Will We Ever Learn?: A Doctor's Diary and Reflections on His Year in Vietnam

By Donald P. Lookingbill, M.D.

From September 1970-71, Dr. Donald Lookingbill, Captain, U.S. Army, kept a diary about life on an Army base and about his experience as a general medical officer for an infantry battalion during the late days of our War in Vietnam. The diary, along with letters from his wife, also chronicles a love story about a family separated for a year by that war. Forty years later, Dr. Lookingbill, Professor Emeritus, Mayo Medical School, reflects on the many costs of war, and on the similarities between our wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. The mantra of the book is a statement made over a century ago: Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jan 31, 2013
• ISBN: 9781300620884

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Will We Ever Learn?: A Doctor's Diary and Reflections on His Year in Vietnam

Will We Ever Learn?

A Doctor’s Diary and Reflections on His Year in Vietnam

Donald P. Lookingbill, M.D.

Professor Emeritus

College of Medicine

Mayo Clinic

Copyright © 2012, Donald P. Lookingbill, M.D.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means—whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic—without written permission of both publisher and author, except in the case of brief excerpts used in critical articles and reviews. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law.

ISBN 978-1-300-62088-4

For Georgia, Scott,

Todd and Hilary

Quote

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

George Santayana: The Life of Reason, 1905

Prologue

Spring, 1986

I am attending a medical meeting in downtown Washington, D.C., not far from the Washington Mall. Outside, the weather is picture perfect — not a cloud in the sky, the bright spring sun warming the slightly cool morning air, and flowering vegetation bursting with life, especially the brightly colored azaleas that are in full, luxurious bloom.

At the lunch break I decide to walk over to the Mall. The temperature is comfortably warm and the sky still crystal clear. It is a great day to be alive.

The Vietnam Memorial had been dedicated just a few years earlier, so I make my way there. I approach from the rear and slowly round the end of the memorial to face its front. With a jolt, I’m suddenly confronted with a wall of black granite inscribed with the names of over 58,000 American men and women whose lives were taken in the Vietnam conflict. None of these individuals would ever again experience a day like the one I had been enjoying.

My immediate, overpowering emotion is as surprising as it is intense. It is not sadness (that comes a few minutes later), but anger. Anger that all these lives had been sacrificed. And for what?

I seek out the names of several people I once knew, including a fraternity brother from college. Now the sadness sinks in. But the anger never really goes away. How could our country make such a terrible mistake? How could we have expected a favorable outcome from invading and occupying a very foreign country and immersing ourselves in its civil war?

Well, I tell myself, at least we learned our lesson. At the expense of all the deaths, injuries, disabilities, and ruined lives, at least now our country seems to understand that a poorly justified invasion and occupation of someone else’s country is a mistake — one not to be repeated.

But less than 30 years after disengaging ourselves from the Vietnam disaster, we invaded and occupied two more very foreign countries — Iraq and Afghanistan — and became bogged down in protracted and costly civil conflicts.

Which begs the question: When will we ever learn?

PART ONE

Vietnam 1970–1971

Chapter 1

An Obligated Volunteer

30 September, 1970, 1 a.m. (V.N. time).

Arrival in V.N. at Bien Hoa airport. Instructed to hurry to terminal if encounter mortar fire. Bus ride to Long Binh at 2 a.m. with armed guard escort thru town — slightly scary with dim lights behind pulled shades in shacks aligning the road.

Our motorcade wound through dark, empty streets. We had just left the Bien Hoa airport outside of Saigon and were bound for the Long Binh base to receive our assignments for our one-year tour in Vietnam.

We rode in buses. Despite the time of day and our jet lag, we were fully awake and anxiously looking out the windows, not knowing what to expect. At the front of our bus caravan, a jeep escort fitted with a manned .50 caliber machine gun reminded us that we were not here on vacation.

We passed through a small town, travelling on a narrow dirt street lined by darkened shacks. We had no idea whether friend or foe dwelled within and, as with most of the Vietnamese population, we never would find out.

