Dr. Lawrence H. Climo Recalls His Vietnam War Service

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In the spring of 1965 I was 27 years old, single and on the last leg of my internship. I was also emotionally drained. Six uninterrupted years on a treadmill of demanding medical studies had left me desperate to slow down. When my induction notice arrived, I initially felt only reflex embarrassment. Couldn’t I have avoided the draft? Shouldn’t I have? But then I felt relief.

Why am I running? Because the Vietnamese youngster in my arms still breathes? Because I can’t abide his dying in his father’s arms waiting his turn to see me at the outpatient clinic at the benh-vien (hospital)? Later I will hear of the murmurs. Who had ever seen a doctor running? Who had even heard of a doctor carrying his patient to the in-patient ward, let alone as the entire hospital was shutting down for the noon siesta? Nobody really expected the boy to live anyway. He had rabies. By midafternoon the boy is dead, the clinic up and operating again, and I am feeling disoriented.

In August 1965 I was at the Medical Field Service School at Fort Sam Houston, Texas, training in the basics of military medicine. It was there that I learned of an extraordinary program, sponsored by the State Department, by which selected doctors–volunteers–would be placed on loan to the Vietnamese Public Health Service. Called the Military Provincial Hospital Augmentation Program (MILPHAP), it would entail small medical teams, from all three branches of the armed forces, sent to beef up civilian facilities. Although it was to be classified as ‘counterinsurgency, I immediately related to it in personal terms. As a preschooler, I had accompanied my father on his house calls in rural Connecticut. Standing solemnly by the bedside as dressings were changed and words exchanged, then sharing refreshments in the kitchen, whenever I had imagined myself as a doctor, it was always as a doctor like my father, on the road, seeing people where they lived, a doctor sitting down to eat with his patients. I volunteered.

The Vietnamese boy stands motionless, unresponsive, his gaze vacant. His arm remains extended just as I’d left it. Catatonic stupor. The family who’d brought him in describes its onset, which followed a bombardment of their village. Post-traumatic catatonic stupor, then. He’s admitted. Blood tests show falciparum malaria, and he is given chloroquine. He recovers fully. It was cerebral malaria the whole time.

On June 20, 1966, after a 26-hour flight crammed alongside other physicians on rows of canvas jump seats in a two-window C-141, I arrived in Saigon and then received an eight-day briefing in Cholon. Among the handouts was a copy of Standing Orders, Rogers Rangers, 1759. Order Number 1: Don’t forget nothing. Number 15: Don’t sleep beyond dawn. Dawn’s when the French and Indians attack.

My medical school alumni association and friends send supplies, such as griseofulvin to cure the disfiguring ringworm that is rendering local girls unmarriageable.

Two other physicians and I, along with two sergeants and six medical technicians, made up our team, and with our administrative officer, Lieutenant Henry Brown, who coordinated everything, we officially became the 734th Medical Detachment. Our assignment was Public Health Region II, in the region where South Vietnam bends left like a comma–the Central Highlands province of Darlac, peopled by the Nguoi Thuong, or People of the Plateau, called Montagnards by the French.

I can’t seem to reassure the distraught father that his son, sick with pneumonia, will recover. He is simply inconsolable. Only later do I find out that an army truck struck and killed his other son on their way to the hospital.

We landed in Ban Me Thuot, a sprawling city of 50,000, home to the Rhade tribe and, since sometime after 1954, to the many North Vietnamese refugees who had fled communism and were resettled here. These two racially and ethnically distinct peoples now lived side by side in uneasy accommodation. A recent Montagnard rebellion, aiming to drive out all outsiders, had begun here in Ban Me Thuot in 1964, and the leaders, under the banner of FULRO (a French acronym for United Front for Liberation of Oppressed Races), still armed, were close by in Cambodia. Like our Vietnamese colleagues and patients, we too were a racially mixed bunch. Our radio call name was Sport Grant.

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Tags: 20th - 21st Century, Historical Conflicts, Historical Figures, People, Vietnam War