure,” I asked.
“Well, sir, she for sure doesn’t like sex at all and since she wouldn’t do it with me, she certainly wouldn’t do it with anyone else!” Hmmm-I was at a loss for words.
After a short wait, the ambulance I had requested arrived and he was then evacuated from my aid station to the 3rd Surgical Hospital nearby in Dong Tam. There they confirmed that he was still a dwarf and that they were unable to cure this problem! Therefore, they evacuated him by helicopter to the 93rd Evaluation Hospital in Long Binh. From Long Binh, he was medevaced to the 93rd Field Hospital in Saigon. Then he was transported by plane to Japan. They, too, could not cure his dwarfism and so he was transported by plane to Tripler Army Hospital in Hawaii. Once again they were unable to cure his problem and so he was separated from the Army in Hawaii. To this day, Pennyfeather has a service connected disability, since this disability was “discovered” while he was on active duty in a war zone. He is therefore entitled to complete medical benefits for life in any Veterans Administration Hospital in the United States.
The inflexibility of this system, the insanity of drafting a dwarf and then needing to separate him form the military as if he were war-wounded, and the long term consequences of defining all problems discovered while on active duty as service connected disabilities has me still shaking my head about the “Army way” years later.

Our office mascot, the leech, was also a graduate, of sorts, of one of McNamara’s 100,000 program. An unfortunate soldier was killed while on duty near Dong Tam and fell into one of the shallow, fetid canals that formed a complex interconnecting network of waterways in the Delta. He was not immediately found. In fact, he must have floated in the water for about a week, gradually turning into what was referred to locally as a “Green Giant.” Enormously swollen, greenish, and bloated from the gas-producing bacteria that were growing in his extremities and abdomen, he was eventually found, hauled out of the canal, and taken to the morgue in Dong Tam. The mortuary technicians identified him by his dog tags one of McNamara’s 100,000. The men who found his body placed him in one of the large green body bags known as Glad Bags but not before one noted that he bore the largest, fattest leech anyone had ever seen. This critter was grayish-black in color and about 10 or 11 inches long and about 1 inch in thickness. The leech had been sucking on this dead soldier’s blood for days. It was carefully removed and placed in a big jar of Delta water and given to one of the NCOs in our office as a curio. The leach had been in our office for a week or so before I arrived, and it lived on there for several months, gradually shrinking as he metabolized that final blood meal. When he was last seen by me, he was only about ½ inch long and curved like a cartoon grimace. Like the famous Cheshire cat, only his smile remained.
The men of McNamara’s 100, 000 had more than their share of medical problems. I remember one particular example of the unfortunates who came to see me on sick call. He said that it burned when he peed. But, unlike most with this problem, he denied having any penile drip. So, I asked him to give me a urine sample in one of my small, sterile, lidded plastic cups. “No, sir,” he replied, “I can’t do that, sir!’ “Well,” I said, “Just take this canteen of water, drink the whole thing and wait around until the urge takes you, and then put a urine sample in this cup.” He protested several additional times but I gave him the canteen and sent him over to the other side of the Quonset hut while I saw 6 or 7 other soldiers that morning. I had forgotten about him and his problem until he returned to me about an hour later and handed me the cup with about 15 cc of viscid fluid in it. Under my microscope, it was obvious that this was a semen sample! It turned out he did not know what urine was at all! This struck me as pathetic, but also ridiculously funny.

How the Air Force Staffed the Army Medical Corps
Of all the persons that I met in the Division Surgeon’s Office, one that I immediately liked was an anomalous officer named Ed Schwartz. Ed was shorter than me, wore a chevron style dark black moustache, and had a ready broad grin. His accent identified him as a New Yorker. All of this was not particularly unique—however, Ed wore the uniform of the U.S. Air Force! Air Force officers usually were part of Air Force units rather than part of the Army. There were no other Air Force officers in the division headquarters staff. When I got to know Ed a bit better, I questioned him about his uniform and how he got to be assigned to the Division Surgeon’s Office. Ed explained to me that the Army’s system of organization was largely the result of central planners who in the aftermath of World War II set out to design a basically modular Army. The various component units would be described in great detail with every piece of equipment and all personnel carefully defined. Then, if a new battalion, platoon, or brigade, etc. was to be formed, there was a convenient list of what people and what equipment needed to be acquired to completely outfit it. This was both a simple and elegant concept which admitted of no variation to enable it to fit efficiently in the real world.
In Vietnam, the 9th Infantry division had no aircraft of their own, although lots of aircraft from other units closely supported their activities. And, the division really had no need for any officer to devote his entire efforts into developing aviation medical policy. That, however, did not stop the Army from assigning someone to this task since the military Table of Organization (T.O.E.) called for an aviation medical officer.
When the war in Vietnam was at its highpoint with regard to the number of men assigned to it, there was a huge need for doctors. With roughly 550,000 soldiers in Vietnam and the T.O.E. calling for roughly one doctor for every 900 people, there were over 600 needed to fill these slots each year. Because the Army maintained the myth that officers in general and doctors in particular were never drafted, they employed a basic and simple stratagem to get doctors to “volunteer.” It worked this way: the doctor would get a letter telling him that on a specific date he was to be drafted into the U.S. Army. Should he decide (female doctors were not at risk of the draft) that he did not want to be enlisted as a private first class, with a private’s minimal salary and no autonomy, he could sign the accompanying notice and thereby “volunteer” to be an officer in the Army Medical Corps. Or, should he choose to decline this offer, he would indeed be drafted and either be compelled to serve as an enlisted medic or be assigned to some medical unit as a doctor but without the doctor’s pay, rank, and autonomy.
Similar techniques were used by the Air Force to impress needed physicians. However, the Air Force in 1968 made an error and impressed too many doctors. Two hundred men above the number that the Air Force really needed were told that they would be immediately drafted if they did not “volunteer” to join the Air Force. Thus the Force in short order had commissioned about 200 more doctors than they could possibly use. Some high-level chats must have taken place between the branches of service because the Air Force worked with the Army to move these doctors from the Air Force to the Army. Each of these “excess” Air Force doctors was given a letter from the Army offering the doctor an Army commission as a captain should he wish to resign his Air Force commission and volunteer for the Army. Or, should he wish to remain in the Air Force, the Air Force would assign him to the Army for all of the two years of active military duty he must serve and he would work at tasks that the Army assigned him. All but 2 of these 200 “excess” Air Force docs resigned their Air Force commissions and were then given Army commissions. However, not Ed Schwartz! Ed had a lifelong love of anything that flew and he refused to join the Army. And so he was summarily assigned to the Army for the duration of his two year obligation.
Ed was assigned to the post of the Division Aviation Medical Officer that was called for in the Table of Organization and Equipment. He was responsible for formulation of all aviation medical policy for the 9th Infantry Division. This was a great job since as best as he and every one else realized, there was no such policy that had ever needed to be formulated because the 9th Infantry Division did not own a single airplane or helicopter. These were always provided by other organizations associated with the division. Furthermore, this situation of a doctor in the Air Force permanently assigned to the Army was so unusual that there were no regulations, policies, or protocols for his odd status. Periodically Ed would have his Air Force salary deposited in a remote bank account for him, and, his initial orders assigning him to the 9th Infantry Division were duly issued. From then on, though,he was essentially on his own.
No one kept records of Ed’s sick leave, vacations, time in Vietnam or whether he came to the office or not. It was not even clear what office or hospital he might come to. He had no clinic to report to, no patients to see, nothing to do. It took him several months to fully understand the dimensions of the administrative black hole he had dropped into. This understanding came rather slowly. He heard one day that some of the infantry personnel had been trained in a jungle school in Panama before arriving in Vietnam. That, he thought, might be fun, so he wrote to this Army jungle school and asked if they had an opening for him. Sure, they said, come on over. So Ed went off to jungle school in Panama by hitching rides on Army and then Air Force planes. No one questioned the patent insanity of leaving a tour of duty in a jungle war zone to “pretend” you were in a jungle war zone for 6 weeks.
Ed figured that the work of jungle school entitled him to a vacation and so he signed up for one week of rest and recreation (R&R) in Bangkok, Thailand. Then, when he realized that no one had counted this R&R, he signed up for another R&R and then yet another. When he fully appreciated that no administrator knew of this or cared, he figured it would be a good thing to take off a few months to travel around the world and visit his brother in Germany. Later, he visited his mother in Brooklyn. When he returned to the 9th Infantry Division he talked a helicopter pilot into giving him flying lessons. Ed was physically a little guy—no more than 5ft 2 in tall. When strapped into a seat in a Huey helicopter, he was too far from the ceiling switches to turn them on so the copilot needed to do this before Ed could actually fly the helicopter.
Before too long Ed fully realized he could come and go as he wished. After his one year in Vietnam finished, he “re-upped” for a second year in Vietnam. Throughout all of his two years in Vietnam he received special combat pay for serving in a war zone--even while he was in Brooklyn or Germany or Panama. And at the end of his two years, or actually one month before it was to end, he was paid for two months of unused vacation time (since no one kept track of this) and was offered one month pay to accept an early discharge with full pay for that month also.

Routines in Vietnam

My first Monday at Dong Tam proved to be the first of a very special day of the week. You see, malaria was a major health problem in Vietnam. To prevent this, everyone was ordered to take a chloroquine-primaquine “malaria” pill each Monday. The orange chloroquine--primaquine tablets were poured into Melamine salad bowls which sat at the end of the chow line in the mess halls in each Army installation all day Monday so anyone so inclined could take his weekly dose. This worked fairly well to prevent malaria but for most people, chloroquine-primaquine tablets also caused stomach cramps and dramatic diarrhea. So, on Monday, beginning around noon, you would begin to see lines of men standing in wait in front of the burnout latrines. While there was plenty of sitting room in the latrines on the other days of the week, Monday there was always a queue. And, on that day, instead of the easy camaraderie of you and someone from your B.O.Q. sharing a crap, there was a sense of urgency. Finish fast and get off the seat to make room for the next guy in the line! Next! Kind of reminded me of Jacques Brell’s song of the same name. Recently I was using Google to find out if there were any on-line commentaries written by men who were in the Mekong Delta when I was there. I came across this recollection from Wayne Coe, one of the helicopter pilots who were there.
“I love mornings in Vietnam, cool and still, well except for the 155's shooting H&I. Harassment and Interdiction, turned into Landing Zone prep. Today we were having a combat assault with the 25th Infantry providing the Grunts. Manchu troops, tough and gritty, seasoned veterans of the air war. They would charge out of the helicopter and kick Viet Cong ass where ever they could find them. They always had a smile for the pilots, we gave them the ride of their lives, delivering them directly to the fury of combat. Nothing can compare with the chaos of combat, and the combat assault was the worst. Helicopters filling the sky, gun ships shooting up the tree line. Tracers flying everywhere. Smoke and fire, explosions, napalm, combat assaults were terrifying to be a part of.
“Major Bauman ordered all of his helicopter pilots to take the dreaded Malaria pill on Tuesdays. The large Orange horse pills were certainly produced by the lowest bidder, and they gave me diarrhea of epic proportions. I slept under the mosquito net I was issued, I hated the pills. I refused to take them. Major Bauman was not used to having Warrant Officers say no to him. Under supervision from the CO himself I took the Malaria pill. Then out to my helicopter for a day of combat assaults in one of the hottest areas around, the Parrots Beak.
“I was chalk two, and had WO Steve Hartman as my pilot. The Blackhawks flew in formation to the pickup zone, landed, and shut down to wait for the signal from the Command and Control to load the troops.
“The crew broke out the C--rations and we proceeded to kill some time, while the LZ was being prepped. I grabbed a peaches and pound cake and started in with my P--38. Steve looked at me with a smirk, and said "if you eat anything on Tuesday after the Malaria pill, it will just squirt out when you least expect it, I always wait to eat till I am out of the helicopter." I laughed and opened another couple of cans, devouring them on the spot.
“The Rat Pack did not like the activity in the landing zone, so more artillery was pumped in, and Major Bauman called in the Air Force fast movers for some heavy drops to break up the tunnels and bunkers.
“More time passed while I stretched out in the sun waiting for the signal to crank up the helicopters and load the grunts.
“I was sound asleep when I heard the starter for the turbine start to wind up. I put on my all of my survival gear, chicken plate, flack jacket, survival radios, helmet and sun glasses, and climbed into the Left Seat. We load the Grunts and the formation departs for the Landing Zone.
“About the time we reach altitude, my insides start to explode. C & C sends us for another circle while the Rat Pack delivers a last pass.
“I am sweating like a pig from the pain now, and my insides are growing exponentially, I feel like I could possibly explode. My mind has forgotten about the combat assault, I can not fly formation, it is all I can do to keep from filling the seat. I find some toilet paper from a C--ration box, the aftermath of my breakfast.
“The formation is on final approach and it is going to be a hot one, we can all see the tracers coming up at us.
“I rip off my chicken board, flack vest, and survival equipment, slide back the panel by the window, take off my seat harness, and unbutton my pants. Just as the helicopter touches down, I jump out of my seat hang my ass out over the skids and jettison my load.
“With all the shooting going on around us, Steve screams at me to get in the helicopter, but the rotor wash has looped my pants over the step on the end of the skids and my toilet paper has already gone through the blades several times, creating a small white snow storm in the tropics.
“Steve is pulling pitch, my pants are stuck on the skids, I rip them off, use them as toilet paper and throw them overboard, and climb in the cockpit now several hundred feet in the air. We were chalk two, most of the flight had witnessed my problem, I knew they would be howling when we got back to Tay Ninh.
“I never realized how much the wind whipped around in the cockpit, until I flew with no pants. We landed in the PZ and I started looking. Boots, shirt, no pants, cool outfit. Luck was with me and one of the Grunts had an extra pair of jungle fatigue pants, and was glad to help out by donating them to cover my bare butt. I must have looked pretty funny, walking around looking for something to wear, the Grunts were laughing so much they could hardly stand up.
“I learned my lesson, I never took another Malaria pill the entire tour, came close a couple of times, but always managed to slip by.”
Wayne Coe’s view of those tablets taken to prevent malaria and mine were quite different. While he refused to take the pills due to the cramps and diarrhea they caused, I had seen too many people with malaria and too many deaths from falciparum malaria to ever doubt the value of this medicine. I took my pills each week religiously and suffered the minor cramps and diarrhea that followed.
Monday was also, it turned out, turkey day in Dong Tam. The menu at the mess halls was based on an inflexible 28 day repeating schedule that always began with sliced compressed boneless turkey loaf, re--constituted mashed potatoes and peas, accompanied by a beverage of home-made Kool-Aid, and finished 28 days later with steak, mashed potatoes and home-made Kool-Aid. Who needed a calendar? What was served in the mess hall said what day of the week it was. Only 12 meat loaf dinners to a year in ‘Nam. What we ate in the mess hall in Vietnam was one large prix fix menu-- except we did not pay for these meals. The Army wanted to serve 4500 calories per man per day. And, to ensure that everyone ate this, they had progressively removed from this menu all food that the average kid from Alabama did not eat regularly or that he did not like. Lamb was totally removed from the diet in 1967 but deboned hams, fried chicken, roasted chicken, hamburgers and beans, turkey loaf, meat loaf, and beef stew were expanded to take lamb’s place. There was ice cream, fresh milk, green salads and always scrambled eggs, bacon and sausage for breakfast. On occasion there were steaks and, perhaps monthly, grilled lobster tails. But there was never any food that was locally procured. Although Dong Tam was in one of the most fertile parts of the earth and the surrounding rivers and ponds of the Mekong Delta produced a vast variety of fresh fish, prawns, and some of the best hard shell and soft shell crabs in the world, the ordinary soldiers never ate even a single bite of this. Local farmers produced ducks, chickens, eggs, rice and pork in huge amounts but this was not eaten by our Army’s soldiers. All food for the military was transported from the continental United States. I did not eat my first Vietnamese food until many years later in the Mekong Restaurant in Mountain View, CA. (I suppose the permanent sign in this restaurant’s window, “A bit of the Mekong Delta in Downtown Mountain View,” prevented me from stepping inside for quite a long while.)
Our segregation from the Vietnamese was almost total. I never ate in their restaurants since it was well know that the Viet Cong had put a bounty on the head of each medic and a price tag of $1,000 on every doctor. I feared I might be poisoned, drugged or shot in a Vietnamese restaurant. I found that Vietnamese maids were allowed on the base during daylight hours to remove litter and perform services of maids (hoochgirls), but they were required to leave the post at night. The inability to tell friend from foe among the Vietnamese population led to persistent separation of the G.I.s from the civilian populace.

My first dozen weeks in Vietnam were made very difficult by the heat and humidity of the Mekong Delta. It was usually about 90 to 95 degrees during the day and only a bit cooler at night. Most of the time, I was in an environment which lacked any air-conditioning and my room had no available cross-ventilation. It took about 3 months for my body to adjust to this climate. And, at first, I was very depressed, home sick, and uncomfortable from a persistent, itchy prickly heat rash. Night was particularly difficult. Throughout the day, but also even at night, helicopters individually and in formations of 6 to 12 would pass over my hooch on their way to and from their Dong Tam destinations. Their rotors would rattle the roof and walls of the BOQ and their sounds would never let me forget I was in a war zone. Roughly once a week, the stink, heat, and humidity of this base camp would be “freshened” by the passing of a huge tanker truck which spewed odorous, vaporous, white clouds of malathion insecticide as it slowly and methodically slowly drove up and down each of the Dong Tam’s roads in a recurring campaign to keep the local mosquito populations at bay.
Each evening I would send letters, and later in the year, small reel to reel tape recordings to Judy in the Bronx. It would take about 1 week for the mail to get to her and another week for her response to return to me. I worried that Paul would have forgotten all about me by the time I returned. To try to prevent this I conscientiously recorded something for Paul on almost every tape. One evening, when I was recording a message to Paul, Ed Schwartz visited my room. He asked what I was doing and I explained about Paul and my need to send stories to him. That was when Ed got the idea that we both could talk to Paul. From then on, often Ed and sometimes Rodger Kolmorgen would join me in telling a story to my toddler son. We had lots of free time and so often we would tell a story and then retell it again and again with variations. One of these recordings of Little Red Riding Hood survives to this day in both its original and in the following bawdy version: Little Red Riding hoods asks, “Wolf, are you going to eat me hole?” “No,” said the wolf, “I’m going to eat around that part.”
During one brief visit to Saigon, I found a military post exchange store that had a small video tape booth. They had an early version of a Sony video reel to reel video tape recorder. A rather large video camera recorded to a 10 inch diameter spool of broad, shiny video tape. I was able to make a tape there and have it still. Regrettably the video tape industry changed tape size standards and recording code conventions so rapidly that on my return to the States, I was unable to find any machine that could read that tape. Judy, however, had been able to view it somewhere.
Usually after making a tape recording for Judy and Paul, or sending letters, my nightly routine included fiddling with a short wave radio I bought to hear the news of the world. The clearest stations were the Voice of America, Armed Forces Radio Vietnam and the various propaganda channels beamed in from various communist countries. It was especially interesting to hear the nonsense broadcast to us American soldiers from Radio Hanoi and Radio Beijing. Their propaganda was so off mark it was a never ending source of merriment for me and the others who listened to it. For example, one program from Hanoi encouraged me to defect to the Viet Cong side because they would feed me! “We know you are very hungry, G.I., and if you join us, we will feed you!” While I had many complaints about life in the military, the only thing I could never complain about was the availability and quantity of food. No one in the Army had to worry about not getting fed. On the contrary, looks at the Vietnamese suggested that they were just barely getting by. I never saw any fat Vietnamese.
Radio Beijing had its own odd, autistic view of the world. Simply stated, they said that all of life’s answers could be found by carefully reading and applying Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book. Often they would enact dramas of “real” challenges that this simple problem solving technique illustrated. For example, the barefoot doctor of Peoples Commune #46 found that Comrade Guangmei had a very large abdominal mass. When all who were caring for her discovered the huge size of this tumor they despaired of ever curing her with an operation. However, comrade Wang opened The Little Red Book of Mao Zedong to a random section and found there that Mao said,
“…we take the eating of a meal lightly—we know we can finish it. But actually we eat it mouthful by mouthful. It is impossible to swallow an entire banquet in one gulp. This is known as a piecemeal solution. In military parlance, it is called wiping out the enemy forces one by one.”
Thus encouraged and inspired by Mao Zedong, they pushed ahead with an operation to save Comrade Guangmei. The huge tumor was attacked in parts and removed piecemeal as The Little Red Book suggested. At various times during the surgery other problems arose, but by looking into The Little Red Book, practical advice could be found to surmount all difficulties. And so, thank to the wisdom of Mao Zedong, Comrade Guangmei was finally cured. Each night a new case study was presented to the unseen radio audience to show the efficacy of communist theory as applied to everyday real life problems.
When the ionosphere was in good shape other remotely located foreign stations could also be tuned in. Sometimes, however, all I heard was static. This radio was, on balance, a good source of distraction and entertainment for me.

Help from the Sullivan Brothers

I hadn’t been in Vietnam more than a month or so when I received a particularly disturbing piece of news from home. My brother Michael, who had been swept up in the Army and trained as an artillery forward observer, had recently received orders directing him to Vietnam. Life for me as a doctor in Vietnam was miserable, often boring, occasionally terrifying, but the odds were definitely better for me than for a new artillery forward observer. I think fewer than two dozen doctors had been killed in Vietnam by the time I arrived there, but the prevalent scuttlebutt was that about half of the artillery forward observers died from either enemy fire or “friendly” fire. I knew that I had to do all I could to keep him out of this war.
Fortunately, there was a way to keep him out of this mess. During World War II, five brothers from the Sullivan family enlisted together in the U.S. Navy and were all assigned duty on the U.S.S. Juneau. This was no accident, the brothers had insisted and their words, “We stick Together” were a famous rallying cry of U.S. domestic propaganda. When the Japanese torpedoed and sank the Juneau in the South Pacific, George, Frank, Red, Matt and Al Sullivan were among the hundreds that died.
After this event, the military changed its de facto policy to allow family members not to be compelled to serve in the same war zone at the same time. The department of defense (DOD) practice during and since the Vietnam War was that “close family members (siblings, parents or children) may voluntarily serve together in the same unit, ship, or aircraft, regardless of the danger that they may all become casualties in the same action. Such family members may request that one of them be reassigned to avoid such an eventuality, (emphasis added) but DOD does NOT guarantee fulfilling the request, due to military necessity."

I wrote a letter to the Army in which I reminded them that I was in Vietnam and intended to remain in Vietnam, but could they please honor the Sullivan brothers’ policy and reassign Michael to another county? It worked. Michael was reassigned to Korea, where he was safe and savored the joys of eating kimchi. But, regrettably, there would be no way I could get out of Vietnam before I had served at least 10 months or Michael might be reassigned to Vietnam in my place.

Dermatology in the Tropics

After some weeks in Dong Tam, a visiting colonel walked into our office and introduced himself as Bill Akers. He was a large man, with salt and pepper grey hair, and an air of friendliness and informality about him rarely seen in one of his rank. Akers was a full or “bird” colonel and a highly qualified and well-respected dermatologist who was working for the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research. Akers’ job was to figure out how to manage or prevent the huge problems the soldiers were having with skin disease. While war wounds and deaths from enemy fire were capturing headlines at home, skin disease in Vietnam was causing a major unpublicized problem. At any one time, as many as a third of the men of the 9th Infantry Division were totally incapacitated by skin problems. There were three principal problems: ringworm with its variants, ecthyma, and immersion foot. Ringworm is a skin fungal disease, named for the round circles it causes on a person’s skin—often with a slightly raised rash edge. This rash often spread widely over a person and sometimes the fungous would burrow deeply into the skin of the legs and feet causing great pain and swelling. Ecthyma is a skin infection like impetigo, but one where the infection goes deeply into the skin’s layers, and then is was marked by a crater-like ulcer forming in the skin which is surrounded by red, angry overhanging skin. Immersion foot was a situation seen in men whose feet were continuously soaked in water where the feet’s skin first became abnormally white and then became progressively redder. Their feet swelled and became so exquisitely tender they could hardly walk.
When my boss explained to Col. Akers that I was now to function as the Division Dermatologist, Akers spent some time talking with me about my background. He concluded that I would need some O.J.T. (on-the-job training) with him to get some real understanding of the dermatology issues. My on-the-job training began the very next morning. Col. Akers arranged a daily sick call where he had soldiers with skin problems visit with both of us. Akers would ask me what I thought was going on, and then he would teach me what the problem really was and how best to manage it. This rather formal all day one on one teaching program lasted for the two week stay he had scheduled for himself in Vietnam. Then, he returned to the States and came back to Vietnam the third week of the next month to continue my lessons as well as to perform his own research. The timing of his visits was designed to qualify him for the incremental pay raise that rewarded service in a war zone for any part of a month. He was very helpful, intelligent and compassionate, making a considerable contribution to my knowledge of tropical dermatology. And, he gave me my first camera to document skin disease. It was an odd point and shoot camera with two little lenses and an attached short chain, like what you might find on an old fashioned pull lamp switch, with two markers on it to judge the correct distance from the photo’s subject. One lens was designed to take a picture at a distance of 18 inches from the lens while the other let you photograph a subject at 36 inches. All objects further than 36 inches from the lens were always out of focus.
One afternoon, as I was walking back to my hooch from my clinic, I saw an astonishing sight: a young, attractive blond woman getting out of a helicopter while all around her swarms of soldiers anxiously circled her like the sycophants of royalty. Who was this? I wondered. As I walked closer I recognized that this was the famous Bobbie the “weather girl” of the evening news on AFVN (Armed Forces Viet Nam) TV Saigon. Each evening, all over Vietnam, any who had access to a radio or TV would hear the weather report from Bobbie Keith. Bobbie was cute. She always wore a sexy miniskirt and concluded her program with a greeting to some fellows in a specific and different military unit. Then, she recited her signature sign off: “Until tomorrow, have a pleasant evening, weather--wise and you know, of course, otherwise.” With that, the Box Tops’ hit single song, “The Letter” begins to blare—“Gimme a ticket for an aeroplane, Ain’t got time to take a fast train—” and Bobbie the Weathergirl started to dance as the camera panned alternately in and out.
I knew that this famous personage’s visit to Dong Dam would require some permanent documentation. I pulled my dermatology camera from my pocket and stretched the metal chain attached to its full 36 inch length. I barged through the crowd uttering “Excuse me.” Once in front of Bobby I told her I needed to capture her picture for posterity. I stretched out the chain from my camera to her head, and snapped my shot with the camera’s 36 inch setting. After a hurried “Thanks” I pulled back from the swarm of admirers.

