Voices from the Vietnam War: Stories from American, Asian, and Russian Veterans

Chapter 17: Life and Death of an ARVN Doctor

Chapter 17 Life and Death of an ARVN Doctor Dr. Nguyen Canh Minh didn’t have much choice during the French Indochina War of 1946–1954 and the Vietnam War of 1960–1975.1 His country became a battleground where two political ideologies competed in order to show their superiority. The Vietnamese people were only chessmen on a board, who unfortunately transformed the struggle between two superpowers into their own bloody civil wars. All the Vietnamese youth approaching military service age were drafted in both South and North Vietnam. The war between two peoples in one nation, brother against brother, friend against friend, and sometimes even father against son, was very destructive for family bonds and the nation as a whole. As a field doctor, Minh risked his own life several times to rescue others in South Vietnam. As a medical group commander, he worked with different U.S. advisers in the army hospital and had quite different experiences. Dr. Minh’s view on the ARVN officer corps was also different from the wartime stereotype. After the Communist takeover of the South, he was sent to a “reeducation camp,” or a prison camp, in the North for more than four years.2 In these POW camps, all of the prisoners had to do manual labor work to produce enough food for themselves and to send a surplus to the Communist government. They had to accept the Communist ideology by studying the propaganda materials and confessing their own “crime” against the Communists in the war. They were punished if they failed to work hard or to criticize themselves. Many of the POWs died in these camps. Dr. Minh witnessed some life-or-death situations in his prison camp. While in camp he made up his mind to leave Vietnam and come to America. 166 Doctors and Nurses After his release from the prison camp, he took three of his children with him, traveling by foot for a week to flee Vietnam. After crossing the Vietnamese-Cambodian border, they continued their long march for another three weeks, traveling by foot for five hundred miles and crossing the “killing fields” of Cambodia, which was also under Communist control at that time. After their long march of four weeks, they finally entered Thailand. Two years later, the broken family reunited in America. Dr. Nguyen Canh Minh Medical Group Commander, Army Hospital at Can Tho, Fourth Tactical Zone, ARVN (South Vietnam) I was born in 1930 in Hue, the capital city of South Vietnam from 1945 to 1955. I had three brothers and three sisters. When I was in high school in Hue, the First Indochina War, or the French Indochina War, broke out in 1946. To fight against the Vietnamese Communist forces [Viet Minhs] in the North, the French government and our Emperor Bao Dai signed an agreement to establish a Vietnamese National Army [VNA] in 1949. I went to a college in 1947 and finished my B.S. degree in biochemistry and physics within four years. When I graduated from college in 1951, the Vietnamese government had enforced a compulsory service for all South Vietnamese youth.3 The army was mostly equipped, trained, and commanded by French military. The French had established a training system for the VNA officer corps. Youths who had a high school diploma could sign up for military training at the national military academies as officers. Since I joined the army with a college degree, I was sent to the VNA Medical School at the Hanoi Medical University in 1951. Many of the medical instructors were French military surgeons and doctors who had field experience in World War II. During the four years [1951–1954] of my medical school, I studied a French medical curriculum at the Medical University in Hanoi, which had been under the French occupation from 1946 to 1954. The French professors and doctors emphasized basic knowledge, systematic training, and professionalism. Patient and skillful, they helped us learn a lot of foundation and general education subjects. In 1952, I met my future wife, Nhon, at the university, where she studied medical education for her teaching degree. She was also from Hue. Life and Death of an ARVN Doctor 167 We had so much in common. After two years of dating, with our families’ permission, we got married at Hue in 1954. After the French army lost their battle at Dien Bien Phu in the...