Our arrival into this amorphous war zone was much different from one that I had seen on television — armed Marines in battle attire, wading ashore on a beach in Vietnam. We had traveled from the states on a chartered commercial airplane, complete with flight attendants. We were still dressed in state-side army khaki uniforms, and we were not yet armed. Although our arrival had been uneventful, we had no idea what would happen in the next 365 days.

The Berry Plan

I was in Vietnam as an obligated volunteer. Why had I agreed to this volunteer status?

My military career began back in 1968, in an auditorium at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. A military recruiter stood on stage in front of all the men in our medical school senior class. (In the class of 1968, there were 115 men and only five women.) The military draft was still in effect back then, and physicians were not exempt.

The recruiter told us that 98 percent of us would be required to serve either in the military or, for a small minority, the public health service. Given these grim odds, he encouraged us to sign up for the Berry Plan, whereby we could defer our service until after we had completed our preferred post-graduate training (residency). After that we would be obligated to serve, but instead of having to serve as general medical officers (GMOs), we would be practicing in our area of interest and expertise: surgery, psychiatry, internal medicine, etc. If we were going to have to serve anyway, this plan made sense, so almost all of us signed up.

I graduated from medical school in May 1968, and on July 1st started my three-year residency program in internal medicine at the University of Rochester in Rochester, N.Y. The work was demanding — in the first (internship) year, I worked an average of 105 hours per week — so Georgia, my new wife, and I had very little time to spend together. When we were together, I was totally exhausted.

On one occasion, when we were out for a rare restaurant dinner, I actually fell asleep at the table in the middle of a sentence — my own sentence. I had been searching my mind for a word but fell asleep before I could find it. When I awoke, I was alone. Georgia had left the restaurant and walked home.

There were 14 residents, including one woman, in my residency group. All but one of the men had signed on to the Berry Plan. In 1969 we were all notified that the military was short of doctors, and, as a result, we would not be allowed to complete our residency training. Our deferments would be shortened from three years to two.

In the spring of 1970 we gathered together around a single phone to call Washington D.C., to find out where we would each be assigned. The fates for some of us turned out better than for others. One of the guys was assigned by the Air Force to Las Vegas, and one was assigned by the Navy to Bermuda. We overheard the following one-sided phone call from another future Navy physician: What? Where? What do you mean only four hours from Paris? He was assigned to the Navy Base in Keflavik, Iceland. Three of us were in the Army — two were assigned to Korea, and I was assigned to Vietnam.

Because we had only completed two of the three years of internal medicine residency, we were officially classified as partially trained internists, and therefore would most likely be assigned as general medical officers (GMO’s), the exact assignment we had hoped to avoid when we signed up for the Berry Plan deferment.

Basic Training

So, as the song goes, I was in the Army now and destined for Vietnam as a GMO. First stop: Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas for six weeks of basic training. Here we would learn about soldiering and military medicine.

In August 1970, Georgia, our ten-month-old son, Scott, and I flew to San Antonio where we rented an inexpensive apartment and the least expensive car we could find, a Volkswagen Beetle, while I underwent basic training. We knew that at the end of the six weeks we would be separated by a distance that extended halfway around the planet. The dread of that impending separation hung heavily over our heads. The clock was ticking and there was no stopping it.

In my boot-camp class of about 100 physicians, nearly half were destined for Vietnam. We all learned about wartime medicine, although minimal attention was given to psychiatric and psychological issues. Instead, we were told that the shell shock and combat fatigue experienced by our soldiers in WWI and WWII had not been a problem in Vietnam. It sounded like our troops, in general, were reasonably well adjusted. (I would learn differently when I got to Vietnam.) There was no discussion of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a diagnosis that would not come into usage until a decade later.

We also learned about field sanitation (little did I know then that I would find myself responsible for this in my first duty location), as well as military tradition and behavior. We actually spent an entire half-day learning to salute — why to, when to, whom to, how to.

Despite having little to lose for inattentiveness or poor behavior, we were, for the most part, well behaved. But many of us had seen the movie MASH that had been released earlier that year, and so irreverent MASH-type behavior did sometimes erupt during training.