Bobbie and her crowd of followers moved away from me as I trudged back to my hooch. Later, when my camera’s film was developed and printed, I learned for the first time that a wide angle lens enormously enlarges a nose when the subject is that close to the camera. Bobby looked grotesque—nothing like the weather girl on televsion.
After a month of my on-the-job training at Dong Tam, Akers decided that I should have at least a few weeks of O.J.T. in a hospital setting. He arranged for me to travel to Long Binh, outside of Saigon, where the 93rd Surgical Hospital was located. I traveled to this hospital for the first time by helicopter, a rather dramatic way for anyone to travel. The UH-1D "Huey” air ambulance with its prominent red cross markings that was to take me to Saigon landed at the heliport close to the aid station were I saw patients. As was standard procedure, the helicopter did not turn off its engines while waiting to take on passengers, but had its main rotor slowly turning as it rested on the landing pad. I and other passengers then ran, in a crouching position, carefully holding onto our hats to keep the downdraft from blowing them off, to the Huey’s open side door and climbed in. I sat down on a bullet-proof flak jacket, as I had been instructed by Jackson, our company sergeant. (“If Charley hits you with an AK 47 round by firing up at you from the ground, he will carve for you a whole new asshole, unless you’re sitting on the flak jacket,” he intoned before my first trip. As always, the helicopter’s broad, sliding side doors remained wide open both on the ground and when airborne. This made it easy to get in and out in a hurry if there was a need. And, it assured lots of air movement, which made the tropical heat tolerable. I strapped myself into the seat rather carefully since once this helicopter was in flight, it was a very long way down and there was no physical barrier to prevent me from falling out. That flight lasted only about 20 minutes, but it was very exciting. I could see the broad, flat expanse of the Mekong Delta below me with canals crisscrossing it at irregular intervals.
Gorgeous pale chartreuse--green rice paddies formed an intricate patchwork below marked only here and there with perfectly round ponds about15 yards in diameter. I noted that often these ponds were arranged in rough rows. Later I learned that they formed where the 500 pound bombs that had been dropped by B 52 bombers had exploded. Scattered along the waterways were thatched houses. In the paddies I could see water buffalo, often with a child fishing or loafing on its back. We flew mainly at an altitude of only about 200 to 1000 feet, so the land seemed to rapidly recede beneath my feet at if it were on some sort of magical conveyor belt. Sometimes we were so low to the ground that the pilot would have to raise the craft up to avoid telephone lines or palm trees! The first time I saw us headed toward a line of palm trees we were so low to the ground that I was looking up at their tops. I thought this was a fatal mistake and held my breath, as I expected us to crash. However, the pilot skillfully raised us up to clear the palm tops and then dropped us down close to the ground on the far side while continuing to advance horizontally at about 120 miles per hour. This low-altitude fast flight was planned to make it harder for enemy on the ground to see and aim at us. In some of the chartreuse paddies I could see farmers in black shorts with conical straw coolie hats bent over as they were planting rice shoots into the mud. In this part of Vietnam it was so warm, wet and humid that there were three plantings and harvests of rice each year.
This aerial view of Vietnam revealed a countryside that was so strikingly beautiful that I started to imagine that if not for the war, this would make a wondrous tourist destination. And, at the same time, I wondered how many of the Vietnamese farmers I saw below me would be Vietcong warriors or supporters when night fell.

Our destination was the 93rd Surgical Hospital which was located adjacent to a large military prison that housed American soldiers accused or convicted of a miscellany of crimes, such as drug offenses, “fragging” (killing officers by throwing hand grenades at them or shooting them), going AWOL (absent without official leave) and refusing to engage the enemy. The Long Binh Jail (Camp LBJ) had high cyclone fencing surmounted by a wide helix of razor wire which formed one border of the hospital’s grounds. Looking through the fence I could see parts of the notorious Silver City, a collection of steel CONEX (short for Container Express) shipping containers used to house the most incorrigible detainees. At the peak of the military prisoner population boom, more than 10,000 U.S. military personnel were prisoners of the Americans—and most were there in LBJ.
The 93rd Surgical Hospital facility consisted of utilitarian one-story wards, each specialized in one or another type of trauma: neurosurgery, orthopedics, thoracic surgery, burns, etc. The staff was trained for a kind of no-nonsense medical care that was absolutely shocking to those used to the more genteel civilian medical scene.
Actually, I first discovered this ultrafast medical care in Dong Tam when one of the men in the division headquarters came to see me with a complaint of stomach discomfort. He had not been feeling well, he said, for a day or so. He had vague nausea and widespread abdominal discomfort that then moved to the right lower portion of his abdomen. I examined him and diagnosed that he had acute appendicitis. I drove him to the nearby 3rd Surgical Hospital and walked in with him to the triage area. There I explained to the doctor on duty what his problem was and turned him over to this doc for further care. At this time, there were no other patients in the area--just one doctor and 3 or 4 corpsmen lounging around.
“Lie down on this gurney,” the patient was directed. This soldier did as he was told and immediately two corpsmen pulled out bandage scissors and rapidly began to cut off his uniform, boots, and underwear as he stared at them in wide-eyed total disbelief. As they cut him out of his clothing, the remaining corpsman quickly tightened rubber Penrose drain tourniquets on his newly bared arms so he could find veins. Then large bore intravenous catheters were quickly and skillfully inserted into these veins and two intravenous infusions of lactated Ringers solution were started. Within 4 minutes, an anesthetist was beginning to induce general anesthesia in this patient with a “push” of an intravenous sedative, the doors of the adjacent operating room were swung open and the fellow was whisked into the surgical suite. About ½ an hour later he emerged minus his appendix! Next he would be transported to Long Binh to have the first part of his convalescence at the 93rd Surgical Hospital. The surgeon who did the appendectomy explained to me that when a case like this came in, they wanted to take care of it as fast as possible since they never knew how many cases of major trauma might be flown in with no warning. They needed to have all operating rooms and staff ready to receive this complex stuff. “Minor problems” needed to be dealt with expeditiously.
The 93rd Surgical Hospital was where many of the seriously wounded were flown directly for care. Those patients that could be managed at the care level available at 93rd Surgical Hospital would receive immediate and rather comprehensive care. Others got enough care to stabilize them and then were transferred back to even bigger and more comprehensive facilities-- either in Vietnam, Japan or back in the U.S.
The hospital was a huge and impersonal facility where rows of horribly maimed men were put back together as best as could be done. The wards were mainly filled with trauma patients: some whole open wards were populated with multiple amputees, others with comatose men with grim head wounds, some with complex wounds involving chest, abdominal and extremities alike.
There was a Puerto Rican dermatologist named Ralph, one of only two dermatologists in the Army who had been assigned to Vietnam, who taught me more about the skin problems inflicted on the soldiers by a combination of a hot, wet, dirty environment and a military more concerned with appearances than health. One of the apparent paradoxes of skin disease in the Delta was that they afflicted the U.S. soldiers but not the local Vietnamese. It turned out that there was not much mystery in this mysterious jungle rot’s discrimination against the Vietnamese. The local people dressed appropriately for the climate; Americans did not. Vietnamese wore flip-flop sandals or were barefoot in the mud or paddies, so their feet could dry out after being wet. They wore shorts or fast-drying, thin cotton clothes and they wore short sleeved shirts. The Vietnamese never were continuously wet for more than 12 hours at a time.
In contrast, the U.S. troops wore heavy socks, high boots, long heavy cotton pants which by military regulation were required to be tucked into their boots “bloused,” in Army parlance and long sleeved heavy cotton shirts which were not supposed to be rolled up. This uniform, once wet, stayed wet. The Army grunt on patrol in the Mekong Delta was wet from his soggy boots to his neck often all day long, and for days on end.
After a few hours of being wet and hot, the skin on the soldier’s feet would be wrinkled and white. But, after two to three days of continuous soaking in water, feet would begin to get really swollen and tender as bacteria invaded through the skin’s protective barrier. Another day or two and the man’s feet were very swollen and painful; the soldier could not walk on them. This was called “immersion foot.”
Bill Akers and others at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research showed that pretty much all of the men whom they studied back in the States had fungi quietly co-existing on their skin. These fungi really caused no problems except for an occasional case of mild athlete’s foot until the person’s skin was kept continuously damp and hot in Vietnam. Then these fungi, which they had carried with them from home in the United States, would spread over the body like a crazy-quilt patchwork of red itching skin. With enough continuous dampness and heat, sometimes these fungi would burrow through the upper layers of the soldier’s skin and dive down into the deeper underlying regions, causing swelling and legs that continuously oozed serum. This was called “tinia profunda” and was very painful and disabling.
The last of a miserable triad of disabling skin problems that particularly afflicted the Americans was a kind of deep, crater-like skin infection often caused by the same bug that causes strep throat. This problem, named ecthyma, came when a minor injury, a tiny scrape or insect bite, was left unclean or allowed to soak in polluted water for some time. These ulcers would gradually enlarge, undermine adjacent skin, and be very painful.
The “cure” for these problems was to get the person out of the water to a clean, dry environment. Immersion foot would mostly resolve spontaneously. Ecthyma often required an antibiotic and frequent cleaning of the skin sores. The deep fungal diseases needed an oral antifungal drug called griseofulvin.
It didn’t take me much time to learn how to recognize these problems. The remainder of my stay at 93rd Surgical Hospital was devoted to learning the basics of other common dermatology.
Life for me during my stay at the 93rd Surgical Hospital fell into a quiet routine of dermatology rounds, education, meals and, sleep—enlivened at irregular intervals by our next door neighbors’ shenanigans. The military jail, which occupied a large multi-acre site adjacent to the 93rd Surgical Hospital, was the origin of frequent misery for the patients and staff of the hospital. The prison’s guards never intended to harm the hospital, but when fights broke out among the inmates, the guards’ first solution was to throw down canisters of CS tear gas from the guard towers which would spew out whitish clouds of the stuff. This noxious material burns your eyes, makes them tear mightily, and causes your eyes to almost uncontrollably spasm shut. As you cough and choke your tears and snot stream down your face. The clouds of CS would often drift out of the prison compound when the prevailing winds were blowing in our direction and flow over to the hospital. There it would be efficiently sucked up by the hospital’s air-conditioning system and blown into the wards. We were gassed with this stuff three or four times during my stay! No one in the hospital had ready access to a gas mask so we just wept or ran out of the ward to find some clean air upwind. The symptoms would rapidly subside once the clean air was felt. The patients, however, were by and large in too bad shape to do anything. Fortunately, most of them were not aware enough to know what had happened.
While most of the staff was male and all of the patients I saw were male, there were a half dozen or so nurses that were women. These were an interesting group. The draft categorically exempted women so all of these women must have volunteered. Many of these nurses were “lifers”—people who had made the Army their career. All of them were somewhat odd. All I saw were single, and very ugly, fat or both. One had the tell-tale facial scars of a past poorly repaired hare lip. I often wondered or assumed that their prospects for finding men in the civilian world were so obviously compromised that they had decided to go where the male to female ratio might give them a definite competitive edge. Their work on the trauma wards added a kind of hardness to their manners that only added to my feeling that these were people to avoid.
When my planned month of training at 93rd Surgical Hospital concluded, I was not saddened by my return to Dong Tam. I had not made any meaningful friendships and felt very much an outsider during this stay.

In Which the Weasel Makes His First Appearance

At first, it was with a sense of relief that I returned to Dong Tam after my time in Long Binh. Not too much later, a letter from Judy let me know that Michael Rappaport, the man who had been my senior resident at Jacobi Hospital when I was an intern, had also been assigned to Vietnam. The letter said that he was working at the 93 Surgical Hospital. We had missed seeing each other when I was there. I thought it would be fun to call him and say hello. This proved to be very difficult, though. The telephone system calling process involved calling from one manually operated telephone exchange at Dong Tam, to the next intermediate manual switchboard, and so on. I still do not understand why this was done this way but I had to figure out all of the intermediate exchanges between Dong Tam and the 93rd Surgical Hospital. To place my call, I first called the nearest switchboard named “Ranger,” the first node in a lengthy series, and spoke to the operator there. I asked him to transfer my call to “Rascal,” another exchange between me and my telephone destination, and then on to “Rodger” and so on. Eventually the last exchange connected me to an operator at the hospital who told me she had no idea where Major Rappaport might be and hung up on me! This whole process took almost an hour to complete. I tried to call Mike a few more times and each time the person who answered the call was totally uncooperative about leaving a message or finding him. Finally, in personal act of idiocy born of frustration, I figured out that the thing to do was to get Mike Rappaport to call me, since I couldn’t call him. I went through the drill one last time but when I finally reached someone in the 93rd Surgical Hospital, I told this person to have Dr. Rappaport call the Division Surgeon’s office in Dong Tam immediately to give them information on their doctor from Headquarter and Headquarter Company, Dr. Lawrence William, who had been transported from Dong Tam to the 93rd after receiving a through and through gunshot wound of the head. I thought that Mike Rappaport would check the ward, not find me there and would then immediately call Dong Tam to see what this weird message was about.
However, he did not do this. He visited the neurosurgery ward at the 93rd Surgical Hospital and checked all of the beds and all of the charts. I was not there. He went to the operating rooms and confirmed that I was in none of them. He went to the intake area where the wounded were first unloaded from the helicopters and checked all of the paperwork and queried all of the personnel. Then he concluded that either the message was in error or that I had died before arriving at the hospital. He decided calling Dong Tam would be futile. Therefore, he never called Dong Tam and so we never would meet in Vietnam. I was disappointed, discouraged and somewhat angry at myself for all the time I had wasted trying to contact Mike. However, in the Army, this sort of frustration was not at all uncommon. Many seemingly minor jobs involved complicated steps and lots of time. Waiting was something that one came to expect in dealing with the Army, its systems and personnel. I did not figure out a way to get in touch with Mike during my time in Vietnam but we finally got to meet a few years later at El Camino Hospital where we both were on staff.
In Dong Tam I soon acquired a new source of anxiety. Ltc. Blackwell was concluding his year in Vietnam in November and he told me that on that date he was being replaced with a real dermatologist, Ltc. Archibald Weems McFadden. My concern was that with an actual dermatologist in the division headquarters, I would no longer be needed. Then I would probably be sent out to the field as a battalion surgeon. Or, this new boss would have lots more work for me to do than the easy-going but feckless Ltc. Blackwell.

Archibald Weems McFadden, or simply Weems or “the weasel,” as he quickly became known by his subordinates, immediately impressed me as a strict by-the-rules regular Army sort. His uniform was immaculate, heavily starched and recently ironed. His boots, unlike those of all around him, were spit-shined to a mirror-like finish. There was no dust on his boots. His salt and pepper gray hair was trimmed into a short flat-topped military haircut. He wore a neatly trimmed Führer-style grey moustache and he addressed everyone formally by his rank and last name. His utterances were brief and he never smiled. Early on, he told those assembled in our office, that he had been directed, “To clear up the mess of skin disease that was leading to a severe deterioration in the fighting strength of the 9th Infantry Division.” He would be reporting daily at the commanding general’s briefing on the progress that had been made in this direction. We, his staff, were to be responsible for achieving this. He then thanked us in advance for all the hard work we would be doing in a war zone and withdrew to his quarters.
McFadden reappeared the next day and marched into the tiny office that he was to use and arranged his papers in neat lines on the desk top. He called for me and asked for a report on the skin disease I had seen. I briefly described the immersion foot, severe tinea and echthyma cases that were leading to the extensive disability. I suggested that allowing the men to wear shorts, or at least permitting them to take their pants bottoms out of their boots and periodically remove their boots and socks to dry off their feet might help. “No sir,” said the colonel, “That would not look military.” End of story.
I heard no more from him about this until about two weeks later when he told me he had the solution to the skin problems: “Captain William, every time you see a man with skin disease, you are to write in his medical record that he has a skin disease that renders him unfit for duty in the hot, steamy, dirty environment of the Mekong Delta. Then that man is to take his medical record along with that note from you back to his commanding officer and he will then be sent back to the replacement company in Saigon for reassignment elsewhere.” This struck me as very odd and likely to have major repercussions. However, this was a direct order from my superior officer and therefore was something I had to obey.
The very next day as men filed in to see me in my aid station, I began to write the notes McFadden had ordered. At first the patients were stunned, and then they beamed at me as if they had just won a ride back home. They thanked me effusively, shook my hand, looked like they wanted to kiss me and left the aid station as jubilant as could be.
The news spread fast. After a day or two at least a hundred men would be at my office for daily sick call with their skin rashes on show. Within the next two weeks I changed the profiles of several hundred men. McFadden told the commanding general, Julian J. Ewell, at his daily briefing that soon there would be no longer any skin disease in the 9th Infantry Division! General Ewell asked no questions, but was elated.
But, after about a month into this scheme, those chickens came home to roost. Commanders all over Vietnam began receiving soldiers with severe skin disease who had been newly transferred into their units. They quickly tracked this back to the bizarre medical “profile” written by Captain William. Word came back to me that when they realized what was happening, a typical reaction was, “What shit is this? Who the fuck do they think they are in the 9th Infantry Division to pack up all their problem soldiers with skin rot and send them up to me!!! These pathetic fuckers are going back from where they came! Let the 9th Infantry Division deal with its own problems!”
Soon orders came to McFadden from on high and from him to me—no more changing of profiles because of skin disease. 9th Infantry soldiers with skin disease were to be treated in the division and not transferred elsewhere. The rag-tag assortment of men with skin problems who had been transferred out of the division soon all returned.
McFadden spoke no more of the matter and then largely stopped all inquiries about any skin disease. He never even once examined or treated a single person with skin problems. And, he never again discussed skin disease with me at all.
Gradually he became more reclusive. Some of his time was spent sitting straight upright at his desk in his office with his rarely blinking eyes staring straight ahead at an empty cork message board. He seldom moved or changed his position in any way for hours as he sat in his cubicle. I would note his presence but since he was silent, neither I nor the other Division Surgeon’s staff would have any interaction with him. At first he would attend obligatory briefings and then often return to his hooch for hours or days. Later, even this lapsed. He was never seen in the officer’s club and was never seen to have any social dealings with any other officers. At the daily briefing, he sat alone and spoke to no one unless directly addressed.
A few weeks after the skin problem debacle, McFadden emerged from a brief visit to his office cubicle and announced to the staff that the current health problem that we would need to address was venereal disease. This had become a major issue which had now gained the attention of the CG (commanding general). There were now hundreds of men in the division who had gonorrhea. “You will not let this continue!” he stated.
The prevalence of venereal disease was no surprise since whores were very common around all of the Army installations and enterprising women often would set up shop (lean-to shelters covered with a tarp and containing a single mattress) in the field that could service an entire battalion during a single day. You could see the soldiers queuing for this readily. Some battalions had even made ongoing arrangements with a local whorehouse to service their men on a regular basis.
Careful statistics on causes of disability were maintained by all Army units, and the specific category of venereal diseases was monitored by commanders. At this time only certain specified illnesses counted as venereal diseases. These included gonorrhea, chancroid, syphilis, genital herpes, granuloma inguinale, and lymphogranuloma venereum.
McFadden’s solution was bold, direct, and every bit as dramatically effective as his skin disease initiative had been, “As of this date,” he proclaimed, “No man in this division may be diagnosed with gonorrhea unless he has had a culture of his discharge grown on chocolate agar culture media and the diagnosis has been confirmed by a Gram stained smear of that culture viewed under a microscope. Unless there is a bacteriological confirmed diagnosis as I have described, you may not diagnose gonorrhea.”
“What, sir, do we diagnose these men with if they have all of the symptoms of gonorrhea but we are unable to do the required culture to confirm the diagnosis? And, how should we treat them?” I queried.
McFadden flashed a slight, ephemeral smile and replied, “Why they, of course, have a non-specific urethritis, which as you know is not a reportable venereal disease, and they should be treated with the same dose of penicillin you might have given them if they had had gonorrhea.”
“You, Captain William, will send a message to all of the battalion surgeons of the 9th Infantry Division and notify them of this new policy which is effective immediately.”
The key to McFadden’s solution was the requirement that the genital discharge which was the hallmark of gonorrhea be cultured. In all aid stations, there weren’t any microscopes, there were no chocolate agar culture plates (these were the special culture media needed to grow gonorrhea) there were no incubators, there were none of the special bacteriology stains needed to prepare specimens for exam under a microscope and, in brief, there was no possible way the new conditions for a diagnosis of gonorrhea could be met.
I sent out the new instructions to the battalion surgeons and within a month the rate of gonorrhea in the division had plummeted from about 900 cases per month to almost none. Oddly, there was a coincidental epidemic of non specific urethritis (NSU), but this was not a venereal disease.

The Zoo Story

McFadden’s successful improvement in the venereal disease rate was appreciated by the division command staff. Some of their delight with the division surgeon even rubbed off on me. I was invited to come to the afternoon briefing and was even invited to dine on a few occasions at the general’s mess. The latter was the dining room inside the protected super heavy duty bunkers of the Division Tactical Operation Center, or DTOC, for short. The general literally ate a few notches higher on the hog than the rest of the Army. He would, from time to time, be presented with fattened live pigs, crabs, prawns or ducks from various local political figures or Vietnamese commanders. These animals would then be sent to the division veterinarian for a thorough physical examination before General Ewell’s chef could dispatch and cook them. This opportunity to examine the general’s prospective food animals was fun for the vet since usually his only job was to take care of a dozen German shepherd guard dogs and supervise the sanitation of the food that was transported to Dong Tam in large metal shipping containers called CONEX (contraction of Container Express) boxes. Mostly he just lounged around and was bored. Eventually, he got a pet monkey who seemed to overview the entire food operation from a perch on top of a favorite CONEX. It struck me as odd that the guy in charge of the food sanitation had a monkey which was able to freely wander all over the food storage area, helping himself to fruits and veggies, and crapping wherever he happened to be!
Well, this general officer’s mess was rather fancy for a war zone with linen tablecloths, nice silverware, waiters and air-conditioning. On Sunday nights the donut dollies were always invited to dinner with the command general (CG.) Donut dollies were attractive, single young women hired by the American Red Cross and sent to Vietnam to lift up the morale of the servicemen. They did this by meeting with them and providing what they referred to as “audience participation recreation programs.”
A dinner with the Julian J. Ewell, the command general in charge of the entire 9th Infantry Division, was usually the reward for my sitting through one of these afternoon briefings. These briefings were often tedious recitals of “objective” statistics invented and measured to prove that he war was being successfully won through careful implementation of the polices of the Department of Defense. Interspersed between the numerical fictions presented by staff officers were occasional angry outbursts from Gen. Ewell or more commonly, from Colonel Ira Augustus Hunt, Jr., the general’s chief of staff. The latter was a big, beefy bully who took great glee in totally intimidating any available subordinate. He would position himself inches from the offending person who failed to show the proper growth of some metric and roar at him like some angry beast.
Other matters would also catch Hunt’s attention. One day, the wretch whose job it was to mow the edges of the parade ground grass became the unwelcome center of Hunt’s focus for what seemed to all like an eternity. Hunt had noted that the sidewalk that led towards the DTOC (Division Tactical Operation Center) entrance had some blades of grass from the lawn which were spreading an inch or two over the edge of this walkway. In gardening parlance, the lawn needed edging. Hunt began his critique mildly enough, “You God damned incompetent son of a bitch….” Then, he really got angry and screamed and yelled at this soldier for at least 5 minutes. You would have thought, if you did not know the subject of this tirade, that here was a major problem which if unchecked might lead to the loss of the war! Hunt was a real life personification of the dog in Albee’s play The Zoo Story referred to as “malevolence with an erection.”
Col. Hunt had in spades that special fatal fondness for numbers that flowed from Robert Strange McNamara downward. McNamara’s view of war was that it was largely such a messy affair because no one looked very closely at the numbers and statistics. War needed to be run like a business and that required precise data. For example, how did you know that soldiers with an IQ below the Army’s arbitrary standard could not serve their nation by being sent to Vietnam if you had no statistics to show how they performed? In McNamara’s memoire, In Retrospect, he said, “But I insisted we try to measure progress. As I have emphasized, since my years at Harvard I had gone by the rule that it is not enough to conceive of an objective and plan to carry it out; you must monitor the plan to determine whether you are achieving the objective. If you discover you are not, you either revise the plan or change the objective. I was convinced that we might not be able to track something as unambiguous as a front line, we could find variables that would indicate our success or failure. So we measured the targets destroyed in the North, the traffic down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the number of captives, the weapons seized, the enemy body count, and so on.”
Alain Enthoven was McNamara’s chief “whiz kid” in those days since he was head of systems analysis for the defense department. The McNamara/Enthoven duo initiated a system that did two things: first everything got measured, counted and statistically described. More importantly, statistical measures that mattered were those that showed the war was being won. These then could be used to demonstrate which officers were most suitable for promotion.
Some of the de rigueur statistical measures, like body count, came down though the military hierarchy, but other metrics were probably dreamed up by Ira Augustus himself. It was probably Hunt who created the idea of measuring numbers of artillery shells fired, total tonnage of high explosives used against the enemy, meters of enemy trench destroyed, meters of enemy canal destroyed or total number of areas controlled by the enemy. All of these metrics were absurd, misleading or gross fictions. At first I wondered why near the end of the month, artillery crews around Dong Tam would be firing almost continuously. Then I learned about Hunt’s metric: the artillery officers had to show that each month they were expending more rounds than they had the previous month. So called “free fire zones” where they could blow up anything with no oversight or controls were blasted into smithereens at month’s end. Herds of water buffalo that could have been grazing in a free fire zone were turned into hamburger, or might have been if only the resultant pieces weren’t so tiny and so scattered, if they were in these regions, since the related statistic of rounds expended must show objective “progress.”
In the Mekong Delta no land was higher than a few feet above sea level. No canal could be destroyed without leaving an even bigger waterway than had previously existed in its place. Trenches? There were none ever found in the Delta near Dong Tam because any trench quickly became a drainage ditch. What happened if you bombed a trench?—you had a drainage ditch that had a deeper hole in it that held somewhat more water than the ordinary drainage ditch.
The total religious faith that McNamara/Enthoven had in these statistics required that those with ambitions must play the game or see their careers perish. Bodies were counted, multiplied, counted, counted yet again and by the end of the day one dead water buffalo might have magically metamorphosized into 188 Viet Cong killed along with all of their supporting infrastructure. The division measured everything and understood nothing.
David Hackworth, who sat through many of these briefings with me, wrote years later,
“The emphasis on cold statistics in the 9th Division was not confined to body count, however. Thanks to Ira Hunt and his computerlike brain, in the 9th Div there was an obsession with analyzing every aspect of the war in terms of easily manageable numbers. Blade time (how long could/did a chopper stay in the air), Reliability of Intelligence, Location of Enemy Devices—all of these and all else, it seemed, could be, and were, turned into percentages, indices or ratios…..But save for body count, there didn’t seem to be any priority among these varied statistics. At Division briefings, the emphasis on say, the number of troops down with immersion foot would be no greater or less that the emphasis on the number of U.S. Savings Bonds sold to the troops, or the amount of U.S. troops used on civic action projects in the AO. It was all the same. This did not make the whole picture look any less impressive, however, and I always thought that a big reason Ewell was so enraptured by Hunt and so eager to advance his career. Hunt was just so smart. He could dazzle you with his figures, and you only realized they added up to nothing or were obtained at too high a price if you understood what the hell he was talking about in the first place. Statistically, he made the division look unbeatable, which made Ewell look pretty damn good himself.”( p. 668 About Face)
And so the 9th Infantry Division was able to progressively show they were winning the war since the number of areas controlled by the enemy progressively decreased until, in 1975, the Viet Cong had only a single area left to them: the whole country!
These lies, cloaked in statistics, progressively eroded the Army’s ability to understand what was happening. The nonsensical data from the 9th Infantry Division that was delivered to the command authorities in Saigon and ultimately sent on to Washington, D.C. was not the only official misinformation that was developed by the U.S. military in Vietnam. All of the other elements of the U.S. military in Vietnam added their own grand falsifications to the statistical description of how the war was being won. These progressive fictions ultimately were believed by the Army and they created a dream-landscape totally divorced from the underlying reality of the Vietnam War. My gestalt on the ground was that of an unmeasured, progressive, relentlessly insidious, impending grand defeat, but the statistics showed in crisp numbers the trends of triumph.
The only thing Hunt ever got right was revealed in one of his comments about the Viet Cong’s attitude to the U.S. Army: “I don’t think they like us.” (Associated Press International news release syndicated in the March 26, 1969, Evening News, Newark, NJ.) But, this was also the opinion of Hunt that was shared by almost all that got to really know him!

