Fishman has visited the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial Wall in Washington, D.C., several times during conferences he has attended at the Bethesda Naval Hospital, but does not plan to do so again. It’s just too painful. I can’t do it anymore, he said, holding back tears. I know some names on that wall, but it’s not a matter of knowing the names. It’s just so powerful seeing them.

Fishman stated that Vietnam completely changed the rest of my life. Before ‘Nam, I had been offered a fellowship at the National Cancer Institute in hematology/oncology. If I hadn’t gone [to Vietnam], I would have ended up an oncologist–and hated it! When asked if Vietnam had given him his sense of compassion, Fishman was not sure. I guess after Vietnam I knew I had seen enough of death and dying, he suggested.

Doctor James Turpin, who headed two hospitals in the Montagnard villages of Dampao and Rolom, in Vietnam’s Central Highlands, for the San Diego-based humanitarian group Project Concern, had also seen enough death and dying by his first Christmas Eve in-country in 1964. Rumors had been circulated that local VC cadres would have his head and the heads of five of his medical staff by Christmas Day.

It was very tense, recalled Turpin, but we just stood around a mortar pit the Green Berets had left, singing hymns and holding each other. He also thought God might have heard their prayers, because Special Forces Captain Vince Triano, who ran a strike force 25 kilometers from Rolom, having heard that same rumor, came down from his headquarters at Psourr and heavily fortified the village. No one from Project Concern would die that day.

When Turpin first arrived in Vietnam from Project Concern’s mission in Hong Kong, he, like Fishman, was deeply affected. In Vietnam I saw people with nothing, he said. I thought that there was a better way to relate to them than by fighting. Many times the GIs whom we would treat would say to me, `If I could only spend my year here … .’

During his tour of duty, which lasted until 1972, Turpin was made an honorary Montagnard brother. In a ceremony for the occasion, he was required to imbibe the notorious Montagnard liquor called Nam Pe, sipped from a huge jug through a long communal straw, and dress solely in a loincloth. I kept hoping the thing would hold together, he recalled.

Turpin and his staff of Vietnamese nurses and medical assistants led very busy lives for the eight years Project Concern operated in Vietnam. Every day they would don emergency room attire, scrub and start rounds at the 18-bed Lien Hiep Hospital.

You had to be careful where you stepped because of all the roundworms that had been vomited up during the night, Turpin remembered. The Montagnards had thousands of roundworms swallowing their GI [gastrointestinal] tracts. The Montagnards, too, had to take care where they walked. Kids walked around barefoot and often stepped in hookworm-infested dog feces, Turpin said. The worms then bored through to their stomach linings. It was so bad that we even had worms that showed signs of malnutrition.

In the afternoon, Doc Turpin, whom the Montagnards called Bac Si Hakkah (doctor who remembers us), manned an outpatient clinic in which locals were treated for various ailments, including starvation, cholera, typhoid, malaria, tuberculosis, intestinal parasites, iron deficiencies and anemia. The level of hemoglobin in their blood was often so low, he said, that the Montagnard kids had…not even enough to sit in school and think.

When it came to surgery, Project Concern’s facilities were primitively equipped. Nonetheless, Turpin and his staff were often able to perform miracles. One that he never forgot was delivering a Koho Montagnard woman’s baby.

It was midnight, Turpin recalled. The baby presented itself upside down. Our generator had little fuel. When it died, we switched to batteries. They lasted 15 minutes. Then we used candles. At 3 a.m. we had a healthy baby and mother, but wax had dripped inside her. I tried to get it out but couldn’t. So we closed her and, luckily, her tissue never reacted to the wax. Turpin was ecstatic that night, for it had been a triumph in more than one way. We lost so many babies brought to us. It was tragic, he said.

As time passed, Turpin was increasingly critical of what he observed in Vietnam. Years later, however, he preferred to call himself pro-nation building as opposed to anti-war. Every time we turned around, the war interfered with our work, Turpin lamented. We were not allowed to go to villages unless a Huey would take us. But we were not high priority. There were so many frustrations. I often thought, `What I could do if there weren’t a war.’ It got increasingly dicey. Though we were in a pacified area, there was increasing potential for harm.

One day in 1972 a Katusha rocket accidentally fell upon the village, killing two nurses–one American and the other Vietnamese. At that point the Project Concern administrators ordered all its personnel out of Vietnam.

Much like his predecessor Dr. Tom Dooley, who had been on a similar mission during the First Indochina War, Turpin wrote two books about his tenure–Vietnam Doctor and A Far Away Country. According to Turpin, Project Concern had carried no banners during the war. But it was still a bit of a surprise to him when, 20 years later in 1992, on the first of his two trips back to Vietnam since the war–with Hanoi continuing to scrutinize requests for travel to the Central Highlands by those who had served there–not only was a visa to return granted him with ease, but mysteriously without the usual fees attached. Permission to travel about at will in the region was approved as well.

It seemed that a Dr. Thien, who during the war had been the VC doctor for the same province, was responsible. One night over dinner at the elegant Dalat Palace Hotel (once one of many retreats for the late emperor, Bao Dai), Thien confided to Turpin that Project Concern had in fact not only trained Vietnamese loyal to the ARVN, but had also unknowingly trained several VC.

I told him, `So we have you to thank [for] keeping us alive,’ said Turpin. He answered, `Oh, we’d have fought to protect you.’ On his trip, Turpin found several of those whose loyalties he had never questioned still employed at Lien Hiep. Today the 70-year-old Bahai physician and resident of Fairview, N.C., provides medical services for inmates at two of the state’s correctional facilities at Marion and Craggy, with 1,000 and 500 prisoners, respectively, under his care. Turpin insists that his staff refer to those he treats as patients, not prisoners, saying, When you salvage people, you salvage yourself.

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