Each morning and afternoon we had marching drills in the base quadrangle. Our performance in the first week was reasonable, with most of us being able to execute a left-face, right-face, or whatever. But by the end of the six weeks, and as departure time for Vietnam approached, we became more rebellious. To the consternation of our drill sergeant, this was partly manifested by a definite deterioration in our marching skills. On a given command, some of us would turn left, some right, some not at all. It all provided noontime entertainment for the onlookers, whose numbers seemed to grow as the weeks went by and our performances became more and more discombobulated.

Although basic training was not nearly as rigorous for us as it was for enlisted personnel, we did have our moments. Near the end of our six weeks, we underwent two days of field exercises at Camp Bullis, a large outdoor training camp on the outskirts of San Antonio. Here we learned many skills, including how to shoot a .45 caliber pistol and an M-14 rifle — although by then the M-16 rifle was the one being used in Vietnam.

On the second day of camp we took two excursions through the infiltration course, once in daylight and the second at night.

The course was a dirt field, covered with barbed wire, which we crawled under. The live rounds of machine-gun fire directed over our heads motivated us to hug the ground. We started in a trench at one end, from which we were commanded to go up and over, and then we crawled toward the machine guns. Along the way, small explosive charges were detonated around us. Commands were given, somewhat obnoxiously, by a Major P, and during the matinee he often compared us to a flock of fornicating sheep. We waited until the nighttime exercise to respond.

The course was more colorful at night because the machine guns fired red tracer bullets. If there had been any doubt that the ammunition was live, this doubt was now erased. We huddled again, now in the dark, at the trench at the start of the course. We had agreed in advance on a response to Major P’s up-and-over command. So when he shouted those words from his lofty command tower, we all shouted back: Fuck You! and stayed put. Predictably, Major P went ballistic. After a few minutes of celebration, we gave ourselves the command to go up and over, and completed the course.

(As I reflect on our behavior that evening, I wonder if a reader might think we were being disrespectful to the military and its officers. That wasn’t the case. I respected and admired the professionalism and dedication of most of the infantry officers I met. But, as in any other profession, there are always a few exceptions. Major P seemed to be one of these.)

That evening was not the last time the f-word was used. In Vietnam, fuck was by far the most popular word in the GI lexicon. It was sometimes even used within a word: Outfuckingstanding was the most common example. A favorite phrase was I might, but I kinda fuckin’ doubt it. Another favorite was the designation for new arrivals in Vietnam: FNG stood for Fucking New Guy. I became an FNG on 30 September 1970.

Departing The World

The day we had been dreading had come. Georgia and Scott were leaving San Antonio to return to Philadelphia, where they would live in an apartment not far from her parents. Even though the odds were excellent that I’d physically survive the year — we had been told that only one physician had been killed in Vietnam up to that time — both Georgia and I knew that the year would change all of us. This would be especially true for Scott, whose first birthday was only 13 days away.

I was allowed to walk onto the airplane with my wife and infant son. Then came the most difficult thing I’ve ever done in my life: I had to turn and walk off that plane. Tears ran down my cheeks as I deplaned. Dazed and deeply depressed, I slowly drove back to our rented apartment, where I found a book that Georgia had left for me.

I decided to start a diary to document my experiences for my year in Vietnam, starting with this one:

27 September, 1970.

Saddest day of my life! Saw G. and Scott off at airport — cried. Found G’s book for me at home and sobbed — for first time in my life.

Later that day I flew to Travis Air Force Base in California, and the following morning we started our 22-hour journey to Vietnam. In Vietnam, I soon learned that the soldiers there referred to America as back in the world. For most, the experience in Vietnam was other-worldly, horrendously so for many. Fortunately, my experience would not turn out to be horrendous. The most difficult part for me was being separated from my family for the year.

Chapter 2

Welcome to Vietnam

The buses from the Bien Hoa airport delivered us to the Long Binh base, located on the outskirts of Saigon. We would spend several days here to become acclimated to the hot tropical climate, to be outfitted with combat fatigues and boots, to process paper work, and to receive our duty assignments.

There were two very different groups of soldiers at the 4th Replacement Detachment at Long Binh, those just