The Conspiracy

It was during one of these afternoon division briefings that Ltc. McFadden first discovered “the conspiracy.” In his mind, it was not entirely clear who was behind “the conspiracy,” but somewhere in the Viet Cong organization there were, he believed, specific sinister individuals who could reveal its innermost evil purpose. “The conspiracy” progressively grew in his mind. What its aims were was unclear to him; where it was located was an enigma. This particular conspiracy must not be confused with the issue of the Viet Cong who were trying to defeat the U.S. and the government the U.S. supported in Saigon. This was some other, hidden, and deeply personal conspiracy directed against Archibald Weems McFadden. He alone knew that this special “conspiracy” existed and his personal mission was to reveal it to those who could not see it.
At one of the briefings it was mentioned in passing that a VC doctor had been captured by an infantry platoon. This fellow was now in U.S. custody in Dong Tam at the POW compound. McFadden directed me to “interrogate” this man to find out if he new any of the VC conspirator’s secrets. In particular, he wanted to know all about how they treated every single medical and surgical problem. The next morning, with a Vietnamese interpreter in tow, I went to the compound to meet with this man.
The POW compound was an austere compound perhaps 150 by 100 feet in size defined by a 12 foot high cyclone fence surmounted by spirals of razor wire. Within the compound were wooden guard towers overlooking 2 or three wall-less canvas shelters where the prisoners ate and slept. Their toilet and shower facilities were the same as mine--very basic. The prisoners were bare-chested, wore black silk shorts, Ho Chi Minh sandals, and were seen squatting in small groups under the canvas covers of the shelter. They seemed to me to be very small, thin and rather vulnerable. I went to the entrance and explained that I was there to interview the captured doctor. My interpreter and I entered the compound and the doctor was brought to me. We sat at a small table in the guard house where I could make notes.
I knew from the start that McFadden’s “conspiracy” was wholly delusional but thought that meeting this man would be a uniquely interesting experience. It was. This man was named Doan Chien. He had been captured by Company A 3/17th Infantry in October, 1968. I explained that I was a doctor conscripted by the Army and wondered if his experience was similar. He didn’t answer that but immediately explained that he was not really a doctor at all but was the best they had in this region. They did not have any real doctors that he knew. He had had less than a high school education when he joined the VC and was given mostly on the job training in basic first aid. His books were largely hand copied from other hand copies and dealt with the importance of cleanliness and vitamins.
His “tools” were largely French made and included a stethoscope, needles, thread, surgical clamps and bandages. He restocked his supplies with funds supplied by the Battalion Executive Officer and Commanding Officer. The drugs were often purchased from local pharmacies. Recently, he complained, drugs were in short supply.
His admitted knowledge of Viet Cong medical evacuation channels was small. He said that the Battalion aid station’s distance from the battle field (approximately one to two kilometers) was a major reason for the fact that often the aid station was bypassed by the seriously wounded. In addition, the Battalion Executive Officer and Commanding Officer played active roles in medical evacuation of the injured. It was the command responsibility to authorize evacuation of wounded based on the report of the injury’s seriousness from the platoon or company medics. He often improvised from rags and clothing to stop bleeding. He did no surgery and the only medications he had were homeopathic remedies and vitamins. His affect was rather flat and he only answered direct questions with short simple answers. It was becoming more and more obvious that this was not a likely setting for establishing warm human rapport. We finished talking, I thanked him for being willing to spend some time with me, I wished him well and left. I wrote up the interview for McFadden, who was both pleased and unhappy about its content. The “conspiracy” had not yet been revealed but he had expected as much, he said.
At one of the nightly briefings, someone mentioned in passing that a rumor was circulating that the Viet Cong had been using a simple, widely-available substitute for intravenous fluids and blood for their seriously injured men—coconut juice. McFadden volunteered to check this out. The next morning he ordered me to get a couple of dogs to test this as a blood substitute. One of Dong Tam’s military police scrounged up a stray mutt for me. I led this unsuspecting canine hero into my clinic where with the help of my medic, I set up an IV blood administration set so that one end poked into a coconut though its eye and the other end was inserted into one of the dog’s leg veins. At first, no fluid flowed since the rigid coconut lacked a vent hole or any way to collapse to reduce the vacuum created as fluid drained from it. The partial vacuum formed in the coconut prevented its contents from flowing though the tube. Realizing the problem, with my Swiss Army knife, I poked another hole in an adjacent coconut eye and the clear juice then flowed down the tubing into the dog. Since the dog weighed only about 30 lbs, I thought the juice of one coconut would be enough to test the concept. We finished the IV and removed the tube. The dog seemed fine then but we enclosed him in a wire cage supplied by the MP for the night. The next morning the dog was no longer in his cage. He had figured out that he had better things to do then be the victim of dumb medical experiments. He had worked loose part of the cage and fled, never to be seen again. I reported my efforts back to McFadden along with my thoughts that although a dog had received one coconut’s juice without immediate adverse effects, this was not really a convincing proof that this odd use of a coconut was more than a rumor.

A week or two later another briefing report seemed to give McFadden the opportunity he had been hoping for to understand the Viet Cong. An infantry unit had been searching for Viet Cong near the Parrot’s Beak. This was a piece of land adjacent to the Cambodian border whose outline on a map looked somewhat like a psittacine bird’s beak. There they had discovered a recently-abandoned, roughly improvised thatch-roofed field hospital that had been used by the enemy. No sick or wounded were found and only a tiny amount of medical gear was recovered. A fairly complete field surgeon’s tool kit was taken as a souvenir. This was given to Weems, who passed it on to me. It contained many instruments that I still have. Overnight McFadden pondered what to do about this hospital’s existence.
The next morning, he approached me and initiated a conversation by saying, “Captain William, I want you to get to the bottom of this!” “What sir, do you want me to get to the bottom of?” “This conspiracy…I want you to figure it out…I want you to take a hundred or so men and some choppers and capture that God-damned VC hospital, its doctors, its patients and all its equipment. Then you can interrogate them and get to the bottom of this whole conspiracy. And that’s an order, Sir!” I saluted sharply, said, “Yes Sir!” pivoted on my heels and marched off to my hooch.
I was terrified. The idea of me, a doctor, and one with no combat training, interest or experience, commanding a few hundred combat infantrymen was absolutely, totally insane from all points of view. I knew nothing of the infantry business; I have never commanded men in combat; I had no idea of what he felt the conspiracy was or how I would have it deciphered for him. The concept of me doing this crazy activity struck me as a sure way of getting myself sent home as a cadaver in one of those big, green, zippered body bags.

Once I got to the safety of my room, I figured out an alternative “battle plan.” I met with my psychiatrist friend, Rodger Kollmorgen, and we agreed that what I would do was to stay out of McFadden’s sight for 4 days. I did not go to the office, eat where he did or go anyplace near where he was housed. Instead, I went early in the morning to the Special Services office in Dong Tam and spent the day there rather than at the office or clinic. After 4 days of hiding from him, I reappeared hoping he would have forgotten the entire episode.
No, he had not. “Were you able to capture those bastards?” he asked. “No sir, when the infantry and I arrived, we found they had all vanished into the jungle without a trace,” I replied.
“Just like those sneaky bastards to do a thing like that,” he answered, “But, we will get them yet!” “Yes, sir!” I told him, and that ended my mission to his satisfaction.
This odd adventure proved to be the start of something else for me, however. The Army tables of organization and equipment called for each division to have a group of men in a Special Services department who were supposed to plan entertainment for the soldiers. These recreational activities included a miniature golf course, a large above-ground swimming pool and a photographic darkroom equipped with 6 fine enlargers and all the gear needed to do black and white photography. With four days to waste as I hid from the weasel and nothing else to do, I set out to learn how to load 35 mm film on little stainless spools, develop the film and print images. There was a basic darkroom photography manual around, but no person who really knew how to use the equipment. Given that I had lots of time, I practiced and experimented enough to get the basic darkroom stuff figured out. I bought a Minolta SR-T 101 single lens reflex camera at the local Post Exchange and began to take pictures. I thought I was making real progress in the darkroom for the first 3 weeks.
I taught myself how to work in total darkness to develop negatives. I would use a beer can opener (“church key” in Army slang) to pop off the end of the 35 mm film canister. Then I would use a scissors to snip off the narrow curled end inch of the film. Next, I gently bowed the stiff 35mm film so that it could be initially threaded, and then wound up into the helix of stainless steel film reels. Next, I would place the reel with the undeveloped negative film into a small stainless steel lightproof canister. Now the lights could be turned on. Then the developer, stop and fixer were successively very carefully poured into the tank and it was agitated every 30 seconds. Finally the film was extensively washed. It was then given a quick bath of diluted Photoflow solution and hung to dry. I spent many hours figuring this out with the help of the film package inserts, which gave the directions and the times that the different chemicals were to remain in contact with the different film types. It was very hot and humid in the darkroom and more than a bit lonely, too, since I was usually the only one there. I did not quite figure out the tricks to removing the bubbles that would usually form on my negative. (One was supposed to give a sharp jolt to the film--containing tank by knocking it on a counter top.) These un-removed remaining air bubbles caused my negatives to have multiple, permanent little round black dots that eventually were transferred to all prints I made. My course in self-taught photography was only slowly progressing.
Then, one evening, when fortunately I was not in the darkroom, that building took a direct hit from a 122 mm rocket. The next day I went to the darkroom to see if it was still usable. Nope, the walls and ceilings were hopelessly fenestrated and beams of light readily demonstrated the tindal effect as dust filtered through these openings. The enlargers were all dust covered and shattered. Little pieces of lens glass and metallic debris littered the floor. That ended my darkroom experience in Vietnam but only served to make me want to do this further when I returned to “the world,” which I did.
The folk in the soldier entertainment business then came up with a new replacement recreational activity for this “decommissioned” darkroom for the men of the 9th Infantry Division: water skiing. Just outside of Dong Tam a huge tributary of the Mekong River, the Song My Tho, flowed. Its dark mustard-colored waters moved slowly and had a smooth, lake-like surface most of the time, marked here and there with small clumps of floating water hyacinths. The Special Services guys had a motor boat with a powerful outboard motor, along with the needed towing equipment and water skis shipped to Dong Tam from the States. An enlisted man from Florida with lots of previous water skiing experience was invited to try out the new equipment.
He had just got up on his skis for his first run and was having a great time cutting long graceful curves back and forth across the boat’s wake when a Viet Cong machine gunner, hidden in a patch of Nipa palm, opened fire on him. The boat made a rapid turn away from the shore and got the guy out of harm’s way in time. The skier was understandably upset about being used as a live trolling lure for VC gunners. Thus, the water skiing program in Dong Tam abruptly ended.

McFadden’s ideation progressively became weirder. He was told at the evening briefing that an infantry lieutenant heard there was a plague outbreak in a remote village. McFadden then ordered me, unaccompanied, to go this village by helicopter to “check it out.” Plague is very bad stuff. In its worst variant, the pneumonic form, patients may have symptoms fewer than 6 hours before they die. Pneumonic plague is quite infectious and had been reported from time to time in Vietnam. My problems were multiple: I had no way to make a bacteriologic diagnosis; I had none of the protective equipment needed to safely handle what could be highly infectious materials and I lacked all of the required technologic training and the necessary bacteriologic laboratory resources for handling plague-contaminated materials. In addition, there was the matter of my safety from enemy fire. The place where the illness had been reported was in a small hamlet near the Plain of Reeds. There were no longer any U.S. soldiers in the region to offer me any protection. Nevertheless, I had no choice but to go on this mission.
McFadden somehow persuaded personnel in headquarters to have me flown to this area in an OH-6A 'Loach' (light observation helicopter). We were to leave almost immediately, which meant incidentally that I would be flying at night in a tiny, minimally-armed observation helicopter with only one other in the aircraft, the pilot.
Flying in a Loach at night is as close to flying on a magic carpet as you can imagine. Both passenger and pilot wear aviation helmets to both screen out most of the ambient noise and allow you to speak to the pilot or ground via the radio communication system onboard. The craft weighs only 1,160 lbs. Its cockpit looked and felt like that of a fancy sports car. There were large, curved glass windows that let me have an almost unobstructed view of the night sky above as well as the ground below my feet. Once we took off, the pilot turned out the landing and cabin lights to make us less visible to those on the ground. This made the encircling curved windows seem to vanish. Except for several tiny red glowing spots on the instrument panel, I felt as if I were flying literally by the seat of my pants. There were very few visual cues to tell me that I was in a helicopter since I could see everything outside with an almost totally unobstructed view. The night sky was clear and bright from a fairly full moon and there were innumerable bright stars above. Below, the ground was dark with only an occasional dimly lit hut to see. At 150 miles an hour and an altitude of perhaps only 200 feet we really seemed to be moving very fast. The pilot raced his vehicle through the air. It was both terrifying and exhilarating.
When we reached the location of the reported plague cases, the helicopter pilot landed on a narrow dike between paddies. I went into the village with a Vietnamese interpreter who had been waiting for me. I explained I was a bác sĩ and asked if I could help. No, a dazed mother replied, her two children had already died. I offered my condolences, and returned to the helicopter without examining them at all. When I landed back in Dong Tam, I notified McFadden that I had determined that the children had died of measles. I lied so that I would not have to justify my failing to get a bacteriologic diagnosis or autopsy diagnosis of the deceased—something which I considered was both dangerous as well as impossible.
McFadden continued to get progressively more bizarre as the weeks went by. At first his most prominent outward eccentricity was a newly acquired interest in recently exploded ordnance. While Dong Tam was being actively shelled, he would not head for the closest bunker’s safety but, instead, would jump into a jeep and drive rapidly toward the place where it sounded like the shells were exploding. He explained his rationale this way, “I collect the spent rocket tail fins and mortar shells. And, I might get wounded and so I could get at least a purple heart.” He was usually the first to arrive at the site of each attack—largely because everyone else would head for the protection of bunkers and only come out when the shelling stopped. He would grab whatever he could that was left of the barrages’ exploded ordnance and get back into his jeep and drive off with his trophies. There were designated specialists whose job it was to analyze the shell impacts and then use this information to back-calculate to where the ordinance had been launched. To do this properly they had to find the tail fins in their original configuration. They hated McFadden since he wrecked the scene and made it impossible for them to figure out where the rounds came from. Once I happened to come across these guys after the impact site had been raided by McFadden. “Crazy old fucker…he’s done it again!” I heard one of them muttering.
Weems began to sit at his desk for long periods of time doing nothing—just sitting and staring ahead. On a couple of occasions, he sat at his desk all afternoon out of uniform—in fact, he sat there immobile and totally nude!
Sometimes he would say odd things, “William, rabbit, moving, slowly, lettuce, with tops of tree trunks and the surveillance or other feet too.” He would grimace at some internally perceived nuance of these comments that only he understood. This, Rodger Kollmorgen explained to me, was a classic example of a “word salad,” and it is a symptom that is very characteristic of schizophrenia.

Locum Tenens

Every soldier was entitled to one R&R or rest and recreation vacation out of Vietnam during his year of duty there. For the roughly 20 battalion surgeons in the 9th Infantry Divisions that meant that their unit would not have a doctor to handle sick call and emergencies for the week or so the doctor was on vacation and traveling to the R&R site. The solution to this problem was to have the doctor from headquarters, i.e. me, go to the battalion and take over the surgeon’s duties while he was out of the county. This gave me a chance to see more of Vietnam and to escape from Dong Tam and the weasel for at least a week or so. And so, I became a traveling locum tenens at irregular intervals.
Usually I would be flown by helicopter to the unit and spend a day or two with the doctor in advance of his departure for his R&R. I would be introduced to the sergeant who ran the aid station, who would look after me personally for the week I was at this battalion.
Most of these locations were rather bleak, but one was located in what might have passed for a set out of the movie “South Pacific.” Our battalion headquarters was deployed in the remains of what had once been a beautiful French-style villa located within a coconut grove. Neat rows of heavily-laden tall coconut palms surrounded the ruins of the villa. There were mango trees in the patio with ripe fruit within easy reach. The home was built of whitewashed masonry—much the worse for war. Pretty much all of the roof, the windows and some of the upper walls had been blasted away by previous gun battles. The walls were pocked with little craters from small arms fire. Nevertheless, the building and surrounding palms had a glorious grandeur and beauty that seemed to shrug off the obvious devastations inflicted by the war. Here and there tiny noisy common house geckos scampered up the still-standing walls and began their incessant obscene calls as the tropical night abruptly replaced the dusk. The men referred to these nocturnal creatures as “fuck fuck lizards” because that is the way their vocalizations seemed to sound.
As the brief twilight arrived, so did the mosquitoes. I am convinced that these could suck all of your blood out of you in a single evening if given an opportunity. To prevent their attacks, we all carried small plastic bottles of oily DEET (N,N-Diethyl-meta-toluamide) that with which we liberally anointed ourselves. DEET was useful in other ways as well. It could be used as a fire-starter. In addition, leeches did not like the stuff. If they attached themselves to you, a squirt of DEET would quickly get them to drop off. However, the place where the leech had cut through your skin to attach itself would continue to drool a trail of blood for hours due to the leech’s secreted anticoagulant. DEET’s major drawbacks were that it made your skin feel sticky; it burned if it you got any in your eyes, and it dissolved plastics, for example, your eye glass frames.
By chance, the night I arrived was “movie night.” They were planning to show two movies that had been shipped to them by the Army Special Services Program. Right after dark, a large white sheet was hung in a broad passageway between two large rooms of the roofless villa. Men sat on the shattered floor tiles both in front and behind this makeshift screen to see the movie. A small portable generator supplied electricity and added a continuous noisy background droning to the ambience. The battalion had an old beat-up Army film projector. The first movie was a short porno fuck film with a whore and an obliging German shepherd dog. This bit with a dog was followed by the main attraction, “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.” The movie was contained in seven large spools of film, each encased in a round tin case. However, there was a small problem with this particular film print: none of the seven reels was labeled and so it was impossible to tell in what order they should be played. There was a fair amount of discussion about what to do about this missing information but a consensus was reached to just roll the film any way they possible. Therefore, the movie had a surreal quality due to both the random sequencing of the spools of film and the fact that two of the spools had been left un-rewound after a previous viewing elsewhere. The projector did not have a working high speed rewind feature and so these two reels were rewound by the projector showing them backwards with the sound turned off. Then they were run and viewed forwards also. The whole process was interrupted for about an hour because the villa was mortared and we had to hide for a while in a bunker. No one was killed, no one injured, so when we decided it was safe, the show was resumed. All in all, this movie lasted for about 5 hours. To this day, I could not describe the plot since my earlier experience merges with more recent recollections and leaves me permanently confused about what took place in that movie. It is also hard to believe but true that this movie made as much sense with the seven reels being played in a random order and with two of them being shown backwards, as in the traditional correct sequence! Only occasionally did the dialogue obviously not fit with what we had just seen in the previous reel.
The next day I travelled with the staff of the battalion surgeon’s office and specially armed guards (to prevent me from becoming a casualty) to perform a mission to win “the hearts and minds” of the Vietnamese civilian population of a nearby village. The concept was to contribute to the Medical Civic Action Program, or MEDCAP as it was nicknamed, which would show the Vietnamese that the Americans would make life better for them. The U.S. Department of Defense decided that such programs were crucial to winning the war. We were to go to a designated village and announce that the American doctor was available to treat all sick or injured persons for free. And so I went.
At the village only a small gaggle, fewer than 10, of old and very young patients showed up. When I wondered aloud why so few patients came for this care in an area with no other medical facilities available, my sergeant explained that notice of the doctor’s coming was only given a few minutes before I arrived. This was standard procedure since lengthy notice would have allowed the Viet Cong to arrange an ambush of me and those with me. However, this highlighted the major inadequacy of the MEDCAP program since only a few medical matters can be effectively managed in what is almost a random and very brief doctor-patient meeting. I could immunize children with DPT (diphtheria, pertussis (whooping cough), and tetanus) and I could treat tiny medical problems like colds and scrapes, but almost all serious matters that I saw could not be properly cared for. For example, I saw a patient who probably had scrofula—tuberculosis of the lymph nodes of the neck. She had enlarged lymph nodes in her neck and several draining sinuses from these hard nodes. Appropriate care would have consisted of getting a proper bacteriologic diagnosis, by using special culture media for tuberculosis, or by arranging a biopsy and staining of the lymph node tissue. Once the diagnosis had been confirmed, I should have prescribed many months of combination anti-tuberculosis drugs to be taken daily, and I should have performed regular follow-up visits to gauge the effectiveness of this care. However, none of this could be done during a single brief visit. In addition, the Army forbade dispensing more than one week’s worth of medicine to Vietnamese patients for fear that these medicines would end up supplying the Viet Cong. Just a single week of anti-TB medicine is worthless or less than worthless in that it contributes to the development of resistance to the drugs given in inadequate doses.
The Army also forbade scheduling return MEDCAP programs at specified times and locations because of the fear of facilitating Viet Cong ambushes. And so the MEDCAP visit was largely an irrelevant and unsubstantial window dressing. After about 15 minutes of giving out Band-Aids and placebos for colds, I returned to the battalion and held sick call for the battalion’s soldiers.
Sick call that week mainly concerned with men with skin rashes: heat rash, fungal infections both superficial and deep into the skin, and a few men with the deep burrowing ulcers of ecthyma. Once these were taken care of, I could lounge in a hammock slung under a large fruit--filled mango tree. Mangos were ripe and I set out to see if I could eat as many as possible in all of the ways I then knew to eat fresh mangos. Some I squished within their skin and then cut off the stem end to suck the juice out from around the pit. Others I first peeled then sliced with a Swiss Army knife I had bought in the post PX. I also could first slice and cut the fruit out of the skin of some other mangos. A Hispanic soldier taught me how to slice off half of the fruit from the pit, cut in from the flesh side to the skin to make large diamonds of fruit that were easily nibbled off when the entire side slice of the fruit was inverted by pushing f
rom the skin side inward. He also introduced me to his way of eating a mango by liberally sprinkling it with Tabasco sauce. Then and now I am convinced that Vietnam produces the world’s best mangos.

Operation Bootstrap

At the end of the week, I returned by helicopter to Dong Tam. Back in Dong Tam, rates of disability as a consequence of skin disease continued to be a major problem. The three or four visiting Walter Reed Institute of Research personnel and Professor Taplin from the University of Miami thought that changes in boots and or socks might decrease the rates of disabling foot problems. They brought with them a variety of prototype boots and socks to test the concept that if the boot could be constructed from faster drying materials and could be quickly removed, once the soldier was no longer walking in wet areas, the soldier’s feet would be less likely to suffer from immersion foot. I was tasked with setting up a field research site to test these various new types of socks and boots. A 91 C medic was relieved of duty with a unit serving in the Delta and was assigned to me for this purpose. I was given the authority to get men relieved from infantry duty to serve as volunteers in this testing project. The job was rather simple. Some volunteers would wear the test foot gear continuously while their feet were kept continuously wet. Others would be permitted to remove the boots and dry off periodically. We used an inlet of the Song My Tho river at one end of Dong Tam as the place where we did this field testing. It was a pretty spot. Clumps of purple flowering water hyacinth intermittently floated down stream by the river bank. The sloping river banks were dotted with clumps of little bamboos, young Nipa palms and plants that superficially resembled papyrus.
My newly recruited volunteers slept on the river bank with their feet in the water continuously all night. During the day they loafed along the edges of the river, adjacent to its banks with their feet constantly immersed in the tawny, opaque water.

The feet of the volunteers that drew the total immersion option were soaking wet for days. You would have thought that this miserable existence would not have attracted many volunteers, but hundreds tried to get accepted for this program since the alternative was to slog though the paddies of the Delta and risk ambushes, explosive mines, pungee sticks etc. My medic, Anon Innominate, (not his real name) picked the winners who would get studied and then oversaw them to be sure that each group kept as continuously wet as the study required.
It took very little time to get meaningful data on how much continuous wetness would cause immersion foot. And, not too surprisingly, the type of boot had no effect on decreasing skin problems in feet that were continuously immersed in water. However, some of the boots had a design modification that included a heavy duty zipper in place of the standard Army issue shoe laces. They were easy to remove and facilitated foot drying. These were coupled with special treads that more easily shed the sticky clay muds of the Delta and had nylon uppers with extra drainage ports to allow water to flow out of the boot. They soon became very popular; but by themselves did not prevent immersion foot.

My medic carefully recorded all of this field research and supervised the “grunts” in these projects. He was a quiet, thoughtful guy who was always looking for ways he could help the project along. And, he could be counted on to make sure the research continued even if I was out in the field servings as a battalion surgeon for some battalion while its doc was on his R & R.
While Anon Innominate was managing the project, now formally named Operation Bootstrap, I left for 10 days to go to Vinh Long. Its doctor was heading for a week vacation out of Vietnam and I was to watch over his battalion in his absence. I arrived by helicopter and was introduced to the doctor and the aid station staff. He left the following day for his R & R. Things were rather peaceful for the next few days. The base was a brutally barren spot with most vegetation within the perimeter cleared and high dirt berms surrounding its low barracks. After about 2 more days of total boredom, at about 11 on a hot sunny morning, a rifle crack sounded and was quickly followed by the cry of “Medic, Medic!!!!” A Viet Cong sniper had fired at and wounded one of the battalion soldiers. My medic and I ran over to where the calls were originating. My corpsman used his bandage scissors to cut through the man’s pants to expose the entrance and exit wounds in his thigh. My exam showed me that there were no major vascular injuries and the soldier’s femur was also intact. We started an intravenous line with some normal saline solution and I gave the fellow some intramuscular morphine. We did all this without knowing if we were all still in the cross hairs of the sniper. It was a worrisome situation for us, but unavoidable. The sniper was never found and I can only speculate that he lurked in some palm tree outside of the base perimeter.
We called for a dustoff chopper and carried the wounded man on an olive drab canvas gurney to a nearby treeless paddy dike. We waited for what seemed like an eternity, but was probably only 15 or 20 minutes. My very exposed location, out in the open only added to my anxiety. Five men on a dike (the wounded man, a couple of litter bearers, the medic and I) were an easy target. Eventually we heard the “chuff, chuff, chuff” of the dustoff craft. We popped a red smoke grenade to identify ourselves and let the pilot know the wind direction. Within minutes the slick had landed, the wounded fellow was handed over to the helicopter crew and he was on his way to the hospital.
Later that day things didn’t go much better for this battalion. A group on patrol was ambushed and three men were killed. The dead were flown out to Dong Tam where the mortuary personnel were located. The following morning, a Sunday, we all assembled for a brief memorial service. Each of the deceased’s M16 rifle had its bayonet attached and then they were stabbed into the earth so the weapons stood vertically “at attention.” The dead men’s boots, still muddy from the muck they had been slogging through, were placed in front of their rifles and their helmets were placed over the rifle butts. The battalion commander made a brief speech, a bugler played taps and a rifle salute was fired. The following days remained grim with miserable morale. I flew back to Dong Tam after the battalion’s own doctor returned. I was glad to conclude that depressing and anxiety filled week.

