Bacsi-Doc

Short story about the Vietnam war.

 

 

 

Bacsi-Doc

            

The Combined Action Platoon to which I was assigned consisted of 12 Marines and one Navy Corpsman. We later described  ourselves as Peace Corps workers with rifles operating as units in the countryside of I Corps outside of Da Nang Vietnam in 1970.

Winning the hearts and minds was the official mantra we were told when being given an area of operation to conduct patrols, ambushes and operations to attempt to ensure that the Viet Cong and NVA not control the locals by kidnapping village chiefs and murdering them or using their  terrorist tactics to convince some villages that wished to have allegiance to South Vietnam be left unmolested from their influence.

As a nineteen year old Navy Corpsman, I have to admit that my knowledge of politics was minimal and our involvement in Vietnam by the late sixties was obviously a “let’s get the hell out of here,” mentality. We flashed peace signs to each other everywhere we went while hitching rides on military vehicles on Highway One, the main asphalt artery running north to south.

Mainly, our platoon of Marines worked with a larger group of local militia types who were called Popular Forces.These were locals who were their National Guard (young, old and in-between) that we tried to train while living in their hometown villages in our area of operation. I was more idealistic in the beginning trying to work the civic action principles of this very different type of infantry unit.

In the villages I would hold Medcaps which were basically mobile clinics. Where I set up  a wooden table and chair in front of a Vietnamese home on a dusty main street while the villagers all lined up to be examined and diagnosed by me, a nineteen year old navy medic.

The Vietnamese word for doctor is bacsi but they usually just called me Bacsi-Doc. A heady title for a teenage corpsman.

The tedious drudgery and sometimes freakish minutes of terror in the CAPs seemed to blend into the day to day existence of never knowing when you might die or be horribly wounded as we witnessed this around us. Our Vietnamese counterparts seemed to appear to bear the brunt of this since Command had dictated a year previously that the Vietnamese had to take the lead on patrols and operations.

There was always the fear of a sniper round or stepping on a booby trap while on patrol or the knowledge that the same CAP a year previously had been wiped out in an ambush while on patrol.

 

I told a Vietnam vet friend of mine recently that my recollection of Vietnam was comprised of two words: Chaos and bullshit. Chaos being the insanity of war and bullshit being the reasons we were there in the first place.

There are so many memories, many of which are blocked and repressed but will still creep up in a sweaty nightmare some forty years later. Basically I was just trying to do my job as a medical corpsman of which I had gone through much training to become.

Before leaving my last duty station at Bethesda Naval Hospital near Washington, D.C.I had worked in the ER learning skills that might only be approved to be performed by medical doctors in the civilian world. After receiving orders for Vietnam the next month, I was officially designated as a Navy 8404 FMF (Fleet Marine Force) Combat Corpsman since we were now Navy personnel officially attached to Marine Corps units which I learned had one of the highest mortality rate of any military occupational specialty.

When arriving in-country we attended Vietnamese Language School which was a two week course to also help us understand Vietnamese customs. We were then assigned to one of the four Combined Action Groups operating in I Corps.

The Lt. Col at the completion of the course seemed to take some kind of sadistic pleasure in telling us forty corpsmen lined up that day that only fifty percent of us would be making it home.

After being there a few months in the CAPs I became resigned  to doing the best I could under the circumstances. One afternoon, I was told that a local farmer had sliced his hand open while in the rice paddies. He was in a nearby hamlet to where we moved that night since being a mobile CAP was now our modus operandi. This was so that the enemy would not know where we might be set up on any given night. We’d learned that the older stationary units could bring on an attack more likely from the Viet Cong.

We became aware that we never knew who to really trust living among the people and  could actually be living with Viet Cong sympathizers. What I learned most interestingly early on was that these poor peasant farmers and their families just wished to be left alone by both us and the Viet Cong it seemed.

As the Marines I was with set up our nightly perimeter and sent out their ambush team, I entered this farmer’s humble straw made home to set up my medical bag on a rough wooden table with a kerosene lamp.

 

 I tended his wound, cleaning it with antiseptic while laying out my suture kit. I injected lidocaine to help numb the area. Using forceps and needle, I then carefully applied individual stitches along the length of the meaty part of his thumb that he had sliced open.

It occurred to me that this farmer had likely never been treated by anyone in his life for anything medically related and I thought he could also very well be either Viet Cong or a sympathizer.

I learned years later that the Viet Cong actually highly respected us for the humanitarian works we performed while in these CAP units and sometimes didn’t harass us because we were actually helping them in some unforetold way in this strange war nobody wanted.

As I squinted in the poor light to mend this Vietnamese man’s hand, I heard  a Marine who was sitting quietly nearby by say: “ Geez, Doc, where did you learn to do s**t like that.?”