Wizard 6: A Combat Psychiatrist in Vietnam (review)

In 1969, when Dr. Douglas Bey, a newly minted captain in the Army Medical Corps, arrived in Vietnam for a tour of duty as division psychiatrist to the 1st Infantry Division, he was greeted, as were so many before him, with catcalls, the kindest of which was "What a bunch of sorry mothers." Stumbling out of the plane and sinking into the dense heat stirred only by the insults of the happy, jeering men lined up for the return flight, Bey felt as though he were "going through the looking glass in Alice in Wonderland and entering a parallel existence."


It is a strength of this memoir that it eschews regaling the reader with "just a collection of humorous anecdotes" about this strange, alternate universe. The tale abounds with such anecdotes, enough to make it entertaining, but these never get in the way of Bey's thoughtful observations about the bizarre, often frightening, and frequently exquisitely boring realities of life with an infantry division in a combat zone. 


Bey opens with a description of himself as a young, immature workaholic graduating from the Menninger Foundation just in time to heed his country's call for psychiatric professionals to serve in Vietnam. This allows the reader to gauge, over the course of the memoir, how the author's younger self coped with, and was shaped by, the experiences. His second, and lengthy, chapter paints a compelling picture of the world on the other side of the looking glass, a world that required learning a myriad of regs and procedures, developing a shell of coping skills rooted for the most part in denial and gallows humor, finding his place in the informal pecking order, and acquiring a new jargon, much of it obscene, though with a touch of whimsy at times. His title, Wizard 6, for example, refers to his radio call name in the 1st Infantry Division, which identified him as the division psychiatrist (the Wizard) and as the chief, also known as "6" for the one in charge. 


Bey's narrative, besides being highly readable, covers a lot of bases. He sheds light on the raw tensions between black and white soldiers, describes how his team diagnosed and treated patients in the division, provided health care to civilians, and identified high-risk individuals and (extra)high-stress combat situations in order to recommend morale-boosting solutions. He gives contextual depth by slipping in factual and historical data about American military psychiatry in small, painless, and helpful doses. And he broadens his scope to describe the Viet Cong's perception of mental illness, which leaned heavily on supernatural models. 


In a more personal vein he paints a bittersweet picture of how he and his fellows "cop[ed] with Vietnam" by putting the "world" out of mind and focusing on work, self-medicating with alcohol, cultivating a "counterphobic" bravado, tweaking the Regular Army's careerism, getting away on R&R, and above all by tapping into the camaraderie forged by adversity. His evolution from callow youth, through callow angst-ridden officer, through callow but slowly maturing manhood is, by itself, a well-told tale. General readers with an interest in the Vietnam experience will find this book entertaining and informative. Although the book lacks depth of research, even academics will find it a worthwhile "primary" account of how one division's mental health team turned abstract psychiatric principles into meaningful practical applications in the field.