Kool-Aid and other Matters

In Dong Tam I learned that my medic, Anon Innominate, had blown his foot off by shooting himself at point blank range with his M16 rifle. He had been taken by medevac helicopter back to Saigon. I never got to see him again and I’ve never really understood why he did this. I suppose it could might have been an accident but that is really quite unlikely. I suspect that he worried that once the special research project concluded, he would be sent back to the boonies to be a field medic. He just could not emotionally accept this and so he decided to bail out by shooting himself in the foot. Sometimes now when panhandlers with hand-lettered cardboard signs that read, “Vietnam veteran, will work for food” approach me in San Francisco, I wonder if any of them might be Anon. Would I recognize him after all of these intervening years? Of course, Anon Innominate was not this fellow’s real name. However, deep within me I find this episode so very personally haunting that to this date, I have totally blocked his real name and his face from memory.
While back in Dong Tam, daily routine moved me through the calendar at an unbearably slow pace. Often back in New York, I had been troubled by the opposite of this: a perpetual very fast-paced life. As an intern or medical resident I never had time for leisure. My work week was often 100 to 120 hours long with little time for meals, sleep or anything but work. And during all of my past educational experiences I had always been driven to try to fit as much into each day as I could. For years I had dreamed of being able to just sit and think, to philosophize about life and my values. I had even informally thought that once all of my training was completed, I might take a year off just to think.
Now, I had been placed in a time and place where, for the first time, I had all the time I could ever want to just think. My official duties occupied no more than two or three hours a day. My daily routine was to get up, wash, shave and go to breakfast. Next came a brief visit to the Division Surgeon’s office and then an hour or two at my little medical dispensary to see people with minor problems. Then lunch. Sometimes I might go back to the Division Surgeon’s office for an hour or so in the afternoon. Then came dinner. Afterwards I might visit the Officers Club and chat with friends and then go back to my hooch to send a tape to Judy and Paul. My new friends, Rodger and Ed, also had lots of leisure. And so we set about to try and lengthen the ordinary activities of daily life. We intentionally would spend two hours on each meal so that we would not have too many hours with absolutely nothing to do. We discussed the minutia of our diet in unbelievable detail.
For example, every day the mess staff filled large insulated containers with Kool-Aid that were available with each meal. Each type of Kool-Aid had its own color and its own synthetic taste which barely covered the flavor of brackish, halogenated Delta water. We delighted ourselves by telling and retelling Kool-Aid stories. Rodger knew of a doctor that managed a ward of patients in Fort Polk Louisiana who were hospitalized for very minor upper respiratory illnesses. The Army viewed a person’s health in a black-and-white mode. Either you were well enough to do all of your duties or you were not. If you were too ill to do your usual training, you were placed in the hospital. The doctor who presided over these soldiers with head colds treated them all with a diet of only Kool-Aid. If the man did not get better on this treatment after three days, the doctor changed the color of the Kool-Aid.
We speculated on whether grape Kool-Aid might be better than orange Kool-Aid for colds. We pondered whether orange Kool-Aid mixed with vodka tasted better than grape Kool-Aid mixed with gin. We wondered if after the war any of us would ever drink Kool-Aid again. (Short answer: No!) We pondered how Kool-Aid might be manufactured. We cogitated on its solubility at different temperatures and what Kool-Aid might taste like if made with water that had not been disinfected with iodine. The water supply in Dong Tam was derived from the brackish waters of the Song My Tho River. We wondered what the salt content of the resultant Kool-Aid might be. It took a lot of thought about Kool-Aid to stretch lunch to the two hours we knew we needed to spend on this one meal.
For days, the topic of discussion was hot sauce. The Army diet is hopelessly bland and repetitive. The only added flavors that you could use to “dress up” your food were salt, pepper and hot sauce. The Army’s hot sauce came in a small plastic squeeze bottle. The stuff tasted vaguely like Tabasco Pepper Sauce. Soldiers from the American South loved this stuff. Often soldiers carried a bottle of it in the elastic band worn around their helmets. At breakfast, most of the men from Texas or Louisiana would squirt copious amounts of this on their scrambled eggs to hide the characteristic reconstituted dried egg flavor. The Army takes its hot sauce very seriously. They even have a detailed specification of how this stuff is put together:
5. SALIENT CHARACTERISTICS
5.1 Processing. The hot sauce shall be processed in accordance with good manufacturing practices (21 CFR Part 110).
5.2 Ingredients. Each type of hot sauce is a ready--to--use sauce prepared from ingredients such as, but not limited to, fermented red peppers, jalapeño peppers, chipotle peppers, habanero peppers, garlic, distilled vinegar, salt, spices, stabilizers, and other ingredients characteristic of each type.
5.3 Finished product. Each type of hot sauce shall be a smooth suspension of uniform small particle size and shall not stratify nor separate (minor separation which upon light shaking disappears and results in a uniform, relatively stable suspension is acceptable). The hot sauce shall have a typical pungent (heat value or bite) flavor and odor characteristic for the type of hot sauce.
5.3.1 Type I, Hot and Type II, Extra hot. Each type of hot sauce shall be a red to reddish--brown colored liquid and possess a pungent odor and a good flavor that is well balanced and peppery.)

Well, one day I got a letter from my uncle Al. He was working in the laboratory back in New Jersey that drew up these specifications for the hot sauce. Uncle Al thought this Army hot sauce was crap that should be dumped, and so he wrote me a letter asking what the men in Vietnam thought of this condiment. He hoped that a unanimous agreement from the troops that the hot sauce was terrible would bolster his arguments for its removal. I polled all of the guys at breakfast. We tasted each of the breakfast foods with different amounts of hot sauce. We asked men it they had their own favorite hot sauce recipes. We speculated on whether there would be riots if hot sauce were eliminated. And finally I wrote a lengthy letter to my Uncle Al pleading with him to prevail on the authorities not to change the hot sauce formula or eliminate this. Apparently the pro hot sauce advocates prevailed since this condiment was never removed from our diet.

Food from home was a welcome diversion from the boring Army diet. One of the guys in the B.O.Q came from Georgia and his mother sent him a local treat, an eight ounce can of Roddenberry's Boiled Peanuts. He generously shared them with several of the guys who were his neighbors and all of us really liked this unique treat. The peanuts were “green”--that is they had not been roasted. They were still in their shells and were canned with a slightly salty brine. He wrote back to his mother that they were a much appreciated treat. About a month latter we got another “care package” from Georgia of three more cans of Roddenberry's Boiled Peanuts. He shared them again with the roughly 20 men in the barracks, but sadly they were all gone within minutes. This time he wrote back expressing his appreciation but explained how many of us there were sharing them and a month later we got a shipment of two cases with 12 cans in each!
This inspired me to send a note to my mother, asking if she could send me a whole salami. She dutifully went to Katz’s Deli in the lower east side of Manhattan and bought a two pound salami that she had them mail to me. Katz’s had a sign in their window in those days that read, “Send a Salami to your boy in the Army.” I waited and waited but that salami never arrived. I told her it got lost in the mail and so she again made a pilgrimage to Katz’s and sent off a replacement salami. When two month passed and the salami did not arrive I wrote to her and asked exactly how this had been packaged and addressed. She explained in a letter I received two weeks later that Katz simply glued an address label with my address, Cpt. L.A. William 05259452, HHC 9th Infantry Division, APO S.F. 96370, on the actual salami and attached the correct number of postage stamps and dropped this in a mailbox. I quickly guessed what probably went wrong: that salami got eaten en route! Finally I asked her to pack the salami in a cardboard carton and send it that way. This one arrived and was enjoyed by all who tried it.

My attention to food as a vehicle to hide the emptiness and monotony of the day was matched by a developed interest in growing a moustache. First I had lengthy discussions around the breakfast table and lunch table with my buddies about the best type of ‘stache to develop. Should it be one of the simple Fuhrer-like stripes favored by the Weasel? All agreed that this would be totally gauche. Should it be thick and bushy, or thin and trim? Finally after a week of discussion and consultation with friends, I decided to create a classic upturned handlebar moustache. However, there was one difficulty. This sort of moustache required a specialty product to hold the ends together: moustache wax. I stopped shaving over my upper lip and simultaneously set out to find a contact who could get me the needed moustache wax. This proved really difficult. The local Post Exchange (PX), the only available retail outlet, did not carry moustache wax. No one seemed to know where this might be obtained. I spend hours on the telephone trying to reach people or places where moustache wax might be available. Telephones calls were cumbersome affairs. A single call might take 15 minutes to make. Then, one day when I was talking to one of the orthopedists from the adjacent surgical hospital, he reminded me that a similar product, called bone wax, was used in the operating room to stop bleeding during amputations from newly sawed bones. He agreed to get me some and this was just what I needed. Bone wax was light straw colored and was still sticky even in the hot climate of Dong tam.
The moustache slowly grew and became the subject of hours of debate. Would this delight or repulse Judy when she eventually saw it? Would it tickle her fancy? How long would I let it grow? Would it be permanent? At what point would the military object to its size? How often should I wax it? Was the wax smell objectionable? Eventually I had a very respectable moustache that took at least 15 minutes of attention on a daily basis to shape and reshape. This moustache lasted until sometime after my second R&R. Judy did like it.
One of the best places to waste time proved to be the Officers Club. Rodger Kollmorgen and I spent hours there discussing the important stuff of life and what items from the states we missed most. We would pull up our bar stools to the polished mahogany bar top and order up drinks that we slowly consumed. Many of our deep conversations concerned the pursuit of happiness. The Spartan life of a soldier in Vietnam convinced Rodger that he missed quality “things.” For example, he loved the closing sound of doors that were made of solid wood, rather than thinly sheathed hollow-core doors. Rodger dreamed of good cars and fine wines and fancy cigars. He missed anal sex with his Thai girlfriend. I yearned for Judy in a real house with a quality stovetop, great food and room for my toys--a hi-fi system, great books, and an oak roll-top desk. We lovingly detailed all the things we would enjoy. For me, I would describe in excessive, compulsive detail my favorite foods—my mother’s fruitcake: itemizing every single ingredient, talking of its amazing texture when correctly baked, its fragrance, slight stickiness and chocolate taste. Food from home in all its glory was very important. Sometimes we would describe in minute detail entire imaginary meals to compare and contrast. Would he rather have sauerbraten made with red wine vinegar, ginger snaps and juniper berries for his main course or would a great prime rib roasted to medium rare served with Yorkshire pudding be better? Had he ever tasted baked Alaska made with Sara Lee pound cake under a slice of high-butterfat quality vanilla ice cream and topped with real meringue? Rodger would tell me about the mystique of Cuban cigars--in particular the legendary hand--rolled Churchilean styled Romeo y Julieta No. 2 de Luxe. We discussed wines and liquor. He relished the peatiness of single malt Scotches and contrasted them with the fancy blends that were sold at the PX. Rodger sang the praises of cask strength Wild Turkey bourbon.
We concluded that we were at heart two total hedonists completely committed to enjoying only the sensual--the Dionysian rather than the Apollonian. After a long time talking about all the food, booze, and stuff we really valued, we got around to looking down at what we were actually drinking that particular day at the bar at the Officers Club. Rodger was just finishing a Diet Coke, his usual drink, while I had been drinking my usual—plain club soda. We then enjoyed laughing at ourselves.

Gradually, though, I think I did get to know myself better and some of what I found surprised me. While before Vietnam I had always thought that circumstances beyond me dictated the maddeningly fast pace of my life, I came to realize that this was really my own style and I actually liked this style. Later, my friend Ara Tilkian would describe this as, “Larry does business on the side while he is doing business on the side.” I like having many projects making multiple demands on my time and attention all at once. The obverse of this was that the Vietnam life, with little to do, was really terribly boring. And, when it wasn’t boring it was terrifying. I did not enjoy that year of lots of empty time to just think and philosophize. I needed to cram as much into my day as I could.

The Schvitz

One day a new form of entertainment appeared at Dong Tam: a massage parlor cum steam bath. Steam baths were very common in many of the R & R sites and Saigon boasted many of them as well. And so after hearing favorable reports about this one from several of my friends, I nervously decided to try it out.
I was very anxious about going into this place since I was not quite sure what they would do to me and less certain about what my autonomic nervous system might do to cause me embarrassment.
The local schvitz was housed in a big, unpainted wooden building somewhat like a barracks but lacking windows. It was conveniently located within the base confines only a few hundred yards from my clinic, in the direction of the river. It had a prominent overhead sign that proclaimed it the Dong Tam Steam Bath. Inside at a neat desk sat a young attractive Vietnamese woman wearing a delicate yellow áo dài with a high neck collar. Her dainty little feet wore elegant black lacquered sandals. There was a definite scent of some unknown perfume mixed with the fragrance of incense in the room. It was exotic and at the same time quite erotic.
“What you want, soldier?” she asked. I paused, puzzled, embarrassed and unsure of what to say.
Behind her was a sign with the different services itemized.
“I’ll take the shower, massage and steam bath,” I replied.
“O.K.,” she said, “Here towel and soap. First you take off clothes there and go take shower there.” She pointed me to a bench in plain view of the desk she was sitting at with a doorway to a shower just beyond this.
I went and quickly undressed and hurriedly disappeared into the shower enclosure. I must have spent at least 15 minutes in the shower because I did not know how to leave this without appearing nude before the female attendant. How to deal with this new situation was eventually resolved by a tiny Vietnamese massage girl, dressed in a white silk blouse, black shorts, and flip-flops, who matter-of-factly entered my shower enclosure, took the soap from me and gently washed my back. Astonishingly, this soap was scented with a floral aroma that was identical to the smell of little soaps in the shape of animals that I had used in my tub as a child in Maryland. It struck me as totally incongruous that that these two very different experiences could have been unified by this single perfume. She rinsed the suds off me and turned off the water.
Next, she reached out and took my index and middle finger in her delicate hand’s grip and led me by the fingers, still dripping, out of the shower. The shocking familiarity of this way of leading me made me wonder if this was how she might have lead a younger sibling, a son or lover.
“Here,” she said, “Take towel to dry.”
She passed a small white terrycloth towel to me which I then used to dry myself very quickly. When finished, I wrapped it around my loins. Again she took me by the two fingers of my right hand and brought me to a padded massage table and gestured to me to lie down.
“What kind massage you want, soldier?’ she asked.
“The three dollar standard massage,” I replied.
“You no want special massage? ----Special massage number 1,” she added.
“No!” I said emphatically.
She placed me prone on the table, removed my towel and proceeded to knead me like a challah dough for a very long time. Then she removed her flip--flops, climbed on the table and began to walk up and down my back. She worked the muscles of my back with her feet. My guess is that she only weighed 80 pounds or so. This really felt good but it was also somewhat erotic.
When she finished with my back she turned me into a supine position and began to massage my toes and feet and slowly made her way up legs until she was at my thighs. When I felt the subtle movement of my cremasteric reflex, I thought I might be done for but she paid no attention to the beginning hydraulics of male physiology and began to massage my forearms and arms. Finally she finished with my arms and turned her attentions to my chest and shoulders. By now, I was trying to remember the first 35 digits of pi, how to conjugate the French verb “etre” and just about anything else that might get my mind off being massaged by a tiny female in a skimpy silk outfit.
The massage finally concluded. Next I was led to the steam room where I sat on a wooden bench for a while as clouds of lavender scented steam rose around me. Then there was a final cooling shower after which I got dressed. Finally, I approached the front desk to pay for the experience. I left with a sense of contentment, relief and delight.
I went back to my aid station feeling very light and relaxed. However, the mood there was rather grim. One of the helicopter gunship crewman had earlier that day walked into the clinic to talk with his buddy the corpsman. He then described a very disturbing tragedy he said he had witnessed. The helicopter crew had landed at a nearby hamlet while they were waiting for instructions about their next mission. The village was a peaceful place with friendly Vietnamese. As was their custom, the slick did not turn off its turbine but slowed its engine until the rotors were revolving rather slowly. The side gunner climbed out of the slick to stretch his legs. He was standing beneath the slowly revolving main rotor. In a Huey, the blades were over two feet above his head. (The rear rotor was substantially lower and we all knew it presented a major hazard that needed to be carefully avoided. Slipping into its path was usually instantly fatal, although I know second hand of one guy who managed to have his scalp slit open by a brush with this blade and to have nevertheless survived the encounter.) While the side gunner was waiting there, a Vietnamese woman and her young son came out of a nearby hut to look at the helicopter. The airman gestured to the little boy to come over to him. The soldier began to play with the child and lifted him up. The boy really liked that and then the soldier gave him a bit of a toss upwards and instantly the revolving main rotor blade cut off the boy’s head. The child’s mother stood there mute with the horror of it all. There was nothing that could be done to undo this catastrophe. She took her baby’s body and walked back to her hut. The soldier tried to apologize but he spoke no Vietnamese. Any way, I thought, there was nothing he could do to undo this or make the situation better. The description of these events was absolutely horrible and its memory has never left me.

Donut Dolly

A week or so later, I again travelled by helicopter to a remote part of the boonies to assume the functions of an infantry battalion surgeon who was going on his R & R. This location was in an area notable for its flatness, rice paddies, and total absence of any trees, shrubs or bushes. Low mud ridges demarcated the water-filled rice paddies. The battalion was housed in tents erected on the dikes that surrounded these paddies. A single-seat burn-out latrine, unadorned with any surrounding outhouse or visual screening, was provided for the officers—an almost identical triple-seater was there for the enlisted men. Both of these facilities were only about 60 feet from the aid station tent. The location was hot, humid, peaceful, and quiet but there was really nothing at all for me to do. I spent my ample spare time reading and writing letters. After three or four days of total boredom a helicopter delivered a welcome diversion.
To the delight of everyone, we heard by radio that a helicopter was coming to visit us bearing a Donut Dolly! Sure enough, we soon heard the whump, whump, whump of a Huey approaching from the direction of Dong Tam. It hovered briefly over us. One of the infantry men tossed a smoke grenade so the pilot could see which way the wind was blowing and the craft briefly landed on the dry mud dike. The Huey waited with its rotors still turning while a pretty brunette wearing a clean, pressed, light powder blue uniform with a Red Cross patch on the shoulder stepped daintily out, clutching her head to keep the rotor wash from blowing off her matching kerchief . Within moments the Huey’s rotors began to turn much faster and it lifted off to return to Dong Tam. The young woman crouched and waited for the brown dust, pebbles and noise of the departing craft to subside.
“Hi,” she said, “I’m Emily and I’m here to entertain you!” Emily was a slight brunette, perhaps a tad less than 5’ 6” tall with a very engaging smile. It’s hard now to imagine how startling, shocking, touching, romantic and nostalgic it was after months of seeing no American women to have someone with the freshness of the imaginary girl next door to drop in, as if by magic, right in front of you. The grunts were all falling all over themselves to see the reality of a “round-eyed girl.”
Emily flicked the dust off her uniform and explained that she was there to bring a touch of home to the soldiers in the field. For the next several hours she played games, passed out humorous papers and sang songs with the soldiers. Some of the games were word puzzles; for instance, “I’m thinking of the name of a band….the letters of their name is SGHTEFU but I’ve scrambled them up—what do you call this group?” The men were engrossed, in love, adoring, grateful, and shy all at the same time. The songs were cute. Sample lyrics:

IncomingCHORUSIncoming, Incoming,Can't you hear those sirens, don't you see those flares,Ol' Charlie's playing games again.Incoming, Incoming,Grab your poncho liner and cigarettes and bring a friend. VERSE 1I applied for Vietnam, a weak moment understand.Came over here to build morale in this never -- never land.They briefed us on the monsoon rains and the Mekong Delta dust,But they didn't mention one damn word about the mortars fired at us. CHORUS VERSE 2Standing in the shower stall, the water's trickling slow.The dogs are staring at your bod and the bugs put on a show.You're all soaped up and getting clean, you're scrubbing down your back,Then the siren blasts, the MP yells, it's another damned attack. CHORUS VERSE 3To be awakened in the dark of night is really quite a strain. Those funny sounds like thunder from an early morning rain.The sudden realization and both feet hit the floor.I`m headin' up and I'm movin' out, but I can't unlock the door.

As the day wore on, however, I felt as if we were being conned, used, and exploited. I felt bitter that the “world” thought that sending this cute person here for a few hours could somehow make up for the filth, danger, loneliness, misery and squalid life all of us were living. And, I thought that Emily herself did not see how grim, horrid, and barren this world was for us. I decided to let Emily see first hand a single aspect of life as it was lived on a paddy dike. It was wicked, I know, but I started to ply Emily with canned soda and Kool-Aid. It was yet another hot humid day in the Delta and Emily happily drank a quart or so of liquids. As the afternoon wore on, I saw a look appear on her face gradually of slight discomfort as Emily realized that her bladder was now getting fairly full and there was no ladies room in sight. Eventually she told the soldiers that she needed to take a break and came to me to inquire where we had the ladies room. I gallantly showed her the officer’s one-holer 40 feet away on the dike. “But,” she said, “it doesn’t have any privacy!” “Yeah,” I said, “but that’s the way it is for us out here…that three-holer over there is the privy for the enlisted men—this is all we have.”
Emily was ingenious, however. She shortly after approached the battalion’s executive office and explained her plight. He ordered some soldiers to erect a screen of ponchos to surround the officer’s latrine and shortly after Emily was able to have a pee in private.
Later that afternoon the Huey returned to take Emily back to Dong Tam. A few days later, I too, returned there.

Our Sky Pilot meets a fellow Christian

Weeks later, Rodger and I met the base chaplain shortly after he returned from Bangkok, where he had gone for an R & R.
“How did it go?” we asked.
“Well,” he said, “It’s a very beautiful city and I heard so much about the massage parlors that I decided to try one. You’ll never guess what happened!”
He then proceeded to give us an explicit, detailed account of his adventure. The massage parlor he described seemed no different from that in Dong Tam except that the building that housed it was a permanent masonry structure. Inside there were several attractive scantily-dressed young women sitting around on benches or chairs waiting for customers. He was asked to choose one of these to be his masseuse, which he did. He was then led into a small room with a massage table in its center, and asked to undress and wrap a towel around himself. The masseuse left while he did this and then she returned.
She had the chaplain lie on his back while she began to massage his feet and legs. She slowly worked her way up his body until she came to the towel. Next, to the man of God’s utter amazement, she removed the towel and began to give him a blow job!
“You can’t do that!” he yelled, “I’m a Christian!”
At this, the little Thai masseuse burst into tears and said, “I’m a Christian, too!”
Then, it got even weirder. The chaplain said that he hugged the still sobbing masseuse and told her he forgave her. He then suggested that they pray together for their sins—which they did!
The chaplain was still unsettled by this odd event and wondered if any other person might have had such an experience in Thailand. We told him that probably no more than 80 or 90% of soldiers might have had a similar experience--but they probably would not have stopped the masseuse or mentioned that they, too, were Christians. The chaplain was astonished.
He was not the only one that had problems with R&R in Bangkok. One of the doctors stationed at Dong Tam was a fellow somewhat older than the rest of us named Major Barkley. Barkley had been a few months less the maximum age for a doctor that the military would accept for active duty. He was about 39 years old when the military gave him the “choice” of volunteering for the Army or being drafted. He had to leave his family practice and his wife and children in Texas. Although he was substantially older than most of the doctors who were battalion surgeons, he was nevertheless remarkably ineffective. He was a big, blond, bungling fellow who walked with a self--deprecating slouch. The military rank that had been assigned to him was not really earned, but was determined by the length of time from his graduation from medical school until the start of his military service. His usual modus operandi towards almost all of the challenges of life was to plead total ignorance or incompetence and ask somebody to help him. At first Rodger, Ed and I thought this was just because he was new to the Army and new to Vietnam. But, as time passed, he never became more knowledgeable.
His self-confessed areas of ignorance were universal. “Could one of y’all fellows tell me how to take care of this soldier I have who has bronchitis?” “Could y’all tell me how to use the PX?” “What should I eat for dinner?” And his endless questions never diminished; neither did his apparent universal neediness. And so when the time came for him to arrange for an R&R, he made numerous pleas for others to make the decision of where to go, how to get there, what to see, etc. And so we collectively decided he should go to Bangkok. Rodger helped him complete the paper work.
Then he heard of the chaplain’s experience. “Y’all gotta help me!” he said. “I need to know how to get to that massage parlor. Do any of y’all know how much I gotta pay to get what the chaplain got? The chaplain said you got to pick one girl from all of those that are there. How do I do this? Which one should I pick? What should I ask for? I’ve never used a whore—do any of y’all know what I should do? I mean, how do you start with a whore? What if I get a venereal disease…what should I do? I don’t know any of that Thai language, how will I do all this? Do any of y’all want to come to Bangkok just to help me a bit?” He was ridiculous in a totally pathetic way. Eventually he got an enlisted man to accompany him to Thailand and Barkley returned with an opal princess ring he planned to give to his wife. He was not successful in an attempt to purchase the clap for himself, although I think he tried.

Hope comes to Dong Tam

In December, Bob Hope came to Vietnam. For the soldiers, this was a very big deal! All of us felt to some extent abandoned by U.S. society. The anti-war groups in the States seemed to endlessly blame the soldiers in Vietnam for the war and its atrocities. There were doubly blind idiots like I.F. Stone, who in his 4 page I. F. Stone's Weekly, were perceived as simultaneously vilifying the US soldiers and by implication deifying the Vietcong. He published accounts of horrifying brutality inflicted by US troops and implied that this was what the US war activities were all about. He suggested that US troops were regularly and systematically ignoring the Geneva Conventions. Stone reported as fact total destructions by the US of Vietnamese towns. However, he never verified if the events he reported really too place. For example, I.F. Stone’s Weekly, February 19, 1968 focused on a town that was completely destroyed and this was, he said, emblematic of our methodical attempts to destroy all of Vietnam, ( I later spent a week at the particular town Stone reported had been “destroyed” and found it to be quite alive, present, and vibrant.) However, he was totally silent on the subject of the numerous Vietcong atrocities, (e.g., I.F. Stone’s Weekly, January 8, 1968 and April 1, 1968 .) Stories of soldiers returning to the U.S. and being spat on or insulted were common. But, more significantly, none of the folk from home, with the exception of the doughnut dollies, ever came to Vietnam. Vietnam was not friendly to tourists, entertainers or casual visitors. It was not a minor issue that the soldiers in Vietnam spoke of their home in the US as “the world” since we thought of our existence as out of the world. We saw ourselves as total outcasts, American pariahs. And so it was an exhilarating matter that a famous entertainer, Bob Hope, would come to visit us. This guy was old, rich, and could have just spent his Christmas safe in Palm Springs knocking little dimpled balls into holes in the ground. Yet he came to visit us, to help with morale and to give a bit of levity to what was for all of us a bleak and dangerous existence.
During the week before he came to the Mekong Delta, Dong Tam’s engineers built a stage, created an outdoor theater that could hold several thousand, and put up an extensive sound system. The stage was shaded by a huge parachute canopy suspended from a crane. Loud speaker stands were ingeniously made from telephone poles and somewhat improvised amplification systems were created. The doctors of the surgical hospital were told that they could bring those patients able to attend in wheelchairs, but the staff needed to manage their intravenous tubes, etc.
On the day of the show, the audience massively overflowed the space allocated for them. There were guys who saw the show from precarious perches both on and on top of power poles, and from the crane that held up the huge nylon parachute over the stage. Bob Hope was received more enthusiastically than the second coming of Christ would have been. Plus, he was in great form. He exhibited a kind of spontaneous humor that showed that what he said in his act could be improvised in an instant. For example, about half way into his show, Viet Cong in a distant tree line started firing at us. Within minutes, two cobra gunships that were already in the air turned their Gatling guns on this area. The angry roar of the 100 round bursts of the M197 electric cannon from the Cobras briefly interrupted the show. Were I Bob Hope, the probable target of the Viet Cong that afternoon, I would have dropped to the ground and ended my program. Hope, however, quipped that these Vietcong were probably just noisy critics of his show, suggested that throwing tomatoes was a more traditional way to show they did not like the program, and went right on with his performance! The soldiers responded to him with spontaneous enthusiasm, cheers, applause, whistles, hoots, hollers and repeated peels of wild laughter. We all loved Bob Hope and showed it. He showed a rapport and fondness for us that seemed to be boundless. The guys in the wheelchairs seemed to forget their catheters, drains, IV’s, and wounds, and shared in the fun that this great comedian brought to Dong Tam that one afternoon.
Being the target of Viet Cong machine gun fire was not the only problem Bob Hope had during that trip to Vietnam. I learned much later that as he flew in to Vietnam, an engine on the plane he was traveling on developed a smoky fire. That engine had to be turned off in flight. Hope chose to fly on rather than land in Bangkok. He didn’t want to disappoint the soldiers by not showing up.

