Book Review

A Doctor's Vietnam Journal

N Engl J Med 2007; 357:2641-2642December 20, 2007

Article

A Doctor's Vietnam Journal
(Military Monograph 97.) By Carl E. Bartecchi. 433 pp., illustrated. Bennington, VT, Merriam Press, 2007. $39.95 (cloth); $29.95 (paper). ISBN: 978-1-4303-1525-4 (cloth); 978-1-4303-0949-9 (paper).

Dr. Carl Bartecchi was drafted to serve as a doctor early in the Vietnam War, and like many of us who were in Vietnam — a beautiful and exotic land — he has had a continuing desire to learn about and help the country and its people. In A Doctor's Vietnam Journal, Bartecchi writes not only about his year as a flight surgeon on an Army base in Soc Trang but also about how he continues to use his medical expertise to help the Vietnamese without consideration of monetary gain.

Bartecchi arrived at the Dust Off helicopter base in 1965, fresh out of medical school. When he arrived, there was mutual suspicion and hostility between the Vietnamese townspeople and the Americans. A Catholic priest took Bartecchi into town to visit an orphanage that was staffed by nuns. There he saw malnourished children who were fed just one meal of rice a day, were clothed in dirty feed sacks, and had pneumonia, diarrhea, and other medical problems.

Bartecchi returned to the orphanage as a volunteer doctor and enlisted some of the medics and a dentist to help him. He solicited donations of fruits, vegetables, and some meat, as well as toys, blankets, and bottles from the United States. Moreover, Bartecchi organized medical missions flying to some of the small farming villages in the Mekong Delta — a major rice-producing area of Vietnam where the population was afflicted by scabies, tuberculosis, dengue fever, and other tropical diseases. There was one doctor for every 100,000 people in much of rural Vietnam, and Bartecchi undertook humanitarian acts that benefited the population even as families were dying in what the Vietnamese call “the American War.”

Bartecchi's journal and excellent photographs (he has had several one-man shows as a photographer) give us an understanding of the humanitarian spirit of some Americans who were involved in the devastating war in Vietnam. He must be credited for writing an apolitical book about the contributions of people in diverse occupations, from the airmen who served under him, to the priests who served both the Viet Cong and the Americans in the South Vietnamese army, to the Catholic sisters who served the orphans of Soc Trang.

Years after the war ended, Bartecchi returned to Bach Mai Hospital in Hanoi, where he began a second round of humanitarian work. He held training sessions in his specialty, brought in other doctors, and obtained a great deal of useful medical equipment for the hospital. He even arranged for several Vietnamese doctors to travel to the United States to study medicine and then return to Vietnam to train others.

Bartecchi was aware of the environmental problems, primitive circumstances, and tropical terrain in which he had to practice in Vietnam. He persuaded the medical bureaucracy and leaders of industry to donate expertise, books, supplies, and expensive medical equipment. I am sure the Vietnamese people he helped consider him a true bac si, a term reserved for doctors who deserve the deepest respect. Physicians will find this book of interest, but government leaders would also do well to read it so that in the future they might be likely to take the path of diplomacy, rather than the path of war.

Allen Hassan, M.D., J.D.
American College of Legal Medicine, Sacramento, CA 95821
hassanmdjd@hotmail.com