Doctor Amos Townsend, who is now a retired U.S. Air Force colonel, had occasion to salvage a lot of soldiers and locals during his tour of duty in Vietnam between 1969 and 1971. The Lee, N.H., resident ran medical facilities at Pleiku, at the U.S. Air Force headquarters for II Corps, just outside the Army evacuation hospital, and at Phu Cat Air Base, in Binh Dinh province. His doctoring took place on the ground as well as in the air, since, as a flight surgeon, he was also required to ride shotgun in OV-10 Broncos over the Ho Chi Minh Trail as they attempted to spot VC for the bombers who waited upstairs. He never forgot one such flight.

They put me with a green, hyperactive lieutenant, remembered Townsend. Farther up the trail I heard him chat with bomber pilots. Then he put a rocket into the jungle so they would know where to lay their loads. We circled hard. He put the nose down a bit and then quickly veered off to the right. All of a sudden, a dozen tracers whizzed by to the left. We watched the bombers do their thing. I could see the VC shooting at them. When we landed, I asked him, `What was that stuff off the left wing?’ `What stuff?’ he asked me.

But the bitter memory of another pilot, whose job it was to lay down fire suppression from his McDonnell F-4 Phantom to aid the rescue of downed choppers, remained with Townsend years later. He came to me and said, `Doc, I feel funny about this mission.’ His plane never came back, and I could kick myself for not grounding his butt.

The hazards of duty were unpredictable. They never allowed us to fly over North Vietnam, said Townsend. But if you flew over the Ho Chi Minh Trail, you often didn’t come home. His cousin, CBS-TV cameraman Dana Stone, had been killed in Cambodia along with flamboyant photojournalist Sean Flynn (son of Errol) in 1970, after the two motorbiked off into the Indochina sunset.

Like Fishman’s, Townsend’s routine on the ground was not overly exciting. He and the two general medical officers and two flight surgeons under his command had sick calls, did physical exams [and] headed downtown to the provincial hospitals to `play obstetrician.’ Then [we] would help out at the Buddhist and Catholic orphanages.

When Townsend was not treating orphans and delivering babies, he was combating black plague, leprosy and gastrointestinal problems. As with Turpin, Townsend and his staff may also have inadvertently treated the enemy, since, as has been well documented, it became increasingly difficult to distinguish friendlies from the VC. This deception was especially problematic at Phu Cat, which, Townsend learned, had been infiltrated by the other side. Still, he worked on.

My job was to cure people. I had to do what was medically appropriate. We may have shown a side of ourselves which had a beneficial effect in the long run, he said, echoing Fishman’s sentiments. Look at the tremendous exodus of Indochinese refugees who came to us as total strangers.

And it is with those refugees that Townsend, still bitter about the way the war ended, chose to continue his work. In 1979, two weeks after he retired from the Air Force, both he and his wife volunteered through the International Rescue Committee to go to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Khao-I-Dang camp along the Cambodian border with Thailand. They remained there to help the refugees for nearly five years. We did it out of a sense of obligation, he explained.

During his time in the camps Townsend’s connection to Indochina and its people deepened. Prior to Vietnam, he had been attached to the Army Chemical Corps at Camp Detrick in Frederick, Md., where he studied biological warfare. We looked for ways to soup up bugs and things more dangerous that protected the other guy [and] would do the same for us. We tested protection equipment. But we didn’t do any harm, he stressed.

In 1981, Townsend was appointed chief medical officer for all UNHCR camps. Shortly after that he was in the Mekong River town of Nongkhai, Thailand, about 30 kilometers downriver from the Laotian capital of Vientiane, on loan to the U.S. State Department. One night Townsend was approached by a former U.S. Army Special Forces lieutenant colonel and a man from British Intelligence, both in their civvies.

They wanted me to do a job that should have been done by the DOD [Department of Defense], CIA or DIA [Defense Intelligence Agency], Townsend recalled. But Uncle Sam didn’t want to play the intel game and get his hands dirty, he said. Ultimately, what Townsend did, at a time when the United States aligned itself with the murderous Khmer Rouge against Vietnam, was travel the banks of the Mekong, attempting to contact Lao escapees as they came across and before the notoriously corrupt Thai police apprehended them. We had been hearing reports from the hill tribes in the camps about how they had been hit with chemicals, he said.

Townsend also packed into Cambodia on an elephant, ironically with a Khmer Rouge escort, as deep in as Battambang to investigate the reports of Yellow Rain, a chemical warfare agent supplied by the Soviets and dropped by the Vietnamese, predominantly on the Hmong hill tribes of Laos. The Hmong, who were tenaciously protected by the mountains, had no love lost for the Vietnamese, and after 1975, the Viets controlled the skies, he said. It’s easy to see how they could have incapacitated, even killed some people who already had two or three indigenous diseases and were already semi-starved. They didn’t even have to aim.

While in the Indochinese jungle he did indeed encounter and examine tribes who had come into contact with mycotoxins commensurate with what could have come from chemical attacks. The logic seemed so reasonable, it infuriated me, said Townsend. I found sick people. However, whether or not their illnesses were due to chemical warfare, I have no way to know.

What he did know, as Vietnam had taught him and as it had taught Fishman and Turpin, was that his medical work in Vietnam had changed his life and brought him unexpected rewards.

---

This article was written by Marc Phillip Yablonka and originally published in the February 2002 issue of Vietnam Magazine.

For more great articles be sure to subscribe to Vietnam Magazine today!

Pages: 1 2 3