How I Celebrate Tet

It was some time in December that I heard a rumor from a Mama san (Vietnamese maid) that the VC planned another special celebration for Tet, the Vietnamese lunar New Year. In 1968 a Tet attack had done considerable damage and was viewed by the VC as successful. When I heard that this sort of attack might be repeated, I started to figure out a way for me to escape Dong Tam for Tet 1969. Every soldier was entitled to one R&R or “rest and recreation” vacation out of Vietnam. The pre-designated sites for this six or seven day holiday were Tokyo, Bangkok, Taipei, Sidney and a few other spots. To get a place in one of these locations I had to put my name on a list, the location had to have an opening for when I wanted to go and, most important, my commanding officer had to sign a form permitting me to leave. Tet 1969 would be in the third week of February, and so I planned to be out of country then.
I brought my form for the R&R to McFadden, but he was reluctant to sign it. “I heard there may be some action around that time and it could be important for your career for you to be here—especially if you could get wounded!” he told me. “No,” I lied, “My mama san told me that it’s just a VC rumor designed to make the Americans nervous all the time. After the terrific beating the VC took in 1968, they learned the lesson of caution.” McFadden signed my form but over the next weeks he would from time to time suggest maybe I should cancel the R&R. I was able to talk him out of it, but he was sure that the conspiracy would lead them to do something for Tet.
Planning this R&R proved to be an enormously difficult and anxiety-inducing ordeal. First there were all the worries about whether or not I would be really allowed to go. If there were an early major Viet Cong offensive, surely McFadden would cancel my R&R. Next, my chosen destination, Tokyo, seemed at first to not have availability when I needed to go there. Then there was the problem of making arrangements for Judy to meet me someplace in Tokyo. Each letter or taped message I mailed home took about 7 to 8 days to get to New York and then 7 or 8 days for a response to come back to me. There was only time for about 3 such exchanges from when I got McFadden to agree to the R&R and when I needed to leave Dong Tam for Tokyo. I asked Judy to get a reservation for us in the Tokyo Hilton on February 18th, 1969.
Back in New York, Paul was enrolled in an experimental parent-child cooperative preschool run by the department of psychiatry of Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Dr. Herman Roiphe ran this program, which enabled psychiatric residents to observe normal child-child interactions through a one way glass window. Paul would be 16 months old at the time of the R&R. My plan was that he would stay home and be cared for by my mother while Judy traveled to Tokyo for the visit. I thought that it would be too difficult for Judy to take Paul all the way to Japan and possible too traumatic if I then failed to arrive. About 13 days before the R&R, I received a tape from Judy describing a conversation she had with Dr. Roiphe. Roiphe claimed that at approximately 16 months of age a child suffers from potentially severe separation anxiety and that not having his mother with him for one week might lead to permanent major psychiatric scars. Judy wondered, if that were the case, if she should really meet me in Tokyo for the planned six days.
I received this tape and was very distressed. What could I do? Should I go to Tokyo if I didn’t know if she would be there? Was it safe to not go to Tokyo and stay in Dong Tam, given my suspicions that there would be a Tet Viet Cong offensive? I sent Judy a tape pleading the case for her to meet me in the Tokyo Hilton, but knew there was not enough time for me to get her response before I had to leave.
There was one other way to reach her and that depended on the men from MARS, volunteer amateur radio operators in the U.S. and the ionosphere. The Military Affiliate Radio System, or MARS for short, was a program which enabled amateur shortwave radio operators, known colloquially as “hams” to communicate with men in Vietnam. This military-ham partnership enabled a soldier in Vietnam to talk via ham radio to a base station in his home city. The local ham operator in the States then had a way of dialing any local telephone number and “patching” the two calls together so you could talk to a loved one back home.
When the ionosphere was in good shape, radio messages bounced from terrestrial sites to the ionosphere and back with little deterioration until they were picked up and amplified by the ham operator at home. These calls did not duplex. This meant that as in most radio communication only one direction of communication occurred at one time. One person spoke and the other listened. When you finished saying something, you said “over.” This let the other person know that he or she could now talk and be heard. The Army also added its unique requirements to the communication process: you could not say where you were located, you could not say where you were going, you could not discuss what you were doing and you could not use profanity on the airways and the entire call was not allowed to last longer than 5 minutes. Only one MARS call was allowed each month for any individual soldier. All calls were continuously monitored by men whose job it was to cut off the radio communication immediately if any of these rules were breached.
All of the electronic equipment needed to place the calls was contained in a small Quonset hut next to the river or on a drab dusty truck that moved on a daily basis to various spots in the Mekong Delta.

The truck was only at Dong Tam about once every two weeks but on one fortuitous occasion I saw it parked just yards from the front door of my aid station with its exotic M.A.R.S. painted label in plain view. What luck! I joined a queue of perhaps 30 soldiers and waited my turn. I waited, and waited, all told about 36 hours on the non-moving line. The various men waiting in line would hold my place when I had to go to the latrine or get something to eat but the MARS personnel made it amply clear that if any waiting man was not present when his time to talk came, he was just out of luck. After this lengthy sleepless wait the guy who ran the MARS station emerged from the truck with an announcement. This time, the ionosphere was not cooperating--no communication could be established with anyone back in the states. None of us got to talk to anyone back home! The next day the truck moved on to another region but promised to come back in 10 days. I was angry, miserable, frustrated, and very disappointed.
When the MARS unit eventually returned, I was already waiting for it and was first in line when it opened for business just past dawn. I had written down key things I wanted to tell Judy so she would be in Tokyo when I got there. Within an hour the system was up and working perfectly. It seemed magical! I was overjoyed to hear Judy answer her phone. I could hear the Ham operator in New York explaining to her how to speak with this system and in moments we were actually talking.
“Hi, Judy, it’s me! How are you and Paul? Over”
“Fine! I just put him to bed, over.”
“That’s great. I’m looking forward to meeting you where we planned and rolling you, over.”
“Larry, I’m still trying to decide whether to meet you on that trip or not….Dr. Roiphe has reservations about the advisability of it and I have a meeting planned with him tomorrow to discuss it. Over...”
“What the fuck does….” Instantly the conversation was cut off by the censor and I had lost my turn on the MARS system for that month. I would not know if Judy would be in Tokyo until I reached the Tokyo Hilton.
And, if she did not make this R&R, I probably would not be able to see her until my year in Vietnam finished, since most men only got a single R&R during their year in Vietnam. Euphoria switched to despondency in an instant. Now I was angrier, more miserable, extraordinarily frustrated, and very, very disappointed.

Tokyo

A week or so later, I hitched a ride on a truck convoy heading to Saigon. I thought my odds of seeing Judy in Tokyo were at best slim. However, I knew that I had to take that small chance since I could not imagine a sadder situation than her traveling all that distance and finding no sign of me and not even a message from me. There would be no way I could contact her in Tokyo to tell her I was not coming.
The trip to Saigon had its anxious moments, but nothing bad really happened. Our convoy was headed by a jeep with an M60 machine gun mounted on it and a gunner who rode standing up with his hand on its trigger the whole way. Another such jeep followed behind. Everyone but me on the convoy’s trucks carried at least an M16 rifle. Some carried grenade launchers and some had composite weapons that could fire grenades from below the barrel of a special type of modified M16. Everyone wore flak jackets and helmets. We drove through the heavily forested road between Dong Tam and the town of My Tho past the region known as “Ambush Alley.” This was often a place where Viet Cong would hide to fire at passing convoys. We had to carefully drive off road briefly to circumnavigate a U.S. tank that had been blown up by a very powerful hidden land mine that had been buried in the dirt roadbed. The convoy moved as fast as it could to minimize the time we might be near any given hidden gunman. It’s harder to shoot a fast moving target than a slow moving one. Huge clouds of reddish-brown dust and grit were kicked up by the lead vehicle and coated everything and everyone in dusty grime.
I carried with me a heavy field jacket lent to me by Sergeant Jackson from my office. Jackson had previously been stationed in Tokyo and knew how cold it was there in February. The Army sent us off on our R & R without providing any o the necessary winter clothes we would certainly need in Japan in winter. In Long Binh I went back to the 90th Replacement Battalion and from there got on the plane which was carrying men to the R&R site in Tokyo.
We arrived in Japan at about 1 AM on a Monday at Camp Zama, the headquarters of the U.S. Army Japan, an hour outside of Tokyo. We needed to be back at this base at 1 PM on Saturday, 6 days later. There were no buses or trains running at that hour of the night. The surrounding Japanese landscape was covered with a light dusting of snow and frost. It was very cold—especially so for one acclimatized to the tropics. Most of the men on R&R elected to stay and shiver in the waiting room at Camp Zama until public transportation resumed about 7 AM. I, however, did not want to waste any minutes of this very short holiday in a military sitting area since Judy might be waiting for me in a hotel.
Two of us found and hired a taxi to drive us through the quiet dark roads that led us eventually to downtown Tokyo where the Hilton was located. An hour after leaving Camp Zama I reached this hotel. When I walked up to the reception desk, the Japanese clerk told me there was a guest staying there named “Judith Rilliam.” He gave me the room number. I ran to the elevator and went up to her room.
She was there!! She was warm, soft, affectionate, feminine and she was there!!!
That was a wondrous week. Many years later I grin as I remember the lovemaking, the toilet that would flush each time I pushed the lever and the guilty pleasure of hearing on the radio that another Tet offensive was now underway in Vietnam. In fact, they said that Dong Tam was still under attack and was on fire!
Here is how one of the guys at Dong Tam described that Tet:
“The evening of February 23, 1969, had begun peacefully with some of the guys jawing outside on the DISCOM bleachers. A couple of flares popped over the east perimeter, which wasn't at all unusual. Several more pops soon followed and in a short time the entire length of the perimeter was aglow in incendiary illumination. All of the east perimeter bunkers were sending up flares! This was very unusual. The parachutes suspending the flares caught the wind and drifted back over the berm above our heads. I ran into the barracks and got my camera. As I stepped back out of the barracks I heard a whoosh and then a horrific detonation. Without thinking much about exposure or focus I snapped a few frames in the direction of the explosion. The southwest corner of Dong Tam was enveloped in a firestorm! The Viet Cong had managed to put a 122mm rocket over the top of the berm into one of the fuel storage tanks at the POL depot near the fixed--wing airfield. The intensity of the ensuing fire ignited other tanks. All we could do was watch the flames and pray no one was too close.”
On my way back to Dong Tam, I had to spend an extra day at 90th Replacement Battalion because Dong Tam was still on fire. I am not sure how many were killed or wounded by this Tet attack. I was selfishly pleased that neither I nor my stuff in my hooch had been damaged.

Incoming

March was a month of frequent shelling at Dong Tam—often three times a night. The swimming pool was destroyed by a direct hit, as was the Reliable Academy barracks, where newly arrived troops were housed. The barracks were rebuilt very rapidly. The pace of repair of essential structures was much speedier in Vietnam than that of comparable construction back stateside. The Army had standard plans for a barracks, all of the supplies were on hand, and there were no Environmental Protection Act or city planning department clearances to be obtained. It was only a matter of a week or two before all was repaired. The pool was another matter—it was deemed unessential and therefore was not replaced. The new routine of frequent in-coming attacks, races to the bunker, and screams of warning sirens became the norm.
On March 26th about 10:30 PM I was awakened by the sudden loud screech of an incoming round. It impacted about 20 feet from my bed with an enormous roar. Fortunately for me, the 120 mm mortar round hit on the outside edge of a drainage ditch outside my hootch. The blast sprayed upwards and outwards from where it impacted with the portion of shrapnel heading toward my bed cut off by the sand of the ditch sides. At first I thought I must have died but then realized that dead people don’t have such thoughts. My room was a mess—there were multiple little holes in my wall from about 3 feet from the floor on up from shrapnel. Everything that had been hanging on that wall, including my M16 rifle was now on the floor. Further blasts could still be heard as the attack continued and these sounds noise was joined somewhat after the fact by warning sirens. I ran out the door as fast as I could and headed for my bunker.
When that attack finally ended, I returned to my room. There I poured myself a drink of about 6 oz of Johnny Walker Black Label Scotch and consumed this fairly rapidly. That was definitely too close a call, I thought. I decided that I would go back to the bunker and spend the remainder of the night in my jungle hammock. I loved that hammock. It had a rubberized roof that kept rain off you and sides that were made of sturdy mosquito netting that worked quite effectively. Once I was inside this, I would close the hammock with the Velcro strips that surrounded the netting panel, release a blast of the Army’s pyrethrum insecticide to kill the mosquitoes trapped on my side of the net and go to sleep securely, safe from mosquitoes, scorpions, snakes, rats and most importantly, from in-coming rounds.
There were three minor downsides of sleeping in my jungle hammock. Inside it was as hot as a fevered axilla since breezes were to a large extent screened out. But, this didn’t matter in a bunker since it was hot, humid and breezeless inside any bunker anyway. Then, you awoke in the morning feeling like you had rigor mortis since you were only able to sleep in a curved supine position. And finally, if you needed to urinate at night, you had to choose between a soldier’s Scylla and Charybdis. You might elect to try the tricky proposition of delicately leaning to one side, pulling open an inch or two of Velcro closure and oh so carefully peeing out onto the ground (tricky because if you leaned a bit too far, you fell out into a puddle of your own urine!) Or, you could un-stick the Velcro closure of the whole side panel and run outside and feed the mosquitoes.
That night I slept very soundly and did not awaken until after dawn.
When I came out of the bunker the next morning, several fellows were talking together about the previous night’s attack. “Where were you when the shit hit the fan??” one asked me.
“I was sleeping in my bed when that round landed in the ditch just outside my room,” I said. “No,” he said, “I’m not talking about the little chicken shit attack.”
Now I was getting annoyed. “That little chicken shit mortar almost killed me!” I said, and explained that after that, I went into the bunker and slept through the rest of the night. The fellows were highly amused by my claim that I slept all the way through the rest of the night.
It seems that the Viet Cong really got the attention of everyone else in Dong Tam later that evening when they were able to score a direct hit on the main ammunition dump of the 9th Infantry Division. Approximately 1,000,000 pounds (1/2 kiloton) of high explosive ignited in a single massive explosion that raised a fireball seen 25 miles away in Saigon. One way to imagine this is very powerful blast is to compare this with the nuclear device dropped on Hiroshima; that bomb had approximately 12 kilotons of energy. All structures for perhaps 100 yards in all directions were vaporized.
One person who was there when the dump blew described his experience this way:
Communist bombardment of Dong Tam was not unusual. Between January and May 1969, prior to the monsoon season, Dong Tam was mortared with great regularity, typically three times a night for weeks on end. It was like the Doctor Pepper slogan: 10 -- 2 -- 4. The VC wanted to keep us awake and edgy. Tired soldiers made mistakes and had poor attitudes. Charlie would throw in three rounds, wake everybody up, and off we'd go to the bunkers with flak vest, helmet, and rifle. It got so intense at times that some fellows opted to sleep in the stuffy bunkers along with the hyper cautious short--timers (those with 30 days or less to serve in--country). On the evening of March 26, 1969, at 2230 hours (10:30 PM civilian time) Dong Tam took no less than 13 120mm mortar hits. We were already exhausted from lack of sleep. After the All--Clear sounded many of us returned to our bunks. At midnight we were again awakened by the sound of incoming ordinance. We grabbed our gear and dragged our feet to the bunkers. Then came a single, indescribable, KA BOOM! At that point in time the world as we knew it had ceased. Over 500 tons of ammunition detonated in one horrific, incomprehensible, 4th of July fireworks finale. Several more huge, gut jarring, teeth rattling explosions were followed by the continual popping of small arms ammo cooking off and the ever--present whizzing of shrapnel through the air. DISCOM was situated the breadth of Dong Tam's Harbor away from the chaos. We caught Hell that night. Sadly, the US Navy caught worse. They were across the street from the ammunition bunkers. (personal account,Robert F. Fischer)

Rumor had it that over one hundred men vanished in the explosion to join the ranks of the M.I.A. (missing in action). Records from that time suggest the number was far smaller than that estimate. I have not been able to verify how many vaporized bodies were counted as M.I.A. Later in the day I drove down to the place where the ammunition dump had been located. There was not so much as a blade of grass at the ground zero. The surrounding destruction was what you might expect had a nuclear device been detonated there. Whole warehouse buildings had vanished without a trace. Scattered irregularly over the region were small shards of shrapnel. For a considerable distance, further from the epicenter, were buildings that had been bashed in or pushed over as if by a giant’s fist. And farther away still were scores of buildings whose windows had been blown out.
After that near miss, I decided that I would always in future sleep in my jungle hammock which I permanently kept inside the bunker hung from two spikes hammered into 4x4 posts. Well, at least that was my intention. Occasionally laziness and a preference for the relative comfort of my mattress in my hooch overcame my preference for safety.

In Which our Hero Travels

I resolved to spend as much time away from Dong Tam as I could. It was clear that this place might kill me.
The first opportunity I had to get away from the hazards of Dong Tam after the big detonation was created by a staff officer stationed on one of the barrack ships moored in the Song My Tho River. He invited me to spend a few days on the ship to “check out” their medical facility and see and consult on care of the men with fungal skin disease. For some time I had heard that these ships were a great place to live. I immediately accepted the invitation and a couple of days later hitched a ride on a Huey that was heading to the USS Benewah (APB-35). This was a ship built for service in World War II as a transport vehicle for tanks and other large vehicles. The Benewah, named for a county in Idaho, had been renovated circa 1966-67 and converted into a self-propelled barracks ship that was used as a mobile base for naval crews and what were called the Riverine Infantry of the 9th Division. The Army had painted the ship standard Army pond-scum green, in contrast to the usual navy colors. The Benewah had a large helicopter landing deck on it so that getting on and off the ship via helicopter was very easily managed.
My flight to the Benewah was fast and exciting since from about 3,000 feet of elevation in a helicopter the landing deck on the ship that we were heading for looked more like a tiny postage stamp with a thin circle painted on it than a substantial heliport. We quickly descended after a flight of only a few minutes. As we descended, the postage stamp landing zone quickly grew in size until we touched down and I jumped out. The Army captain who hosted me gave me a tour of the ship’s facilities. I was quite impressed. All of the living quarters were air conditioned. The officers slept in bunk beds—only 4 men to a room but this space did not seem to be any more cramped than the old room that I shared with my brothers when we were living in Queens, N.Y. The ship was far enough out from the banks of the river and its position was changed often enough so that it was not as easy a target unlike the places on shore in Dong Tam. All of the men on the Benewah enjoyed real flush toilets. Their showers had both hot and cold water! The best of the amenities, however, was the dining room for officers.
There, Phillipino waiters in neatly starched uniforms served beautiful and tasty meals on elegant china with real silverware! There were no flies or dust in the dining room. It, too, was air conditioned. This was a paradise compared to Dong Tam! With many regrets, I only spent one night on this ship. The next morning the mess boy took my order for ham and eggs with the eggs to be done sunny side up. After this fine meal, sadly, I went back up to the flight deck and was whisked back to Dong Tam.
A need to serve as a locum tenens for a doctor who was stationed in the boonies near Ben Tre gave me my next opportunity to escape from Dong Tam. He was leaving for his week of R & R and I happily agreed to take his place in his battalion. I planned to be there during Easter Sunday on April 6th. I was helicoptered to the battalion headquarters adjacent to the town of Ben Tre.

Ben Tre was the town made famous by a quote by Peter Arnett, at that time a reporter for the Associated Press. Arnett said that an Army major had justified the destruction of the city earlier in 1968 by saying, “It became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it.”

Ben Tre was a pretty site with many palms, banana plants and a quaint town where there seemed to be lots of commerce. Obviously, the town had not been destroyed although a section had been heavily damaged. The town is south of Dong Tam on the banks of one of the innumerable tributaries of the Mekong River. It was accessible by ferry or helicopter. Even today I do not think you can reach the town of Ben Tre without using a ferry of some sort. The aid station was small and the personnel were friendly. The sergeant in charge of the place made me feel welcome and showed me where I could stow my gear. The building was well protected by sand bags surmounted with sharp concertina wire. The location was vibrant with the noise of the town. Its entrance welcomed you with a colorful hand lettered sign that read, “Next time, bring your wife.”

Behind the aid station was one of the quaintest latrines I have experienced. This latrine was a small platform of palm tree trunks built over a pond. The platform was supported by palm poles and was reached by walking over a short bridge of planks sawn from palm trunks. There was a clean three-holer board privy adjacent to a cardboard box that held soiled toilet tissue. For the benefit of the uninitiated, there was a hand-painted sign that read, “Fish eat crap, not toilet paper—put the paper here!” I thought this was some joke but I had arrived on a Monday—malaria pill day. Eventually I felt the need to try out this latrine and I somewhat nervously walked the rickety plank, dropped my pants and eased my bowels. My mind was idly wondering whose idea of humor it was to put the latrine over the water when I heard a considerable commotion beneath me. By looking down through spaces between the palm poles of the latrine platform or through the cutout seat hole, I could clearly see the pea--green waters under me were churning with fish! These were big fish in the carp family. As the malaria pill continued to work its magic on my guts, the fish literally rose to the occasion with some of them actually leaping out of the water to receive my offerings! This latrine also was almost the only one I used in Vietnam that did not reek or need to have its contents burned out daily. My only reservations concerned the wisdom of eating those fish. But, I supposed that cooking them thoroughly might have killed all of the infectious agents they would be sure to harbor. The sergeant said that the local rice farmer that owned that pond was happy to have the soldiers feed his fish for him.
There was little work for me to do at Ben Tre. Mostly I passed the time reading a novel. As I lay on a cot feeling fairly comfortable, my peace was interrupted by the sudden call of, “Medic, medic!” When I emerged from the tent I saw several men in ARVN uniforms running towards me with a litter. On this litter was a tiny Vietnamese woman perhaps 50 years old who was bleeding from multiple sites. She had earlier been trotting down a dike path bearing a yoke laden with heavy panniers full of rice when she touched the trip wire of a Viet Cong booby trap. As she touched the wire, she realized what she had done but it was too late to protect herself. The explosive exploded with ghastly results. She had bone sticking out of a wound in her left arm, multiple head wounds, chest wounds, and an obvious fracture of the left leg. As quickly as I could, I started an intravenous line. Her skin was cool, slightly damp and stunk of blood and rice paddy. I started pouring normal saline fluid into her and then put field medical dressings on the various wounds while a medical corpsman was splinting the fractures. Surprisingly, as I ministered to her, she remained entirely silent. However, I noted her eyes followed all of my movements. Almost simultaneously I had someone call for a dust-off for her. Once she was given initial treatment, I went with the corpsmen carrying her stretcher and i.v. bottle to the site where we asked the dust-off helicopter to land. It seemed like it took a very long time for this one to arrive; however, it always seemed like it took a long time, when actually the choppers usually came within only 15 to 20 minutes. While we waited at the dust-off site, we lined up a few different colors of smoke grenade canisters so we could mark our location. Waiting on a paddy dike at dusk, exposed, was always an uneasy experience for me. I was tugged simultaneously by two different concerns. First, my patient, the corpsmen and I were obvious, vulnerable and unprotected targets. In addition, there was an enormous sense of worry and anxiety for the life of a patient who clearly needed urgent care unavailable in the boonies. Would she get to a hospital in time? Minutes seemed to take hours as we waited.

When we first heard the whup--whup--whup of the approaching helicopter blades, about ten minutes later, we used our radio to call the pilot and asked it he could see us. “Pop some red smoke” he called back. I pulled the ring on a red smoke grenade and tossed it onto the dike. The dense, blood--red smoke billowed out and drifted slightly away from us in the wind. As the smoke pulsed out of its canister it swirled, diffused and slowly rose in the air, looking like a sympathetic aerial hemorrhage. This dramatic visual cue gave the pilot both a certainty that we were who we said we were and told him needed information about wind direction and velocity. Within minutes he had deftly landed. The poor injured woman was carried on the stretcher to the helicopter; the i.v. fluid bottle carried by my corpsman was passed to a corpsman in the chopper. Very quickly but gently she was loaded aboard and without even waiting to slide the door shut the bird was lifted up and headed to a waiting hospital. I never saw her again. I hope she survived.
Later that day I treated a captive Viet Cong soldier who had minor injuries. Then he was marched away by guards to a POW compound with his hands manacled behind. The remainder of that week before Easter was quiet. I treated an assortment of ringworm, gonorrhea, ecthyma, gastroenteritis, and mild respiratory ailments during daily sick call. After this, I read some of Hesiod’s Works and Days.
My sergeant mentioned that there was an orphanage in Ben Tre on the other side of the river from us that he planned to visit for Easter. The place was run by an order of elderly Vietnamese nuns who were caring for about 200 children. They would welcome any medical help they could get since they had very little in the way of medicine and no available medical personnel. I agreed to come along and offer any assistance I could provide.

Easter Sunday dawned pretty much like any other day. The radio’s Dawn Buster program crowed “Goooood Morning, Vietnam!” at 6:15 AM exactly on schedule. After breakfast and a brief sick call for the men of the battalion, the sergeant, a couple of medics, and I rode by jeep to the nearby Ben Tre ferry to cross the river. The medics carried supplies: antibiotics and dressings and surgical antiseptics. A small group of people waited for the ferry to arrive. There was a woman with a cute little girl who was transporting a large wicker basket of noisy ducks. There were a couple of tiny battered cars. An ARVN soldier, the ostensible guard of the ferry, was snoozing quietly in a hammock adjacent to the dock. A platoon of infantry soldiers were also waiting at the ferry launch planning to board one of the small U.S. Navy Riverine vessels waiting for them. There presence was both reassuring because of all of the weaponry they carried, but also somewhat bizarre when you realized that this was Easter Sunday. “Jesus Saves,” was written in large letters on the back of the flack jacket of a huge soldier who hefted the 35 lb. tube of an M-67, 90mm Recoilless Rifle to his shoulder as he waited in line. These people were planning another normal day of hunting and killing humans.

The ferry arrived. It was a small affair made of three shallow barge hulls held together by a wooden platform nailed on top. The whole craft was powered by a dinky diesel engine. The ferry was big enough for only a couple of cars and about 20 or 30 people. We all crowded on board and it put-putted us across the mud-brown river.

We walked from the ferry to the orphanage. The building was a huge one story structure, with high ceilings, peeling paint and hundreds of old iron beds and cribs lined up in large, hot, crowded wards. Children were roughly grouped by age. Often there was more than one child in a crib. Most wore only a simple smock--like one piece garment. Some lacked even that. Many stood silently was we came in. We were greeted warmly in fluent Parisian--accented French by the Mother Superior. She and perhaps only 5 or 6 other aged nuns were the entire staff for this facility. Food was donated by local people--for all else they made do with occasional foreign philanthropy and lots of prayer. These orphans had been dropped off at the building, often at night, by anonymous locals. Their plight was caused by the war, illness, poverty and mixes of these disasters.

