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3rd Med
- The University Press of Kentucky
- Chapter
- Additional Information
One of my listeners wrote me an email in January of 2008. dear bob: My name is Al Naar. I served as operating room corpsman with the 3rd Medical Battalion during the Vietnam War. On May 2 & 3, 2008, in Charleston, SC, the officers and men of 3rd Med will assemble once more . . . and hold their 40 year reunion. . . . There will be over 100 doctors and corpsmen who served together and will see each other for the first time since leaving Vietnam 40 years ago. This presents a rare and unique opportunity to interview surgeons who left private practice, joined the military and served during a difficult time in our nation’s history . There are many stories that came out of the Vietnam War. However, very little if any have ever been recorded of the extraordinary service of these individuals. As an avid listener to your show, I feel that this subject matter would be compelling and of interest to many in your audience. I thought so too, and so did Ariana. The battalion served in several field hospitals close to the DMZ. What these medical men were dealing with in 1968 were the results of a double whammy: the siege of the U.S. Marine base at Khe Sanh, which began on January 2, and the Tet Offensive, launched on January 30. Think of M*A*S*H, with the wisecracks , the black humor, the irony of sewing up men so they could go back to an unpopular war and risk their lives again, the antiwar feelings of some of these military officers at war, the music playing in the 3 R D M E D 192 A V O I C E I N T H E B O X operating room—3rd Med had all that going on too, except these were navy doctors serving on land. Their patients and their corpsmen were U.S. Marines. If there were still travel funds in the budget by May, we’d be going to Charleston. Then I checked my calendar and was horrified to see that I was already booked for that weekend. I was to deliver the commencement address at the University of St. Francis in Fort Wayne, Indiana. As much as I wanted to go to Charleston, I didn’t want to break my commitment to USF. So Ariana went alone to 3rd Med’s reunion. From Fort Wayne, I sent her a text message: “Getting anything good there?” She replied, “If you call making grown men cry—good, yes.” I answered that she’d been doing that for many years. What Ariana recorded in Charleston was solid gold. We called the program “Stories from 3rd Med—Surviving a Jungle ER.” I spoke very few words—identifying a speaker now and then. The men told their own stories. Dr. John Munna, a trauma surgeon from New York, described operating on his first case in Vietnam as the hospital was under fire. He also did bare-handed heart message on a marine, commanding him to “Live, live—don’t you die on me.” Dr. Norman Pollack spoke of the most horrendous cases, victims of booby traps, phosphorous (which continues to burn and can’t be put out, so it must be cut out), and Bouncing Bettys, land mines that pop up to a height of five feet and decapitate people. He also told of doctors who couldn’t deal with what they were seeing and had to be reassigned. There were no defibrillators available to 3rd Med, so Dr. Jack Hagan and corpsman John Little fashioned one from a pair of kitchen knives, an electrical cord, and a generator. Little recalled a marine wounded while clearing a minefield. He was hit in the head, eyes, heart, and belly. After surgery, he said he was to be married in two weeks. When told he was blind, the patient said he didn’t want to live anymore. Then he died. On the first day of the siege of Khe Sanh, twenty-six-year-old Dr. Ed Feldman was assigned a marine patient who had “what looked like a pipe” extending from his abdomen. That “pipe” was actually an unexploded 82-millimeter enemy mortar shell. The hospital had been under attack and had no power. Dr. Feldman operated with marines [18.232.66.188] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 13:53 GMT) 193 3 R D M E D holding flashlights over his patient. A sergeant advised him as to which parts...