![]() Another had a patch over his missing eye.Ī different photo showed a bunch of goats laying outside of the surgical room.Īlbright said they would shoo them off before going into the surgery room where he spent most of his time at the hospital.Ī greenish-blue fan was the closest thing they had to air conditioning. One was in a wheelchair with a missing arm. “I love the kids,” he said as he scrolled to a photo with a few Vietnamese boys. The hole served as a backup place that children could watch a delivery when midwife Madame Mau would kick them out of plain sight from the open window. At the end of the table was a small hole where the blood would run into a bucket underneath.Īlbright said there was also a hole in the wall outside of the frame of the photo where medical staff would throw out the placenta for the dogs to eat. Other photos showed the dreary conditions of the Vietnamese hospital.Ī delivery room had a small wooden table where women would give birth. The soldiers usually brought their families with them which added to the casualties when pilots in B-52s bombed the forest, Albright said. Many Viet Cong fighters went north a few miles into the U Minh Forest that became a VC stronghold. Albright said the Viet Cong soldiers destroyed most of the building when they were driven out by American and ally troops. The maternity ward sat in disrepair after being bombed by Americans trying to drive out the Viet Cong.Īnother large building on the property was missing most of the roof. ![]() He said each was used for a different purpose: surgery, delivery, recovery and so on. In an old newspaper clipping, Albright told a reporter about one case where two mothers with three children each shared a bed.Ī picture Albright took from outside of the remote hospital shows several buildings. The hospital had 80 beds but served between 150 to 200 people daily. ![]() “I was as far south as I could go,” Albright said. In 1969, Albright, now promoted to captain, headed for Vietnam where he would be part of a small team of American and Vietnamese doctors that would help soldiers from both sides and civilians.Īlbright would take a military Jeep from the military compound about one mile to the hospital.Ī sign out front across a narrow dirt entryway stated “Benh-Vien An-Xuyen.” It was the hospital in the city Ca Mau, which had a population of about 14,000 at the time but served a province of about 200,000. “You see things you don't see in most civilian hospitals,” Albright said. They had already been treated elsewhere for their initial wounds and were there for subsequent operations. He saw young soldiers with missing limbs. The early commission meant more time in the military, but it also gave Albright some much-needed cash while finishing his senior year at the University of Kansas School of Medicine.Īfter graduating from the medical school in 1966, Albright did a yearlong internship at the Wilford Hall Medical Center, now called the Wilford Hall Ambulatory Surgical Center, in the San Antonio area. Instead of being drafted, Albright signed up for early commission into the U.S. and allies tried to stop communism from spreading from Vietnam and the region. This little known episode in the history of US neurology deserves recognition as an example of how the specialty can be successfully practiced under austere conditions.The war intensified as the U.S. All were among the US Army, Navy, and Air Force medical officers who cared for the medical and surgical needs of the 2.5 million US military personnel who served in Vietnam from 1965 to 1972 2 under conditions ranging from primitive to dangerous. Three collected data for scientific studies later published in medical journals. Two received Bronze Stars for meritorious service. Among them was one of us (R.B.D.), the first US Army neurologist to set foot in a combat zone since 1945 1 and the first of 15 US Army and 4 US Air Force neurologists to serve in Vietnam during the next 6 years ( Figure 1). When it docked in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) 23 days later, the men of the US Army's 935th medical detachment (neuropsychiatry team) disembarked. On December 1, 1965, the troop ship USNS General Leroy Eltinge left Long Beach, Calif, destined for Vietnam.
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