We toured the wards with Mother Superior. She was a diminutive woman, perhaps about 60 years old who had been at this institution for years doing what she could to help those no others would. It was lunchtime and the toddlers were each eating their food: a small amount of plain rice in a little bowl. There were some children with hydrocephalus. These lay listlessly on their soiled mattresses while flies crawled over them. Some children cried but most watched silently as we walked by their dark, fly--ringed eyes staring out of sunken etiolated faces. Small hands occasionally were poked out between the bars of the cribs in greeting or supplication; which it was remains to this day unclear to me. The smells of unwashed kids, spoiled milk, vomit, and diarrhea were palpable.

In one room, older children were eating from their bowls of rice. They were very much quieter than children usually are and none smiled. There seemed to be no interaction between these children and no signs of toys, books or any objects other than their cots and the rice bowls. It was a barren landscape. The Mother Superior brought me to one little girl, perhaps 8 or 9 years old, who had a swollen jaw and a draining abscess. I gave some antibiotic capsules to the nun for this child.
The needs of this institution’s children seemed enormous and these few old women were doing all that they could but it was clearly not enough. The nuns could not supply many of the fundamental ingredients of child care: food, clothing, medicine, parents, family, teachers and medicines, from simple basic things like multivitamins to treatments for malaria, worms, and infected skin wounds. Any direction I looked, I could see enormous unmet needs. In place of these desperately needed goods and services, these nuns could only offer love, supplemented with endless hard work.
My sergeant had brought with us a large but still quite insufficient collection of medicines, dressings and vitamins, as well as some cans of Coke which he gave to the kids. Some of the medical supplies I believe he had personally bought at local markets. We spent much of the day examining and treating the sickest of the children as best we could. What was particularly heart--breaking was that we could not plan regularly scheduled visits back to this place. We never really knew where we would be at any time in the future. Furthermore, the Army declined to treat local people in clinics with pre--arranged schedules for fear that the Viet Cong would learn of these schedules and ambush the caregivers.
When we had dispensed the last of our medicines and supplies, we said goodbye to the nuns and returned to the ferry and from there went back to our aid station. It was personally quite painful to be able to do so little for those who needed so much—especially since I knew that the US had the tools, resources, and personnel to do much more. What we lacked, however, as a nation was the will to do this.

A Holiday for the Chosen

The next day, I flew back to Dong Tam. It was very hot and very dusty. As I drudged to the mess hall for lunch, my boots kicked up little puffs of ochre-colored dust, leaving their prints in the fine talc-like powdered clay. At lunch, the chaplain mentioned to me that there was going to be a Seder held for Jewish soldiers in Long Binh. The chaplain assured me that this would be done right with all of the required religious food items in place, including kosher wine and of course matzo. He gave me a mimeographed flyer explaining where and when the event would take place. All were welcome. I figured that a Seder meal would have to be better that the boring fare I had just finished. Also, Long Binh was much safer than Dong Tam since they hardly ever got mortared there. As I walked back from the mess hall to the clinic, further clouds of fine, tawny dust were liberated by my boots. High above, enormous cumulus clouds threatened, but it hadn’t rained for weeks. I planned to go just for a day or so.
I reminded McFadden that I was Jewish and would need to travel to Long Binh for this absolutely necessary deeply personal religious service. He gave his approval with a silent small grimace. On the day of the first Seder, I hitched a ride by helicopter up to Long Binh and located the dining hall where four or five guys were making preparations for the Seder. I introduced myself to them and they invited me to help get ready. These people were a mix of officers and enlisted men. One was an orthodox surgeon, Mandell Ganchrow, from the 93 Surgical Hospital, I believe. We worked together to spread white plastic table cloths over the wooden tables, set out silverware (but no plates) and utilitarian plastic beverage glasses (not wine goblets.) Then we broke apart bunches of celery so the leaves could be on a Seder plate and the remainder served as crudités with black olives. There was a rabbi who said that the Army had procured individually frozen, glatt-kosher entrées of pot roast, carrots and potatoes from Schreiber Caterers, a Brooklyn-based company. These were defrosted and were then heated in their aluminum foil serving plates in the adjacent kitchen. For religious purposes, the rabbi had managed to round up three or four cases of Manishevitz Concord wine that we distributed on the tables. It was all rather informal. As we worked, others came and joined us. Eventually about 40 men were gathered together.
At sundown, the rabbi began the service. Things went well for some time. The pot roast was delicious. It reminded me of past meals I had eaten and enjoyed at the New York Jewish Theological Seminary when I was a college student at Columbia. The wine brought back memories of past Seders in happier locations. We were all having a very good time when just as the service began to deal with the celebration of freedom from enslavement, a Viet Cong mortar attack began!
In moments we all dropped to the ground. The attack seemed rather brief. Once the sound of explosions ended, Major Ganchrow stood up by his table and announced: "Men, I am the ranking officer in this room. I give you my solemn word that God will allow no harm to befall you if you now perform the mitzvah of sitting back down and finishing the Seder!" This was obviously one very crazy fucker! He was ignored. We all grabbed the bottles of wine that had not been opened as well as the remnants of the open bottles and ran for the nearest bunker. The Seder was over.
The next day I hitched a ride back to Dong Tam with one and a half bottles of Manishevitz and memories of a Seder ruined in an entirely unique way.
The morale of men in Dong Tam continued an inexorable slide downward that for me seemed to have accelerated after the ammunition dump was destroyed.. A huge painted FTA (fuck the Army) appeared on the post’s main water tank. Everyone paid more and more attention to his DEROS (date eligible for return from overseas). “Short timer” calendars proliferated. These were pictorial representations of the 365 days-long tour that made up a soldier’s stay in Vietnam. Sometimes these were carton figures of women in erotic poses with all of their visible body carved up into parts representing the days starting with day 365 and going backwards to day one. Once you had colored in each of the pieces of this puzzle, your time in Vietnam was over.
Ed Schwarz, who usually acted quite appropriately, now started becoming a bit bizarre. For example, one day when walking to the DTOC for an evening briefing session, an infantry colonel heading in the opposite direction passed him on the sidewalk. Ed gave him a broad smile, saluted sharply in the most perfect military manner and simultaneously said, “Fuck you, sir!” Ed continued to walk smartly ahead and the colonel, unwilling to believe what he heard, just kept on walking. Ed told me about this with great amusement. On another occasion, Ed wore a pair of Levi jeans in place of his regulation army uniform pants. He was stopped by a superior officer who told him he was “out of uniform.” Ed smiled, acted totally dumb, and commented that his uniform shirt was entirely correct. The officer said, “But look at your pants!” “What’s the matter with them?” Ed said, still acting like a jerk. “They are not the uniform pants,” the officer said, “You have got to change them immediately!”
“Yes sir!” Ed replied and kept on walking.
While Ed was up to his passive-aggressive nonsense, McFadden became increasingly withdrawn and indifferent to most events around him.
Often he would sit for hours in his office doing nothing but silently eating box after box of Cracker Jacks. This was a candy snack mix of caramel-coated popcorn and peanuts. Cracker Jack came in a cardboard box about 1 x 4 x 8 inches which was covered with shiny, waxed paper. In the very bottom of each box there was a diminutive “prize.” The prizes were tiny plastic animals, cards, whistles, letters of the alphabet and other tchotchkes. I assumed that Weems collected them, just as he collected tail fins of mortars and military awards. As McFadden munched, he ruminated on the war, the conspiracy, his current rank and what he might do to advance his career. He wanted to think up new ways to show his value to the division. After an afternoon of snacking, he became inspired.
“We need to have a professional organization,” he said to me. “We’re in the Army,” I replied. “No,” he said, “I want a Mekong Delta Medical Society!” I was appointed as the one who would create this. And so I wrote up a description of this new organization. Its purpose was to “further the education of physicians in the Mekong Delta.” I got the Weasel to agree to pay for a dinner at the officers club with drinks on the house. I designed a cardboard poster for distribution on the post. All of the doctors in the 9th Infantry Division were invited to fly in for the inaugural meeting of this grand society with the enticement of an evening where free drinks and a steak dinner would be provided. We mailed out invitations and about 20 battalion surgeons agreed to come to the dinner meeting. The day before the meeting, a new battalion surgeon came to the office of the division surgeon. This FNG (fucking new guy) was due to report to a unit in a more rural area but we invited him to stay over another day in Dong Tam so he too could enjoy the camaraderie of the newly formed Mekong Delta Medical Society.
The dinner was gloriously successful. That is, everyone enjoyed the steaks, booze and beer at the Officers Club. McFadden gave this group of assembled doctors of the Mekong Delta Medical Society the following “canned” boot speech:
“Sirs, the unique environment of the Mekong Delta is characterized by persistent heat and continuous humidity that exceeds 90 percent. Soldiers in this field of war are often continuously wet since for operational reasons they must spend days or weeks marching through inundated rice paddies and adjacent canals. The combination of heat, humidity, dirt and wet feet cause, as I am sure you know, considerable morbidity from immersion foot, ecthyma, and tinea profunda. Here in the Delta we have developed an innovative program of field dermatologic research which, in cooperation with the Walter Reed Armed Forces Institute of Research, and the University of Miami’s Department of Dermatology, has resulted in new footwear for the soldier in the field. In my hand you see a prototype of our new jungle boot with several unique features designed just for the Mekong Delta: first you will note that the foot has additional metal mesh protected portholes to facilitate the rapid drainage of water, the uppers are manufactured from fast-drying nylon fabric and in place of the traditional laces, there is a heavy duty nylon zipper to allow the soldier to easily remove the boots to allow his feet to dry. This boot also has a special tread on the bottom to prevent the heavy mud of the Delta from adhering and weighing the soldier down….” The doctors joyfully cheered him since they had already consumed far too much alcohol.

Then the drinking continued and continued. As the docs stumbled out of the Officers Club, still boozy and happy, the new guy staggered off the pathway leading towards the BOQ and fell into one of the numerous drainage ditches that criss-crossed Dong Tam. His screams brought some of the more sober docs to his aid. They had him taken to the nearby 3rd Surgical Hospital. There x-ray films confirmed that he had suffered a comminuted fracture- dislocation of his shoulder —and this after only 3 days in country! This lucky bastard had his million dollar wound splinted and then he was dusted off to Saigon and eventually back to the States. He now is entitled to care in any Veterans Administration hospital for life due to his permanent service-connected disability.

In Which Awards are Given and Roles Alter

Bronze Star Medal
“The Bronze Star Medal is a United States Armed Forces individual military decoration and is the fourth highest award for bravery, heroism or meritorious service. The medal is awarded to any person who, while serving in any capacity in or with the military of the United States after December 6, 1941, distinguished himself or herself by heroic or meritorious achievement or service, not involving participation in aerial flight, while engaged in an action against an enemy of the United States; while engaged in military operations involving conflict with an opposing foreign force; or while serving with friendly foreign forces engaged in an armed conflict against an opposing armed force in which the United States is not a belligerent party.
Awards may be made for acts of heroism, performed under circumstances described above, which are of lesser degree than required for the award of the Silver Star. Awards may also be made to recognize single acts of merit or meritorious service. The required achievement or service while of lesser degree than that required for the award of the Legion of Merit must nevertheless have been meritorious and accomplished with distinction.
The Bronze Star Medal is typically referred to by its full name (including the word "Medal") to differentiate the decoration from bronze service stars which are worn on campaign medals and service awards. The Bronze Star is a bronze star 1 1/2 inches (38 mm) in circumscribing diameter. In the center thereof is a 3/16 inch (48 mm) diameter superimposed bronze star, the center line of all rays of both stars coinciding. The reverse has the inscription "HEROIC OR MERITORIOUS ACHIEVEMENT" and a space for the name of the recipient to be engraved. The star is suspended from the ribbon by a rectangular shaped metal loop with the corners rounded. The ribbon is 1 3/8 inches (35 mm) wide and consists of the following stripes: 1/32 inch (1 mm) white 67101; 9/16 inch (14 mm) scarlet 67111; 1/32 inch (1 mm) white; center stripe 1/8 inch (3 mm) ultramarine blue 67118; 1/32 inch (1 mm) white; 9/16 inch (14 mm) scarlet; and 1/32 inch (1 mm) white.” Wikipedia.

McFadden saw to it that I was awarded a Bronze Star Medal for my role in arranging that eventful doctors’ get-together—although concerns about the embarrassment over losing one doctor as a casualty of the meeting made certain that there would never again be a repeat of the Mekong Delta Medical Society meeting.
Over the next weeks, I decided to properly commemorate that first, last, and only meeting of the Mekong Delta Medical Society. I bought a box of Cracker Jack at the Post Exchange. One evening, in the privacy of my room, I very carefully started working to separate the layers of the Cracker Jack’s glossy waxed paper covering at the bottom of the package. I needed to use a scalpel with a #11 blade since the covering had been heat treated to melt the waxy coatings together to seal the box. After perhaps an hour of fine dissecting of paper layers, I could see clearly the grey, thin underlying cardboard. Very delicately I incised this with one fine stroke of the scalpel blade. This gave me access to the “prize,” a small plastic camel. By using a dainty hemostat, (one that had been liberated from a Viet Cong hospital surgical case) I was able to extract the “prize” without doing further damage to the box. Next, I carefully inserted my Bronze Star Medal though the box’s incision and buried it beneath the caramel--coated pop corn. The overlying layers of paper were resealed with a drop of glue and the finished product looked just as it should: the product's logo, Sailor Jack and his dog Bingo, were as glossy as ever, the box pristine.
Very early the next morning, just about the time Specialist 4th class Adrian Cronaurer began his crowing, “Goooood Morning, Vietnam,” on Dawnbusters, I was at the Division Surgeon’s office with my special present. No one was about. I walked into the Weasel’s office and removed one of the three Cracker Jack boxes he had neatly lined up on his desk for the morning’s work. I replaced the middle one with my specially prepared box. Then I went to my desk and ate the Cracker Jack candy from the purloined box before going to the mess hall for some morning coffee.
At 9 AM I was back in the office busying myself with writing up yet another congressional investigation of a soldier who reported his illness was not being taken seriously. About an hour or two later, McFadden arrived and sat at his desk in thought for about 15 minutes. His heavy lifting completed, he rewarded himself by starting to eat through his morning squad of Cracker Jacks. I was not watching but remembered that he always ate the Cracker Jacks in strict sequence beginning with the box on the far left. It was a while before his quiet munching sounds abruptly stopped and a long pause ensued. Then he began to scream the scream of great outrage. “Who put this in my Cracker Jack?” he yelled, holding up my Bronze Star Medal. “I want that son of a bitch found and immediately court marshaled. Who did it? How did the bastard do that? Where is his respect for the military?” The tirade raged for quite some time. The other guys in the room as well as me all looked very puzzled. “Maybe,” I suggested, “The Cracker Jack company just wants to do something to show that they support the military.” He was skeptical. McFadden never did have this mystery unraveled.
But, McFadden himself continued to relentlessly unravel. He talked less and less. His speech became increasingly formulaic and inappropriate—especially if you just let him direct the conversation. When any new person came into his office for any purpose at all, he was given what we called the boot speech. This was exactly the same speech he had given at the Mekong Delta Medical Society. Eventually, Rodger Kollmorgen and I became so concerned with his frequent psychotic verbal ramblings and behaviors that we determined that he needed real, formal psychiatric help, and should be removed from Vietnam for medical reasons. Rodger ascended the medical chain of command, finally reaching the top psychiatrist in USARPAC (U.S. Army, Pacific) and his counterpart in charge of all psychiatry in Vietnam. These two doctors, both full colonels, agreed to make a visit to Dong Tam to perform a psychiatric evaluation of McFadden. The arrived at our office less than a week after Rodger spoke with them. Rodger and I met with the two psychiatrists and detailed the signs of a major psychiatric disorder: withdrawn and increasingly bizarre and/or autistic behaviors such as sitting at his desk for over a day at a time wearing no clothing, lying in a fetal position on his bed for days without eating, drinking or sleeping, inability to interact with peers or subordinates, increasing talk about “conspiracies,” and intermittent speech consisting of a word salad. We discussed how they might best examine him without being demeaning or embarrassing. Finally we decided to be fairly direct but gentle and have Rodger broach the subject of why the psychiatrists had come to Dong Tam to evaluate him. Rodger introduced the doctors to McFadden.
“Sir, these two gentleman, the USARPAC head psychiatrist and the top psychiatrist of USARVN (US Army, Republic of Vietnam) have come here to pay you a visit. They have heard that you sometimes have trouble sleeping and have heard that the stress of your job may be causing personal problems for you. They would like to talk to you a bit about this.”
“Colonel, can you tell us a bit about how you are feeling inside right now? We just want to chat a bit about your personal thoughts and emotions.”
McFadden answered, “Sirs, the unique environment of the Mekong Delta is characterized by persistent heat and continuous humidity that exceeds 90 percent. Soldiers in this field of war are often continuously wet since for operational reasons they must spend days or weeks marching through inundated rice paddies and adjacent canals. The combination of heat, humidity, dirt and wet feel cause, as I am sure you know, considerable morbidity from immersion foot, ecthyma, and tinea profunda. Here in the Delta we have developed an innovative program of field dermatologic research which, in cooperation with the Walter Reed Armed Forces Institute of Research, and the University of Miami’s Department of Dermatology, has resulted in new footwear for the soldier in the field. In my hand you see a prototype of our new jungle boot with several unique features designed just for the Mekong Delta: first you will note that the foot has additional metal mesh protected portholes to facilitate the rapid drainage of water, the uppers are manufactured from fast drying nylon fabric and in place of the traditional laces, there is a heavy duty nylon zipper to allow the soldier to easily remove the boots to allow his feet to dry. This boot also has a special tread on the bottom to prevent the heavy mud of the Delta from adhering and weighing the soldier down….”
“Yes, colonel, we’re glad to hear about your progress in this area but how do you feel now?”
“Right, and in addition to the boot, we have developed a very fast drying sock that will replace the traditional tropical cotton sock that tends to dry very slowly in this climate. Now, this boot is only our latest prototype. Others are on the way that may be easier to remove and faster to dry.”
This dialogue of the deaf continued for another half hour. Then the psychiatrists thanked McFadden for his cooperation and left to have an exit interview with Rodger and me.
All were in agreement that he was now blatantly psychotic but the two senior psychiatrists said that removing McFadden from a war zone for psychiatric reasons would be a blot on his career that would be permanently harmful. They decided that instead of this, Rodger would be given the duty of looking after Weems. They would discuss the matter with the Commanding General and they would recommend that I should be appointed the Acting Division Surgeon, thus relieving McFadden of all official duties. And so, McFadden remained in Dong Tam, coming and going from his office as his delusions dictated. I became the Acting Division Surgeon and attended each of the daily divisional briefings in his place.

The Good the Bad and the Bizarre

I was in my clinic seeing soldiers with skin disease one morning when one of the grunts brought up a unique new issue.
“Sir, I want to adopt a Vietnamese child,” he said. Memories of the day at the orphanage were fresh in my mind and so, eager to help rescue an orphan, I told him I would see what was required to make such an adoption. I explained that I would need to do some research. I asked him to return to the clinic the next day. By then, I had talked to several people in division headquarters—in particular some of the officers in the Judge Advocate General Corps (JAG) who were the military’s lawyers. They supplied me with a form that needed to be completed for adoption. It required detailed information on the soldier initiating the adoption. He needed to have various blood tests made to assure that he did not have a venereal disease and the child needed to have tests to assure U.S. authorities that the child did not harbor infectious diseases such as tuberculosis. The soldier’s commanding officer was required to give his approval. The local Vietnamese governmental authorities would also have a say. It was clear that this was likely to be a complicated administrative process, but I thought that I should do what I could to not obstruct the process. The G.I. seemed on the young side. I sat down with him and the form and began to complete it.
As I suspected, he was only 19 years old and he was unmarried. Hmmm, I thought, I don’t think this will work out. Who would take care of the child when he was in the field, I wondered. After all, he was an infantryman.
But, as I continued to collect the administrative data, I came to the section of the form that dealt with the prospective adoptee. I got her name completed, learned she was an orphan but when I asked for her age he said “eighteen.” “You mean eighteen months old?” I suggested hopefully. “No sir! She is eighteen years old.”
“Oh,” I said, “You want to marry her.”
“No sir, I just want to adopt her so I can take her back home.”
I told the fellow that this was an unusual situation and that I would have to get back to him.
I consulted the JAG officer again and he was highly amused. But, he said, one could not adopt one who was no longer a minor. The girl would need to apply for a U.S. visa through the ordinary channels.
I reported this back to the soldier who accepted this information sadly. I never learned whether the girl eventually made it to the U.S. or what exactly this soldier’s relationship with her was.
Although from time to time odd incidents like this livened up the day, usually the boring nature of existence at Dong Tam became the norm. This was interrupted at irregular intervals by mortar and or rocket attacks. Partly to keep from thinking about the intermittent dangers, I started thinking even more about food. The diet in the mess hall was increasingly tedious. One day, one of the guys at lunch mentioned that he thought than the instant foods that the long range reconnaissance patrols carried into the field were really good. I begged some from Captain Dickey, a leader of a company of long range reconnaissance patrols. These foods we very much like contemporary freeze dried camping foods. They came in several varieties: spaghetti with meat sauce, chicken stew, escalloped potatoes with pork, beef stew, chicken and rice and chile con carne. All you had to do was add 10 to 12 oz of hot water and mix. Hot water was rare enough in Dong Tam so I asked Captain Dickey how he dealt with this when out in the boonies. He assured me this was no problem since he always carried about a pound of C4 plastic explosive with him. This stuff was a favorite of the guys that did the explosive ordinance disposal (EOD) work, as well as combat engineers who used it to clear trees from construction sites. To my surprise, Dickey used it for cooking!
Then he demonstrated his technique in front of my barracks. He pulled of a piece of C4 about the size of a marshmallow from one of his quarter pound blocks of this stuff. It was white and looked as innocuous as vanilla nougat. He said it could be kneaded pretty much like Play Dough. Then he scooped out a bit of a hole in the sand, perhaps six inches deep, in front of my room and placed the knob of C4 in its bottom. Next he filled a metal pan with water. “Now for the tricky part,” he said. “You can burn C4, you can strike C4 but you must never do them both together because if you do, the C4 will blowup and kill you. When C4 is burning, be real careful not to drop your pot on it.” He pulled a match from his pocket, lit it and then touched the flaming match to the side of the C4 lump. Immediately the C4 caught fire and burned with an intensely hot flame. To my surprise, this stuff emitted the kind of hissing sound while it burned that you hear when using one of the common kerosene or gasoline camping stoves. Very carefully he placed the pan of water over the burning C4. Within 3 or 4 minutes the water was actively boiling. “I advise that you also never attempt to put out the flame of burning C4; just let it burn out,” he said.
.
This Captain Dickey was an odd sort. In civilian life he had been a pipe radiographer. His job was to x--ray pipe welds to check for flawed pipe connections. This was an unusual but not very exciting job. In the Army he became a Ranger and his particular specialty was going out into the paddies, marshes, and remote parts of the Mekong Delta with a group of danger-seeking men and search for trouble. Trouble consisted of finding Viet Cong personnel and hunting and killing them. He also participated in various other forms of mayhem: when a village chief was suspected of helping the Viet Cong, Dickey and his snipers and assassins would lie in ambush and kill him. A recent blog suggested an appropriate motto for the rangers might be: “Get in touch with your inner barbarian.” Often they would kill someone with Viet Cong weapons and techniques. They carried AK 47 rifles, the standard weapon used by the Viet Cong. The purpose of this was dual: to mislead those who found the dead into believing that this murder had been perpetrated by the Viet Cong and to be used in place of the U.S. weapon, the M 16. (The M 16 was a wonderfully machined rifle, ideal for a clean, dry environment. In Vietnam, there was nothing that was clean and little that was dry. The M 16 often jammed when muddy. The AK 47 was poorly made, and had a ferocious kickback but you could pull it from the mud and it would always fire. There was enough space between its roughly machined, loosely fitting parts to leave plenty of room for all kinds of dirt and mud.)
These long range reconnaissance patrol soldiers had few manners and minimal ethics. I had never before met humans with so few signs of a conscience. They were at first somewhat scary but when I really got to know them they were very scary. From time to time they would want me to supply them with medical supplies—antibiotics, Dexedrine to keep them from falling asleep for days at a time, and similar items. Once they invited me to attend as a doctor at an Anectine interview of a Viet Cong prisoner. I demurred and stayed as far away from the room where they were doing this as I could. I was frankly horrified.
Anectine’s only legitimate use was as an adjuvant to general anesthesia in an operating room to relax abdominal muscles prior to surgery. And, those patients who received Anectine were always “asleep” while this was employed. This drug would be injected intravenously. In seconds it caused complete neuro-muscular blockade. This meant that the treated individual’s motor nerves would no longer communicate with his voluntary muscles.
However, Dickey’s men used Anectine all by itself as their own version of truth serum. Once Anectine took hold, a man could no longer move any muscle. More importantly, he could no longer move his chest in order to breathe! But his brain was not affected at all so he knew he was unable to move and unable to breath. He quickly recognized that he was suffocating. As he recognized his plight, the interrogator would explain to him that this was just a taste of what would be done next if he did not immediately answer all questions truthfully and completely. After a few minutes of drug induced suffocation, the doctor in attendance would pull out an Ambu bag and use it until the Anectine effect passed. (This was a valved rubber bag with a fitted mask that covered a person’s nose and mouth. When the Ambu bag was squeezed rhythmically, it pushed air into a non-breathing person and allowed the paralyzed person to get the air he needed to live.)
After this invitation to participate in the Anectine interview, I started putting more and more space between me and Captain Dickey. However, I did still on occasion use his men to guard me on travels by road from Dong Tam. I spent more time at the Division Headquarters and less time chatting with Captain Dickey. A week or so after this episode, I again found myself watching over a battalion in the field while its doctor was on R&R. I again had lots of time on my hands after a brief morning sick call turned up no one with any serious complaint. But this unit happened to have some EOD (Explosive Ordnance Disposal) experts there in the battalion headquarters. The two fellows were happy to teach this inquisitive doctor a few tricks of their trade. The explained to me how I could stick a length of detonator cord (commonly called det cord) into a blasting cap, use my teeth to crimp the cap down around the det cord and then poke the blasting cap into the C4. This could be used to blow up unexploded ordinance or any thing else I was so inclined to destroy. Det cord itself could be wound around trees with the rule of thumb that you needed three turns of det cord for each foot diameter of the tree you wanted to fell. Later they taught me how to defuse mortar shells—a skill for which I have not yet found any civilian use. I think these EOD guys were amused to pass on some of their esoteric skills to a doctor.
When the battalion’s doctor returned from his R&R, I moved back to Dong Tam.

