Vietnam Journal

The Vietnam Journal is a personal record of a young "mustang" naval officer and his team of three doctors and eleven hospital corpsmen sent to Vietnam following the Tet Offensive in 1968 under the operational control of the US Agency for International Development. Their mission was to assist the medical staff of a Vietnamese civilian hospital of the early nineteenth-century variety for 365 days. It was a struggle of living and working under the most trying conditions of enemy threat, culture shock, language barriers, and the general chaos of military, inefficient civilian agencies, and foreign entity conflicts. The team being responsible to each of these for something yet receiving support from none. However, it is also a story of an evolution of young men, most under the age of twenty-one, coming from a world of set standards with clear expectations and objectives and their adaptations and changes to get the job done and survive. They were surrounded by the war, but not a part of it, except to be involved in the aftermath of its result near them. Yet they were constantly targeted by mortar and rockets fire on the average of every ten days. Most of the team handled the stress well. Several of the older team members did not. The Journal is noticeably frank in capturing the team's interactions with the circumstances they found themselves in and with each other. Their achievements, shortcomings, exceptional performances, prejudices, and individual creativeness are recorded as a matter of fact and without regard to rank or position. It is honest and replete with its own recurring humor. It has its share of mysteries, deception and crime, and intrigue. None of the team member were aware of their actions being recorded, except the author. It was not meant to be secretly recorded, it just never was questioned or discussed.