The Ark

Military protocol dictated that both the Division Surgeon and the Division Chaplain attend the daily divisional briefings. After the meeting adjourned, I often had dinner with the division chaplain, who was also required to attend these briefings. He was a short, soft-spoken fellow with a fondness for all of God’s creatures--but he especially loved reptiles. After I got to know him a bit, I heard a rumor that he had a pet snake. After dinner one night, I asked him if this was true. “Sure,” he said, “I keep a reticulated python.” “Can I see it?” I queried. “Sure,” he said. After supper we walked over to his room and he showed me a standard wooden foot locker he had stowed at the end of his bed. He worked a combination lock which secured the trunk and then carefully raised the locker’s lid. Inside was the biggest snake I had ever seen in my life!
The chaplain reached in and using both of his hands drew the snake out. This fellow was at that time about 14 feet long and weighed over 80 lbs. Its head was about the size of an Army water canteen and its body was almost as thick as my thigh. Its skin was glossy and covered with an elaborate pattern reminiscent of a woman’s reticule. Dark, almost jet--black lines formed an elaborate pattern of spaces filled with light brown patches. Outside the black borders were ochre-colored and dark brown bits that highlighted the patches and gave an impression that the creature was either trying to develop camouflage or had been so excessively enlarged that it was beginning to pixelate. From time to time the snake would flick out her pink 4--inch--long forked tongue. The chaplain beamed as he showed off his prize possession.
“She looks so much better now than when I first got her,” he noted. “Where did you find her?” He explained that six months earlier that he had gotten word from one of the battalion surgeons that some soldiers on patrol had passed a group of Vietnamese villagers who had come upon this snake as it was moving across a path and grabbed it. They had tied its jaws closed with twine, held its body in a stretched out configuration so it could not coil to strike and were to their great amusement, trying to kick out its teeth as it resisted their assaults. The chaplain rode in his jeep to this scene and through an interpreter persuaded the villagers to not kill the snake or eat it as they intended, but to give it to him. He hauled the injured animal back to Dong Tam and assessed its injuries. It had had several teeth knocked out and for several weeks seemed to be very sullen and scarcely moved.
The chaplain thought it might have a dental infection and so he persuaded the Dong Tam dentist to take dental x--rays of the creature. I can only imagine that scene as the chaplain held the head, with the little rectangles of dental film squeezed inside, while medical corpsmen restrained the body and the x--ray machine buzzed into life.
Troubles were confirmed. There were some broken snags of teeth in the jaw and also radiological evidence of adjacent osteomyelitis (bone infection). Again, since I was not present, I can only imagine the chaplain pleading with the dentist to help this most unfortunate of God’s creatures. Eventually the dentist said that if the chaplain would hold open the snake’s mouth, keep the head from moving, and assure him that the chaplain’s helpers would completely control the body, the dentist would drill out and extract the damaged teeth and curette the diseased mandible.

One evening after the dental clinic had closed for the day the chaplain, the ailing reticulated python, four volunteer dental corpsmen and the dentist convened. The dentist did what he had promised. The snake emerged from the clinic minus several teeth and with a new name, “Henrietta.” No, I have no idea or even a guess about why this name was chosen or this setting was picked for the naming ceremony.
Afterwards, with a severely damaged and infected mouth, Henrietta was not interested in moving much or feeding. For several months the chaplain each day pumped the antibiotics recommended by the dentist down the snake’s gullet using a 30 cc syringe and a length of plastic tubing.
After four months or so, she finally ate her first meal. The chaplain had begged a live duck from one of the nearby village priests. The feeding process was rather simple: the duck was dropped into the foot-locker home of the snake and the locker lid was closed. The next day the chaplain opened the lid to see if there was now one less duck visible and if there was a matching swelling in the snake’s body. Somehow this reminded me of tossing a Christian to the lions, but when I suggested this to the chaplain he was puzzled by the allusion.
In just one or two more months, Henrietta made a complete recovery and lived with the chaplain in his room from that point on. Once a week she was fed a live duck, never a chicken, because the chaplain feared that the fowl’s sharp beak might potentially injure Henrietta if she swallowed incorrectly just once.
“How do you know this is a ‘she’?” I asked.
“Well, I really am not sure—you can only tell for sure if it is a male snake if you see a hemipene emerge from its vent. Since I have never seen this with this animal, I’ve decided she is female.”Later during the year, though, the chaplain noted that while squeezing its prey, a distinct hemipene slipped out briefly and Henrietta underwent a name change to Henry.
Once a day, the chaplain accompanied Henry on a “walk” so the python would get some exercise. He would carry the snake over his shoulder out to the nearby bunker and then place him on the ground. The snake would slowly slither into the bunker and seemed to flow along the inner perimeter of the structure while from time to time his tongue darted out. The chaplain assured me that not only did this outing do the snake much good, but the residual scent of python was sure to keep rats away from the building. After a walk, Henry was carted back to the foot locker and placed inside. A sturdy padlock kept Henry confined. Most of the time, Henry had a fairly mellow disposition. He would allow the chaplain to lift him onto the shoulders of willing bystanders and would not strike. When he was molting, however, or just before he was scheduled to have a feeding, he became more cranky. If his eyes had the milky appearance that indicated a total body skin molt was near, it was best to leave him alone in his locker because he would, at these times, draw back into a tight “S” curve and strike at any nearby moving form.

In the spring, Dong Tam became a snake nursery, of sorts. Since the entire post had been dredged from the sand of the Song My Tho River, it proved to be an ideal nesting ground for both pythons and cobras. Soldiers began to discover tiny boas and cobras soon after they emerged from their eggs. These little guys had the coloration of their parents but were little longer than shoe laces. I spent an afternoon photographing these newly hatched serpents.

When the time approached for the sky pilot to return to the U.S., he found a permanent new home for Henry in the reptile collection of the Staten Island Zoo. This species of snake often grows to over 20 feet in length and may weigh over 200 lbs. They have life spans in captivity that exceed 20 years. What happened to Henry after he left Dong Tam is not known to me. However, it is interesting to note that there is now a commercial snake farm just outside the Dong Tam border where reticulated pythons and king cobras are raised. While the cobras are usually bottled in distilled rice wine spirits and sold for their alleged beneficial effect on impotence, the pythons are sold for food.

Snakes were not the only exotic creatures that could be found in the Delta. One day a corpsman told me he met a guy with a really weird pet. I asked the medic to have the pet’s owner bring it to my hooch. That evening he showed up with a critter I had never seen before. It was about the size of a house cat, smelled vaguely of buttered popcorn and looked like an animated fuzzy puppet with a long furry tale and protuberant brown eyes. The head was cat sized but proportioned somewhat like that of a raccoon—with raccoon-like “bandit” markings. The paws had bare pink pads the size of those of a cat.

“Look at this, sir,” the proud owner said, as he placed the creature on the bottom of my open wooden door. The animal placed his feet on either side of the door’s edge and rapidly climbed all the way up. When he got to the top of the door, he turned around and scurried down head-first like a squirrel. Unlike a squirrel, however, he did not dig his nails into the door but used his pads with his paws positioned on opposite sides of the door to hold on and control his descent. He seemed very friendly and made cute little sounds as he was held and stroked.
His owner said he found him out in the jungle when he was on patrol. No one knew much about this animal in Dong Tam. The veterinarian who looked at him was as puzzled as the rest of us. And, I had never seen one before or after.

Now, however I think I know what this mystery animal was—the Common Palm Civet or Toddy Cat. It was later suspected as the animal vector of a SARS outbreak (Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) is a viral respiratory illness caused by a coronavirus).

There were other uncommon critters that were captured and kept as pets. One gloriously unsuccessful “domestic” animal was the Leopard Cat. This is not at all your familiar pussy cat. One day a grunt captured a small Leopard Cat kitten and decided to keep it as a pet. This creature from the moment it was caught until the time some weeks later it was released had a really miserable attitude. Each and every time any person walked near it or even toward, it the creature seemed angry. It would spread its front paws apart, arch its back, show its little fangs, hiss and spit. It was as if in 9 previous incarnations it had been Ira Hunt’s twin. It was a consistently and persistently mean little creature--even to the guy that fed it. Years later I saw a caged adult Leopard Cat in a tiny zoo in southern Vietnam and this animal also hissed, showed its fangs, and spit at me. However, they definitely are beautiful looking felines.
The most interesting animal involuntarily pressed into duty as a soldier’s pet was a Rhesus monkey. A soldier who was assigned to the battalion where I was working as a locum tenens owned a pet monkey named Joey that he no longer wanted to keep. Joey needed a new home. As a child, a monkey had seemed to me the most desirable pet imaginable. They were so nimble, dexterous and intelligent that they were often the stuff of my childhood dreams. However, my parents had never gone along with this idea and monkeys were not easy to find in rural Maryland or in New York City. Well, here was a chance for me to get one with no one to tell me “no.” With a smile Joey’s owner turned him over to me. As we parted company he mentioned that Joey had picked up some bad habits. I thought he was joking but I soon learned more about that.

Joey was a very odd-looking simian. Soldiers had given him a military type haircut with an electric clipper so that the flat top of his head resembled the insignia of the first infantry division, complete with an indelibly marked red numeral “1” set in the middle of this weird hairdo.
Joey was very self-sufficient. He enjoyed foraging for fruits in local trees. Mangos were his favorites. But he also loved to climb coconut palms and had been trained to throw down coconuts on command. When he was so inclined, he would come out of his tree to allow himself to be picked up. Usually, though, his preference was to largely ignore me. However, while he might not want to come when called, he could be seen casting furtive looks to see exactly where I was and what was happening at ground level. If something interesting occurred down below him, he could leap out of his tree with amazing speed to investigate his finding.
That was how I first discovered his worst bad habit--Joey smoked! In Vietnam the Army facilitated smoking among the troops. All packets of military rations included an accessory package which contained cigarettes, matches, chewing gum, toilet paper, coffee, cream, sugar, salt, and a spoon. The Surgeon General’s paper officially documenting the risks of smoking had only been out for 4 years in 1968. Most adult males and almost all soldiers smoked during 1968. For infantrymen who faced a horrible death or mutilation on a daily basis, the distant risks of cigarette smoking were irrelevant. Smokers commonly would light their next cigarette from the burning ember of the one they had just almost consumed. Then they would throw the still smoldering cigarette to the ground.
Joey silently watched for this and would come swooping out of his tree to pick up the recently discarded butt, bring it to his lips and start inhaling. He was seriously addicted and would make a big noisy fuss if you attempted to take a cigarette from him. He would show his teeth and act rather menacing.
It was somewhat embarrassing to have a smoking monkey as the pet of a non-smoking doctor but I figured I would just have to tolerate this until I could break his nicotine habit.
However, this never came to pass because of bad habit number 2.
As I mentioned, he was fairly self--sufficient and spend large amounts of time moving through trees, loafing, eating, scratching, or watching. While he was doing his thing, I was doing my own activities. I might be reading, or recording a tape to Judy, or seeing soldiers with minor problems. Much of this took place out of doors. I would eventually stop watching Joey and quickly forget he was above me in the tree until I stood up and started to walk away. He waited for me to turn my back to him. Then, when I least expected something, he would leap from his hidden perch with astonishing speed and land on my upper back, immediately giving me big, juicy simian play bites on the back of my neck! The jumping I did, and my screams of surprise obviously reinforced his behavior. He thought this was just the greatest game ever. It has been decades since this happened but it still sends shivers up my spine when I remember this. It didn’t take many days for me to decide that Joey had to go. And so I passed him on to another soldier, noting that he was a fine monkey but did have a few bad habits….

Hawaii

As June approached, I figured that I should try to escape Vietnam for an extra week of R & R. I heard that Hawaii was really a great destination, and so I casually submitted the requisite papers for going there. I mentioned nothing about my previous visit to Tokyo and McFadden (who paid no more attention to me than he did to the color of his snot) simply signed the document when it was placed on a small pile of papers in front of him. I suppose he would have signed an affidavit resigning from the Army had that been placed before him, too.

I wrote to Judy and she made arrangements for us to rent a small apartment I learned of though one of the guys in Dong Tam. This time we planned for her to take Paul, and everything went very smoothly. I was able to hitch a ride to Saigon with a military convoy and after a short stay in the 90th Replacement Battalion, I was on my way to Oahu.
I reached Hawaii about 8 AM the next morning and boarded a small bus that would drive us to the downtown location where Paul and Judy were. Regrettably, the morning traffic from the airport to downtown Honolulu was dreadful that day. Soon the bus was stuck in traffic going no place while the minutes of my R&R were ticking away. I didn’t have much chance to feel unhappy about this however, because within moments a Honolulu police car pulled even with our bus and noted it was full of soldiers. The officer called to us though his open window and asked if we were on R&R. “Yeah,” we answered. “Well,” he said, “follow me!” He then put on his flashing red and blue overhead lights and his siren. The traffic ahead of us moved to the shoulder of the road and we drove quite quickly behind our police escort all the way to downtown Honolulu to the R & R depot. It was a small kindness and one that was repeated in other ways by other Hawaiians over the next several days.

Judy and Paul were waiting for me in the rented apartment and they were a delight to hold and see again! Judy looked delicate and beautiful in a sleeveless dark sun dress with little floral designs and a necklace of yellow beads. I photographed her sitting on a wicker chair on the lanai.
Judy sitting on Lanai in Hawaii

We went that evening to Michael’s Restaurant, which at that time had been recommended as a large up-scale dining experience overlooking the Pacific and Diamond Head. We sat at a table with fine silverware, white linen napkins and tablecloth and faced a huge wall-to-wall painting of a beach scene with a tropical sunset and scattered palms. Suddenly I realized that this was not a painting at all, but was the actual seashore as viewed through a huge picture window. The meal was delicious and a wondrous treat after months of formulaic Army food.
The next day we took a rented car and visited the Honolulu Zoo. I thought Paul would love to see the variety of animals but he was primarily interested in only one type of creature: pigeons. Paul would chase after them time and time again, grinning as they scattered before him. It was a total delight to see my son so “grown up,” but sad when I realized that I had missed watching the changes in him that evolved over the previous months.
We visited the Polynesian Village and tried the sour--tasting poi. We lounged on the beach and watched Paul play in the sand.
On our last day in Honolulu, we decided to visit the Bishop Museum late in the afternoon. We arrived about 4:45 PM only to discover that the museum would close at 5 P.M. The entrance fee was $3.00 and so I said to Judy that we should go in, if only for a little while since the next day I had to leave and would not get another chance to see any of it. The ticket lady heard this and asked if I were a soldier. “Yes,” I said, “and tomorrow I return to Vietnam.” She then told me that it was a very nice museum, but not worth $3.00 for only 15 minutes. “Just go in for free now, since you’re in the Army,” she said, “If you come back another time, you can go in for a longer time and pay the usual entrance fee then.” I was affected by her kindness and later noted how this contrasted with the reactions to soldiers of people in California and New York.

When the R&R ended, I kissed Judy goodbye and sadly went back to Vietnam.

The weather began to become wetter and wetter after I returned. Huge cumulus clouds that everywhere could be seen rising thousands of feet into the air periodically dumped prodigious amounts of water on all below them. It rarely rained continuously for days on end, but it did rain for hours or minutes almost every day. When I traveled to the countryside to be a substitute battalion surgeon, the paddy dykes between the fields were sodden and their mud tenaciously clutched the bottoms of my boots. A walk from a mess hall just 50 yards from my aid station to my clinic would result in an elliptical, snowshoe-like 4 or 5 lb. glob of grey sticky clay-like mud sticking to the sole of each of my jungle boots. It was time-consuming and tedious to scrape this mud from my boots. And, it was futile since the next time I had to walk to the latrine, more mud would stick to the bottom of my boots again. More seriously, ring-worms bloomed on bodies of the infantrymen and sick call was packed with men with various tropical skin diseases.

Friendly Fire but the Band Plays On

The command general’s briefings in the Division Tactical Operations Center seemed to be increasingly gloomy affairs where it nightly became harder and harder to show that the war was being won according to schedule. General Ewell, a skinny twerp of a guy, became increasing edgy and sarcastic. One afternoon it was apparent that the very same Viet Cong bodies had been recounted at least 3 times as different military units walked past the same dead bodies, thereby artificially inflating that day’s total body count. Ewell gave a bitter hoot and asked, “Now, how many times you gonna count the same God dammed gook bodies? If you’re gonna cook the numbers, don’t be so God damned obvious!” Then looking at Col. Hunt he scolded, “Hunt, I want you to check these numbers before this shit is served up here!”

For me, the year was slowly grinding to a conclusion. I began to meticulously cross off the days on my short-timer’s calendar until my DEROS (the magical Date of Expected Return from Over Seas). I spent more nights sleeping in my jungle hammock in the bunker and took fewer chances. I avoided any unnecessary trips to the boonies.
On July 4th there was a steak and lobster tail barbecue held at the officers club. The food was good and there was lots of cold beer. I was feeling no pain as I returned to my room and lay down on my bed. Around 10 or 11 PM I heard loud angry talk from two soldiers just outside my room.
“Don’t point that there, that’s the officers quarters,” one said.
There was no spoken answer but within seconds I heard the unmistakable sounds of a .50 caliber machine gun firing off continuous rounds in my direction!
I rolled out of my bed onto the concrete floor and just lay there until I heard the pair walk away. I stayed put perhaps another 30 minutes and then got up and stalked into the bunker, where I spent the rest of the night. Were they just drunk, angry, stupid or out to kill officers? I suppose I will never know.

But, the band played on…literally. The 9th Infantry Division had a complete military marching band, complete with everything including trumpets, trombones, drums and Sousaphones. The band was used to liven up the official division ceremonies. On July 8, a large ceremony and awards presentation was planned at the division headquarters on the parade ground just in front of the division tactical operation center (DTOC). On the day before the ceremony, the division band was out practicing on the parade ground. They really did make a wonderful sound. I've been a longtime fan of John Philip Sousa. On this particular occasion, they were playing one of his marches. I came out of the division surgeon's office to watch and listen. It was a beautiful afternoon, with large cumulus clouds slowly moving through a blue sky. The parade ground was in great shape; its coarse grasses having been newly mowed.

Then without any warning, I heard the screech and thud of incoming mortars. The guys in the band, still holding onto their instruments, all started racing for the protection of the DTOC bunker. Within moments, you could now also hear the wailing of the warning siren intermixed with the screech and thud of the incoming rounds.

I loitered for a few moments outside of the bunker just to watch the spectacle of the band players running with their instruments, and then I too ran into the bunker. My recollection is that there was no further band practice that day.

The next day, though the award ceremony took place, complete with military band and with no interruptions from enemy mortar rounds.

The following week a surprise visitor walked into the Division Surgeon’s office—one I doubted that I would ever see alive. Sid Cohen showed up on his way to his first R & R. Sid, you might recall, was the doctor who had his orders switched with mine so that I might become the resident dermatologist of the 9th Division. He had spent the succeeding months in a remote and isolated unit in the southernmost portion of Viet Nam in my place. I felt I owed Sid something and so I was very friendly to him. He was to spend a day at Dong Tam before heading to the 93rd Replacement Battalion in Long Binh so I invited him to come to my derm clinic and see patients with me and chat. Sid agreed and after seeing a few patients we were just sitting and talking when we felt the brief concussion followed by the scream of an out-going round overhead that had come from one of an adjacent artillery battalion’s 8 inch Self-Propelled Howitzers. These huge guns made an enormous noise when fired. To me, since this was obviously an out-going round heading for some location far from Dong Tam, it was no big deal. But not so for Sid!
Sid leaped from his chair and had what seemed to me to be an adult equivalent of the Moro reflex (actually, this reflex is only normally seen in newborns. If startled, a newborn baby will extend his legs and head, while his arms jerk up and he starts to cry.) Sid did everything but shit in his pants!
“Are they attacking us!” Sid screamed.
“No, of course not, that’s out-going,” I answered.
This was a very strange reaction from a person who had been in Vietnam for many months and so I asked Sid if he had ever heard anything like this before. Upon further questioning I learned that the place where Sid had spent all of his tour of duty so far was an idyllic hamlet. The town’s mayor was closely allied with the Vietnamese central government while his brother was a major leader in the Vietcong. Both siblings had promised their mother that they would not bring any fighting into their home village and both had kept their word. Consequently, Sid had never before heard any sounds of war—no in-coming or out-going mortars, rockets, howitzers, etc. until now on his way to his R & R. Sid’s time in Vietnam had all of the charm of a year at a somewhat basic tropical resort. I decided to not tell Sid about my “successful” efforts to have my orders and his transposed. Ironic, I thought, that much of my miserable year would have been avoided if I had only gone with the flow and not tried to get stationed in Dong Tam.

In which our Hero is Recalled to Life

“Dr Manette was buried alive and recalled to life, metaphorically but only just. It is the consideration and affection and tenderness of his family and friends which make the life flow through his veins once again.” Charles Dickens in an e--mail to Jenny, http://www.youth.net/victorian/hypermail/0162.html

By now, I was a definite short-timer. I had fewer than 100 days left of my tour in Vietnam and began to think of how and when I could permanently escape. By this time in the war’s evolution, Richard Nixon was president and he was beginning to talk about bringing the troops home. The 9th Infantry Division was notified that it would be withdrawn from the conflict, perhaps in October and would be re-stationed in Hawaii. The first battalion to be withdrawn left the country July 7th, 1969.
I was offered the position of Division Surgeon of the unit once it was reassigned to Hawaii. However, there was a catch—service in Hawaii would commit me to serving an additional year in the Army since I would be obligated by Army policy to have a minimum 2 year tour there. I contemplated this for less than a nanosecond and declined. However, Jerry Shefren, another battalion surgeon in our division that I knew, agreed to lead the 9th Infantry Division to Hawaii. I sought other ways out that might happen faster and would not commit me to serving more time in the Army.
What finally enabled me to leave Vietnam and return to the States was in some ways as memorable as my arrival in Vietnam. Early in my stay at Dong Tam I had treated James Lundy, a major in the G2 (the office in charge of military intelligence for the division), for an injured conscience. He had had a brief secretive sexual encounter with a Vietnamese prostitute and had been haunted afterwards by guilt since he was at the time married with a wife he professed to love back in the States. He came to me worried that he had acquired a venereal disease. However, he had no infection of any sort. (No lesions, no abnormal VDRL blood test, no discharge, no enlarged nodes—in short, he was lucky and well, but worried.) Nevertheless, his conscience would not drop the matter that easily. At irregular intervals over the following months, this man would ask if he could see me in private. At my office, behind a barracks, as well as in his barracks he would pull out his penis and ask if this or that was the sign of something terrible. “No,” I would say, “that is an entirely normal hair follicle,” or “No, that is the normal color of your glans.” He would leave this abbreviated “short arm drill” temporarily relieved, only to find something new to worry about.
Then as summer neared, Major Lundy learned that Nixon was going to be pulling troops out from Vietnam. He then figured out a way to get himself out of the country early—he would transfer himself into the second unit that was going to be withdrawn. He would become the XO (executive officer) a week or so before the unit got its orders. Since only he knew which unit this was, he figured he might just get away with this. The 3/60 Infantry would be the first unit removed from Vietnam and was scheduled to depart for the States on July 7, 1969. He reasoned that assigning himself to this first unit to be removed would be too obvious and so he chose the second unit scheduled to leave Vietnam. Then he remembered that he had another problem—he had a colossal fear of flying. Also, he had an equally great fear of letting anyone know about this phobia--it was too unmilitary.
He approached me and made me an offer too good to be refused. On July 19th he would have both of us transferred into headquarters and headquarters battery of the 3rd battalion of the 34th Artillery Battalion. He knew that this unit was going to get orders later that week that would state they were going to be removed from Vietnam on July 26th. The quid quo pro was that I had to assure him that he would not have any trouble flying, but would instead sleep until he was back in the U.S. By this date, my brother Michael had been in Korea long enough so that he was not in danger of being transferred to Vietnam if I were to leave this country a bit early. I could safely escape Vietnam and return home to Paul and Judy. I wondered, as I contemplated the dose of Nembutal (the infamous “yellow submarine” sleeping capsules) I planned to administer, whether Major Lundy would awaken once we were back home, but I knew he would be in a stupor for all of the trip.
My last days in that artillery battalion were surreal. First, the officers in that unit said that they were surprised that their doctor had been reassigned to another unit even though he had but a short time to go on his Vietnam tour. Then, three days later the entire battalion got the “surprising news” that they were all being withdrawn from Vietnam early as part of the newly announced gradual scaling down of U.S. involvement in the war. Again they thought it quite a stroke of luck that shortly after I was assigned to be their doctor, the unit was being moved out of Vietnam in only four more days. ”The ways of the Army are inscrutable,” I told them. I spent these last days getting initials on my “Installation Clearance Record----DA form 137” to document that I had returned my M--16 rifle, my flack jacket, my helmet and left a forwarding address so that stuff mailed to me in Vietnam could follow me back to the World.
On my departure day I awoke at dawn, brushed my teeth, shaved, got into my uniform and went to the mess hall for breakfast. I was nervous and worried. Would I really be able to escape and finally end this year? Or, would something go wrong at the last instant. Would I be found out and sent back to my original unit? But, so far, nothing unusual. Then all of the men of the battalion climbed onto deuce and one half trucks for a brief last drive through the wet yellow sand and mud puddles of Dong Tam to Reliable Academy, where quite a reception was waiting. There were journalists with cameras, gawkers from other units, and even a jeep with the division’s brigadier general in it, all there to see the show. We clambered out of the trucks and were instructed to walk up the stairs into the Reliable Academy barracks. There we were told that we could not bring any ammunition, souvenir AK 47 rifles, mines, grenades, C4 explosive, narcotics, illegal drugs, pornography or m.p.c. (military payment currency--used instead of U.S. dollars) out of the country and to drop them in a container provided for that. Out of assorted pockets and duffel bags a mad mélange of ammunition, Vietcong hand grenades, rifles and various other souvenirs were reluctantly produced and dumped into the waiting receptacle.
Next we were told to remove all of our clothing, and that each of us would undergo a body cavity search to be sure we weren’t hiding contraband. Our baggage was separately searched in great detail. (I thought that there might be such a search and so I had determined to have two valued items returned to the States undetected. I had carefully tucked my favorite Swedish Pornography photo magazine into the official plastic case that held my Bronze Star for Merit award. I knew that no inspector would think that any soldier would pollute such an award with any contraband—and I was right. The Bronze Star got zero attention. My personally prized jungle hammock had been mailed off to the States by me in a box labeled, “Child’s grommet toy.” I assumed that they might x-ray the box and see the metal grommets. The plausible explanation that this was some sort of toy would prevent them from opening and actually examining the contents. This ploy worked. The hammock came back to the States undetected.)
After our baggage was searched, we were next. We were moved along in the nude one after another. Military police commanded us to open our mouths to the glare of flashlights and bend over and spread our cheeks for rectal exams. I felt that I was being treated like a felon who was being passed into a high security penitentiary. All of us passed muster. We were told to get back in our clothes and get back on the trucks. We were then driven to the airfield where a proper military band played the Stars and Stripes Forever. We unloaded ourselves from the trucks and marched across an actual red carpet past General Westmorland and General Ewell who shook the hands of each of us, told us we were heroes and congratulated us for serving our country and the Republic of Vietnam so ably. We then loaded onto aircraft for the short flight to Saigon. However, before we left Dong Tam, military police boarded the aircraft and had each of us produce military ID photos and our actual orders to be sure that there no stowaways. Finally, the M.P. wanted to know how many doctors were on the plane since they had heard that some of them might also try to sneak out of Vietnam. “There is only one here, and he is our battalion surgeon,” one soldier responded. My I.D. and my orders were then re--inspected. With that last ordeal completed, the doors on the plane closed and we immediately took off. When we landed in Saigon, there was another band and another red carpet that this time led to the Freedom Bird, a World Airways 707, which was waiting to fly us back to the states. The flight was long but uneventful. Thirty minutes before our flights started, I gave the anxious major 200 mg of Nembutal and when we were on the plane in Saigon I gave him another 100 mg for good measure.
When we finally arrived at Travis Air force Base in Northern California Maj. Lundy had to be helped off the plane, his sagging shoulders supported by an enlisted man on either side of him since he was too lethargic to make it on his own! After that, I never saw Lundy again, but I’ve silently thanked him many times.

I called my old friend Dan Purnell from Travis Airforce Base and he kindly offered to pick me up. I waited in the bleak Travis waiting room with its rows of hard plastic stack chairs until Dan arrived and drove me to his home. Joan and the kids were delighted to see me and entertained me as if I were a returning hero. I left them with a few small pieces of shrapnel I brought home as souvenirs. After a night’s rest, I then flew back to New York City where Judy, Paul, my mother and Uncle Ben were waiting for me in our old apartment in the Bronx. It was a hot day in summer. “Would you like something to drink?” Judy asked. “Sure,” I said, “Do you have a beer?” Ben was shocked. “They taught you how to be a shicker like a goy!” he exclaimed.
Paul was very doubtful that I was actually Daddy. I couldn’t understand why it was that each time Daddy was mentioned he would start looking around to see where Daddy was. This finally all made sense when I went walking with Paul and Judy the next day and we passed a mail box. Judy explained that each day she would take an envelope or a little white plastic package containing a spool of sound recording tape to the mail box. Paul would get to drop this into the maw of the mail box with the instructions, “Now, send this to Daddy!” For him, Daddy was what a mail box was named. Paul proudly pointed to a mailbox on our walk and said “Daddy!” I think that of all the losses I suffered by going to Vietnam, none compares with my feeling of losing the experience of being with my son for that year. And nothing epitomized that loss more than his mistaking a mail box for his father on my return.

Epilogue:

Soon after I returned, I started on a trip to interview the various places where I was contemplating finishing my interrupted residency in internal medicine. I thought that the most convenient thing would be to fly out to California and visit Stanford University Hospital first, and then gradually work my way back to the institutions in the East that I had applied to and which had already accepted me for their training programs. At this time, military members in uniform received enormous discounts on airfare, and so I flew wearing my Army green uniform. When I arrived at San Francisco International Airport I rented a car and headed down U.S. 101 toward the Stanford campus. I turned on the KCBS news and heard that students at Stanford were that afternoon expressing their distaste for the war in Vietnam by trying to burn down the campus ROTC (Reserve Officers’ Training Corps) building. A large, riotous group of students were actually hurling Molotov cocktails at it. In addition, they were throwing stones at anyone in military uniform--like me! Later I heard rumors that much of this antiwar sentiment was being orchestrated by the son of Dr. Halsted Holman, the chairman of the Stanford University Medical School’s Department of Medicine.
Instead of heading immediately towards Stanford University, as was my initial plan, I drove into Palo Alto and rented a room at a little hotel on High Street. There I changed out of my uniform and into civilian clothes to avoid being the target of stones and Molotov cocktails during my visit to the Stanford campus. I realized then that while I might be a returning hero to my family, to the rest of the world I was suspect, a villain responsible for the war and its atrocities, or at the least a total jerk for being duped into going into the military in the first place. At Stanford, and in much of civil society, service in Vietnam was viewed as a shameful activity, not unlike masturbation--one you didn’t discuss in public. And, this has barely changed for them over the ensuing decades.
On the day of this first visit to Stanford, Michael Jacobs, a doctor who had been an intern when I was a junior resident in internal medicine at Bronx Municipal Hospital Center, picked me up in his convertible from my hotel in Palo Alto and drove me to Stanford University Hospital for an interview with a faculty member from the department of medicine. My misgivings about the rioting and burning of the ROTC building were soon replaced by my wonder at the Stanford hanging gardens and beautiful architecture of the main hospital. I was fascinated to overhear conversation from some residents of Palo Alto complaining of this day’s weather: it was sunny with the temperature about 84F and a 15 mph wind. They thought that this was unbearably hot and windy. I felt this must be a paradise if this was weather so terrible it warranted any complaint at all.
At this first sight of the hospital building as we drove down Pasteur Drive, I began to compose in my head letters of rejection to all of the other residency programs to which I had applied. As I made this decision to reject these as yet unseen choices, I was sure of one thing—never again was I going to trust any major life-changing plan to a purely objective rational analysis of pros and cons. That sort of logic had sent me to Vietnam and made me miserable for 329 days. I was going to try and see how life flowed when I thought with my gut rather than just my brain.
However, my time at Stanford would be postponed until I finished my required full two years of active military service. The Army allowed me to finish my active duty at Fitzsimons Army Hospital in Aurora, Colorado. I worked there in the Out-Patient Clinic under the administrative supervision of Col. Gustavo Belaval, a lifer whose chief claim to fame was that he had failed his board exams in internal medicine twice for good cause. Belaval lamented the fact that the Fitzsimons Out-Patient Clinic was staffed mainly by doctors like me who all had, as he put it, a “bad attitude.” When Christmas neared, Belaval told various doctors that he wanted them to help him with his traditional Puerto Rican “La Posada” celebration. All the doctors he approached to help him bluntly refused to do so. Belaval complained to me, “What can I do? Always in the past if doctors refused to help me, I would tell them that they might end up in Vietnam. But, all of you guys have already been there and regulations will not permit you being sent back there involuntarily for a second tour within a two-year period. Why do you guys have this bad attitude?” “I suppose you will have to make your own arrangements for La Posada,” I told him.
When I was finally released from the Army, I began my second year residency in internal medicine at Stanford. During this year I received a letter from the Army reminding me that since I had accepted my military commission before the age of 26, I incurred a total six year military obligation: two years of active duty (now completed) plus an additional two years of active Army reserve and two more years of inactive Army reserve. I was directed to report to an Army reserve unit to start the active reserve portion of my obligation. No way, I thought! I wrote back to the Army that they had taken two years of my life and would not get another minute. Specifically, I suggested that they take their current request and shove it! I knew that they would not take me to court over this matter or dare to initiate any public legal proceedings against one who had served in Vietnam and received the Bronze Star with two Oak Leaf clusters. Anyway, I was not going to serve further and I knew they no longer had anything that they could use to coerce me. Months passed and then without further comment the Army issued me my final honorable discharge papers.

My experiences and feelings on returning to the U.S. were complex. Before my time in Vietnam, I had a fundamental trust that the U.S. government’s foreign policy was just, appropriate and well-considered. I was an unabashed altruist—one who imagined himself as potentially as virtuous as the character Victor Laszlo in the movie Casablanca. I had assumed that our highest elected officials knew what they were doing and that their actions were righteous. I believed that Lyndon Baines Johnson was making wise decisions in the national interest. In short, I was very naïve, innocent, and mistaken.
During my time in Vietnam that unquestioned faith in the inherent goodness of our country and its leaders, and of people in general, was shaken to its very roots. I returned bitter, suspicious, and hostile to the society that had sent me and so many others to Hell, and then turned its back on us when we returned. I returned as a serious doubter of the infallibility of assessments and decisions rendered by our President and Congress.
My faith in myself changed as well. I knew that for me, the urge to survive might in a flash lead me to sacrifice another as easily as when I tried to feed Sid Cohen to the wolves by switching orders with him. I am not a Victor Laszlo. I learned that for all of us humans, “civilization” is but a very thin veneer, imperfectly superimposed on a much more savage and primitive creature. Once the inhibitions of our society are removed by changing people into soldiers, the amount of violence they are capable of is enormous. An ordinary milquetoast radiographer could become an ingenious assassin and torturer in a flash. A bellhop, dishwasher, insurance appraiser or salesman could, and in fact did, metamorphosize into the perpetrator of the massacre at My Lai!
My personal extreme anger at the principal architects of the war has continued. Many years later, I learned that once, when Robert Strange McNamara had been travelling on the ferry to Martha’s Vineyard, he was recognized by another passenger, one who viewed him as a war criminal. The man attempted unsuccessfully to pitch McNamara overboard. I thought that if I had met McNamara in a similar situation, I would have promptly broken his nose. I remember, too, my vitriolic reaction when I heard that Lyndon Baines Johnson, the U.S. President I hold principally responsible for the involvement of this country in Vietnam, had died suddenly after a heart attack. My first thoughts were that it was a pity his suffering from this was likely to be too brief. I suppose bitterness is too mild a term for some of my feelings about those who sent us into harm’s way.
In a sense, all of us who went to Vietnam and were fortunate enough to return alive were, in one way or another, somewhat “broken men” with hidden wounds and scary facets even we scarcely see. For some, the joy of life ended in Vietnam; for others, serious behavioral problems, homelessness, drugs, alcohol, flashbacks and post traumatic stress disorders were a legacy of their time there. I was clearly one of the fortunate. However, even I still have daily recollections of the sounds, the smells, and the images of that distant war experienced decades ago.
In spite of it all, I am a survivor—one who has been able to successfully step back into the flow of our culture and community with no visible signs of damage. After my time in Vietnam, I was able to resume my family life as well as my medical career. Unlike the unfortunate Dr. Manette, the scars on my soul are relatively minor. At most, I have joined the legions of the walking worried. Much of this ability to move on from my experiences I owe to my wife and children, as well as to Gwendolyn, Lani, Emmy, and Molly (a series of very tolerant and patient canines)—all of whom helped to mellow out some of the bitterness of my Vietnam experience.
I still remain in some sense an altruist—one who may be quite skeptical of how much good he may do but one who will continue to try. I would rather attempt to help to make life better for those less fortunate than myself, even if that means failure, than sit back passively grumbling about how terrible the world is.

Footnotes:
1. The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion, 2007
2. A passage from Dante Alighieri's Inferno (Canto 27, lines 61-66) spoken by Guido da Montefeltro in answer to the questions of Dante, who Guido thought was dead, since he was in Hell:. The flame in which Guido is encased vibrates as he speaks: "If I thought that that I was replying to someone who would ever return to the world, this flame would cease to flicker. But since no one ever returns from these depths alive, if what I've heard is true, I will answer you without fear of infamy."

Glossary of special terms

ARVN Army of the Republic of Viet-Nam. ARVN (pronounced Arvin) was South Vietnam's army. During the war, ARVN troops were advised by American officers and fought alongside American soldiers. Also referred to as Marvin the ARVN.
Boonies The jungle. From boondocks, first used by U.S. soldiers in the Philippines following the Spanish-American War. Also called the bush.
Charlie American soldiers slang for Viet Cong. Charlie (or Charles or Chuck) was short for the phonetic representation Victor Charlie for VC.
Chinook CH-47 helicopter, very large, twin rotored, looks like a flying banana
Chopper A helicopter.
DEROS the magical Date of Expected Return from Over Seas.
Doc Enlisted medical aidman or MD. A slang title used by American military servicemen for their medic or doctor
Dustoff describes a helicopter that is used to medevac wounded troops from a combat zone
Escalate To intensify. To wage a wider war.
Freedom bird Airplane returning soldiers home to America after their tour of duty in Vietnam.
Friendly fire Accidentally firing guns or dropping bombs on one’s own soldiers.
FTA Fuck the Army! An expression meant to convey maximum distaste for the military
Grunt American infantryman in Vietnam. Popular nickname.
Guerilla Military operations conducted in enemy held territory usually by volunteer irregular forces. Combat style is characterized by skirmishing, surprise hit-and-run raids on enemy supply lines, camps, and patrols.
Ho Chi Minh sandals Vietnamese sandals made from used automobile tires.
Hootch Soldier’s living quarters or a native hut in Vietnam.
In country Vietnam. U.S. military slang.
Jungle boots Canvas boots designed like traditional leather combat boots. Canvas dries easier, while leather boots rotted in the jungle. Jungle boots also had steel mesh in the sole of the boot to protect the wearer from booby traps, such as sharpened and poisoned pungee sticks.
KIA Killed in Action.
Lifer Career soldier in the U.S. army, in contrast to a drafted soldier obligated, usually to serve only 2 years
MACV Military Assistance Command, Vietnam. In 1961, MAAG was enlarged, reorganized, and renamed MACV. This organization directed the American advisory effort in South Vietnam and later directed the war effort itself.
MARS Military Affiliate Radio System. A system of military radio personnel and short wave radio signal connections linked with volunteer civilian amateur radio operators that enabled soldiers to communicate with family and friends in the US
Medevac Medical evacuation by helicopter.
MIA Missing in Action. MIA refers to a soldier who is reported missing in action but whose death cannot be confirmed.
Napalm Incendiary, such as gelled gasoline, used in Vietnam by the French and the Americans using flame throwers and dropping in bombs from aircraft to serves as a defoliant and as an antipersonnel weapon.
PAVN Peoples Army of Viet-Nam. PAVN was the army of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam), referred to by American and Saigon government forces as NVA (North Vietnamese Army).
PLAF Peoples Liberation Armed Forces. PLAF was the guerilla army of the National Liberation Front in South Vietnam, referred to by American and Saigon government forces as Viet Cong, or simply VC
Platoon Approximately 45 men belonging to a company and commanded by a lieutenant.
POW Prisoner of War. POW refers to a soldier who has been taken by the enemy.
Pungee sticks Sharpened wood or bamboo stakes, often feces tipped, usually set in recessed pits in the ground and covered to hide their existence
Purple Heart U.S. military medal signifying combat wounded.
Regular Army The permanent Army of the US, often populated by career soldiers
RVN Republic of Viet-Nam. The Republic of Viet-Nam was the official name given to South Vietnam, as proclaimed by its first president Ngo Dinh Diem, following the temporary partition of Vietnam in 1954. RVNs capital was in Saigon.
Search and destroy A military operation aimed at killing enemy soldiers but not at taking and holding territory.
Short To be near the end of one’s one-year tour of duty in U.S. military service in Vietnam (specifically, having under 100 days left in country). A short-timer.
Sky pilot A chaplain. Affectionate slang.
VC Viet Cong. Viet Cong was the pejorative name given to NLF members by South Vietnam’s President Diem. It means Vietnamese Communist, even though most NLF members were not communist. Also referred to as Victor Charlie, after the radio call signal for the initials.
World, the Home. The U.S. The real world.
XO Executive Officer. Second in command.

Where are they now?

Ed Schwartz remained in the military. When we talked last some years ago, he was happily recounting opportunities to travel to war zones around the globe. He never made the transition back to civilian life—never married or became “normal.”
Archibald Weems McFadden retired from the Army and when last contacted was collecting bricks at his home in Annapolis Md.Rodger Kollmorgen returned to Minnesota and continued the practice of psychiatry.
Philip L. Ash, the Provost Marshal, retired to Southern California where he grows and shows roses.
Mandell Ganchrow, MD, the meshuga at the Passover Seder, is the past president of the Orthodox Union as well as the former Executive Vice President of the Religious Zionists of America.

2007-08-24T08:17:00.001-07:00

Tahiti Moorea vacation

Costa Rica

2006-12-31T21:08:00.000-08:00

Larry, Judy, Lisa, Rodney, Leila, and Dahlia visited Costa Rica in December, 2006. We spent much time at the beach or in the jungle. The wildlife was extraordinarily varied and many of the creatures were gorgeous! Perhaps the most spectacular bird I saw was the Scarlet Macaw. This picture was taken as the bird was inspecting me.

Rose and Ray

2006-10-31T07:52:00.000-08:00

Ray is demonstating a kick at his karate class. Rose, below, was photographed at a family wedding with her stuffed cat.

Judy & Larry visit Germany

2006-07-23T11:38:00.000-07:00

Judy and Larry in an archway at Schoenburg Castle.

A painter copying one of the masterpieces in a museum.

A view from our room in the tower of Schoenburg Castle where we stayed the night.
Neuschwanstien Castle

Amazon visit

2006-07-23T11:16:00.000-07:00

In June 2006 I travelled with Randy Frakes to Iquitos, Peru. There we boarded El Arca, a funky river boat, and travelled upstream several hundred miles on the Maranon and Ucayali Rivers (these two join to form the Amazon.) We loitered, photographed, swam with the Piranhuas, fished for Piranhuas, and trekked in the tropical rain forest. These snapshots show a few of the local critters.
This shows just the head of a large anaconda loitering in the river next to the boat.
Here is a tiny Cat's Eye snake.
This is a Hoatsin bird hanging out in the bushes by the river.

Visit to headwaters of the Amazon

2006-07-23T11:07:00.000-07:00

A black Huacary monkey stares at me.
El Arca, cruising up the Amazon at dawn.
Colorful caterpillar

2006-07-23T10:30:00.000-07:00

Leaf cutter ants carrying food for their mushroom gardens.

2006-07-22T09:53:00.000-07:00

Giant waterlilies
The botanical explorer Richard Spruce (1817-93) had his first encounter with the giant waterlily (Victoria amazonica) in South America, where it grows in the backwaters of rivers in the Amazon basin, the Guianas and the Mato Grosso in Brazil. Its circular leaves, with their upturned rims, are anchored by long stalks rising from an underground stem buried in the mud of the river bottom. The leaves first appear as spiny buds but expand rapidly up to half a square metre a day. Their upper surface has a rather quilted appearance and a waxy layer that repels water. The purplish red undersurface is covered by a network of ribs clad in abundant sharp spines, possibly as a defence against herbivorous fishes and manatees. Air trapped in the spaces between the ribs enables the leaves to float - they are so buoyant that they can easily support the weight of a small child. Each plant produces some 40-50 leaves per season which cover the water surface and exclude light, thus restricting the growth of most other plants.

Ray and Rose Piano Recital

2006-06-04T22:04:00.000-07:00

A piano recital is a big deal--especially when it is your first and it is held in a large church before a large audience! Well, they played beautifully and were given a jump rope by the teacher as a little reward and a way to help them unwind. For Rose, an bit of extra excitement came from shedding a tooth as she finished her piece.

Leila and Dahlia at Bass Lake

2006-05-30T21:41:00.000-07:00

On Memorial Day, Leila, Dahlia, their parents and grandparents hiked 2.6 miles to Bass Lake in the Point Reyes National Seashore. This was the girls' first time swimming in a natural lake. The water was cold but they loved it.

Rose's Dance Recital

2006-05-28T08:25:00.000-07:00

Rose performed yesterday at the Santa Clara Convention Center. These snapshots show her in her tap dancing routine and then dancing to the music, "Somewhere Over the Rainbow."

Snowy Egrets

2006-04-30T06:54:00.000-07:00

It's hard to believe it, but, these birds were photographed on April 29, 2006 in a palm adjacent to the duck pond in Palo Alto, California.

Travels through Northern Ethiopia

2006-02-23T20:56:00.000-08:00

Axum was the center of a vibrant civilization for almost 800 years. Above is a stela marking a royal burial site.
Gondor in northern Ethiopia is noted for its ancient castles. One of these is pictured above. Often each royal generation would build a new castle.
This is a monastery on the outskirts of Mekele, precariously perched on top of a tiny peak.
Here is an overview of the Mekele countryside as seen from the monastery. I photographed this during the dry season. Later, once the seasonal rains fall, this will again become some of the most productive agricultural land in Ethiopia.

2006-02-23T20:50:00.000-08:00

Here are some of the flower gardens around the buildings of the Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital. Dr. Catherine Hamlin, the co-founder of the hospital, has long believed that lovely gardens are an important adjunct to curing the physical and psychologic damage the patients have suffered.
In an effort to reach more women with obstetric fistula, new satellite hospital facilities are being built in five outlying areas of Ethiopia. The newest center, in Mekele, just opened in February 2006. This is a view of the new main ward. This facility was largely built with donations from both the Australian government and the Australian Hamlin Fistula Trust.
Few photos more clearly demonstate the plight of woman in Ethiopia than this picture of women carrying stones from a construction site. Women often are the ones who literally do the heavy lifting in the fields and job sites.
This woman is making gravel by smashing rocks with a hammer. She does this job all day long to supply needed aggregate for concrete mixed on the job site.

2006-02-23T20:48:00.000-08:00

This is the new fistula hospital in Mekele. It still has a yellow ribbon that was cut later at the opening ceremony.
A patient knits as she waits outside of the hospital.
Dr. Catherine Hamlin visits with a fistula patient. This is one of the lucky few who managed to deliver a live baby. Unfortunately, the mother suffered an obstetric fistula.
Dr. Gordon Williams, one of England's most renowned urologic surgeons, has been coming monthly for years to donate his time to training local doctors in repairing some of the most complex cases. Here he meets with Dr. Hamlin outside of the operating suites.

2006-02-23T20:43:00.000-08:00

This is a view of the newly opened ward in the Mekele fistula hospital.

Religion has sustained these people for hundreds of years, providing hope when there seemed little be be hopeful for. This is a Ethiopian Orthodox priest holding his cross.

A priest in his church.

Another castle from Gondor.

Scenes from Ethiopia

2006-02-23T20:39:00.000-08:00

This is the main ward at the Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital. A picture of Reginald Hamlin, co-founder of the facility, is on the wall to the right.
Catherine Hamlin reviews a patient's chart on the ward.
This is the ribbon cutting ceremony for the new facility in Mekele.
A patient and her baby wait outside the ward. She has successfully completed surgery to repair her fistula.

2006-02-23T11:00:00.000-08:00

A wedding at one of the mololithic churches in Lalibela, Ethiopia.

2006-02-23T10:59:00.000-08:00

This man was silently praying in the church of St. George in Lalibela Ethiopia.

2006-02-23T10:57:00.000-08:00

This is a hermit I saw while visiting Lalibela in northern Ethiopia last October.

Queen of Sheba and King Solomon

2006-02-23T08:51:00.000-08:00

20th-century Ethiopian painting of the Sheba/Solomon narrative from the 14th century Ethiopian manuscript, the Kabra Nagast, (Glory of Kings), the Ethiopian national saga.
Ethiopians locate Sheba in Axum, in the north. From here, according to the Kebra Nagast , she was persuaded to travel to the court of Solomon by the head of her caravans - a man much impressed by the King's wisdom and might. In Jerusalem a banquet of specially seasoned meat was given in her honour and, at the end of the evening, Solomon invited her to spend the night in his chambers.
Sheba agreed, but first extracted a commitment from the King that he would not take her by force. To this he assented, on the single condition that the Queen make a promise not to take anything in his house. Solomon then mounted his bed on one side of the chamber and had the Queen's bed prepared at the other side, placing near it a bowl of water. Made thirsty by the seasoned food, Sheba soon awoke, arose, and drank the water. At this Point Solomon seized her hand and accused her of having broken her oath; he then " worked his will with her ".
That night the King dreamt that a brilliant light, the divine presence, had left Israel. Shortly afterwards the Queen departed and returned to her country and there, nine months and five days later, she gave birth to a son - Menelik, the founder of Ethiopia's Solomonic dynasty.
In due course, when the boy had grown, he went to visit his father, who received him with great honour and splendour. After spending a year at court in Jerusalem, however, the prince determined to return once more to Ethiopia. When he was informed of this, Solomon assembled the elders of Israel and commanded them to send their first born sons with Menelik. Before the young men departed, however, they stole the Ark of the Covenant and took it with them to Ethiopia - which then, according to the Kebra Nagast, became " the second Zion ".
The notion that the Ark of the Covenant was removed from Jerusalem to Axum is central to the reverence accorded to the tablets, the Tablets of the Law, in Abyssinian Christian practices. The belief system of which the tablets are a part is, however, an unusual one. No other Christian Church gives such importance to what is, by definition, a pre-Christian - indeed a Judaic - tradition.

2006-02-23T07:08:00.000-08:00

Not all tourists return from Ethiopia. These skeletons rest in a cave near a church in Lalibela. They are the remnants of 13th century pilgrims who died while visiting this holy site!

Judy is thrilled to ride a ferris wheel with the twins!

2005-12-23T18:38:00.000-08:00

Rose tries out ice skating for the first time!

2005-12-23T18:27:00.000-08:00

Ray's first time on ice

2005-12-23T18:22:00.000-08:00

Dahlia and bunny rest on a rock

2005-12-10T14:03:00.000-08:00

Great Blue Heron

2005-11-25T20:57:00.000-08:00

Rodney and Leila

2005-11-25T20:52:00.000-08:00

Leila leaps on the sand

2005-11-25T20:50:00.000-08:00

Dahlia and her board

2005-11-25T20:45:00.000-08:00

Dahlia at the beach

2005-11-25T20:44:00.000-08:00

Larry, Jac and Rod visit Bhutan

2005-11-20T22:00:00.000-08:00

We visited Bhutan to do some fun hiking, birding and photography in the beginning of September, 2005. To our surprise, English has become the lingua franca of this high Himalayan kingdom. This made communication very easy. The visual impact of this country is striking: chartreuse, terraced rice paddies rapidly ascending steep hillsides, huge tzongs and temples with detailed and colorfully painted wood detailing, colorful monks and elaborate hand-woven fabrics on highly photogenic people. Here are some photos of our stay-in no particular order.

Tiger's Nest Monastery

2005-10-18T21:02:00.000-07:00

statue at Bangkok Royal Palace

2005-10-11T20:40:00.000-07:00

Bangkok water lilly

2005-10-11T20:39:00.000-07:00

Masks for religious festivals

2005-10-11T20:25:00.000-07:00

Tiger's Nest in the clouds

2005-10-11T20:22:00.000-07:00

2005-09-18T20:34:00.000-07:00

Funeral service

2005-09-18T09:48:00.000-07:00

Tzong on the river

2005-09-18T09:46:00.000-07:00

Terraced rice paddies

2005-09-18T09:45:00.000-07:00

Jac helps fix a water-powered prayer wheel

2005-09-18T09:42:00.000-07:00

School children returning from class

2005-09-18T09:40:00.000-07:00

Local woman

2005-09-18T09:39:00.000-07:00

Roadside vegetable stand

Monks making a joyful sound

2005-09-18T09:37:00.000-07:00

Monks makinge a joyful sound

2005-09-18T09:36:00.000-07:00

Monk hamming it up for the camera

2005-09-18T09:35:00.000-07:00

Prayer wheels

2005-09-18T09:34:00.000-07:00

Dance of the stags

2005-09-18T09:32:00.000-07:00

Masked figure at Wangdue Tshechu

2005-09-18T09:25:00.000-07:00

Bas relief on rock in the countryside

2005-09-18T09:24:00.000-07:00

Little monk welcomes us to Memorial Chorten

2005-09-18T09:22:00.000-07:00

Tiger's Nest Monastery

2005-06-21T19:14:00.000-07:00

Hotel, Bodie California. Situated in the hills of the high desert landscape east of the Sierra Nevada Mountains at over 8,000 feet, Bodie was home to over 7,000 people and 2,000 buildings. Gold was discovered here in 1859 by W.S. Bodey and the town boomed in 1877. In its heyday, this wild town had 65 saloons, 3 breweries, 2 banks, a whole street of brothels, a large Chinatown complete with opium houses, gambling halls, saloons and a Taoist temple, hotels and boarding houses, a few churches and a jail. It had a reputation for wickedness, badmen and “the worst climate out of doors”.
Winters at this high altitude camp were severe with temperatures that sometimes dropped to 40 below zero and snows that drifted to twenty feet. Killings were almost daily events, and robberies, stage holdups, and street fights with and without guns were common. Its reputation was summed up by one little girl who wrote in her diary after learning that her family was moving to the remote and infamous town, ”Goodbye God, I’m going to Bodie.”

2005-06-21T19:13:00.000-07:00

Using a view camera, Bodie, California

2005-06-21T19:12:00.000-07:00

School room, Bodie, California

2005-06-21T19:11:00.001-07:00

Old building, Bodie, California

2005-06-21T19:11:00.000-07:00

After a early summer storm, Donner Pass,

2005-06-21T19:10:00.000-07:00

Shepherd, near Bridgetown, California

2005-06-14T06:22:00.000-07:00

Rose hangs in mid-air as she contemplates letting gravity pull her into the pool.

2005-06-14T06:21:00.000-07:00

Ray and Rose swimming with arms linked.