One Year and Eternity

By Dr. Frank Swaim

War is as natural as life and death. Life is war. It is the natural means among all living organisms by which the weaker species is vanquished and the stronger species predominates. Beneath a thin veil of civilization, the unrecognized and undeclared war simmers constantly as people compete for ever-diminishing supplies of fuel and food.

Dr. Frank Swaim served for a year as a medic with the United States Air Force in Vietnam; he saw this thin veil of civilization torn apart by the open hostilities of war. One Year and Eternity chronicles Dr. Swaim’s year in Vietnam through entries from his logbook kept at the time.

He experiences the agony of being separated from his family, the terror of being stationed beyond the front lines and surrounded by hostile Vietcong. Being poorly supplied medically in the midst of woefully unsanitary conditions, Dr. Swaim had to perform major surgical procedures under the most difficult of circumstances. Perhaps worst of all was the low morale of the troops.

One Year and Eternity is a book created in the crucible of experience and shaped by a reflective mind. Its message: the fittest survive.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Aug 31, 2018
• ISBN: 9781546258131

Dr. Frank Swaim

Born in Indiana of farming parents, Frank Swaim graduates cum laude from Indiana State University in 1963. After serving with the air force in Vietnam, he entered private practice in Rockville, Indiana. Dr. Swaim is also active in farm management, investments, and community health. His professional and charitable work have earned him sufficient recognition to be included in Who’s Who in the Midwest, Dictionary of International Biography, Men of Achievement, and the National Social Directory. Dr. Swaim resides with his wife and three children in Rockville, Indiana.

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© 2018 Dr. Frank Swaim. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 08/28/2018

ISBN: 978-1-5462-5814-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5462-5815-5 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5462-5813-1 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018910294

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

The world has always been the same; and there is always as much good fortune as bad in it.

Niccolo Machiavelli

Contents

Part 1 The Assignment

Part 2 Texas and Fort Sam Houston

Part 3 Saigon

Part 4 Ca Mau and An Xuyen Province

Part 5 Return and Reflections

PART ONE

THE ASSIGNMENT

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In the last 3,428 years of recorded history, only 268 years have seen no war. I have seen a war. The Vietnamese war. Remember it? Probably not. It is far away and long ago now. All the draft cards have been burned, the flags shredded, and the bronze and silver stars hurled at the White House and ground underfoot. Songs have been sung and books written about it; some of great public interest have been popularized and melodramatized on television so that everyone knows there was a war, but it was a funny war and a fun war, full of Hawkeyes and good times.

But it wasn’t. Anyone who has been out front in a war knows good times are few and far between.

I intended to write this a long time ago, when I returned from Vietnam in ’67, but it doesn’t matter. There have been hundreds of wars in recorded history, and there will be hundreds more from now until eternity, so why should it matter when this is written? It is one more chronicle on one more war, a one-year chronicle of a war that lasted at least a decade (although who really knows when our involvement really began and ended) and accomplished just as much or as little as any other war. But as one old career army veteran said: Let’s not knock it; it’s the only war we’ve got now.

My involvement began on the inauspicious day of March 22, 1966. I was standing in the hallway of the 3525th USAF Hospital Outpatient Clinic, Williams Air Force Base, Arizona, waiting to call my next patient over the P.A. system. At that moment, the hospital commander opened the door at the end of the hallway and purposefully started walking down the hallway toward me. I thought nothing of it, for he did occasionally come to the clinic, and I turned to call my next patient. Little did I realize that he was the bearer of news that was to drastically alter my life, and, as I thought a little later, perhaps end it altogether.

Before I could get the name of my next patient enunciated, he grabbed my elbow and said, Come in and sit down.

My rectus abdominis muscle tightened a little and my throat became dry. Colonel Thiele was not one who indulged in insignificant discourse. If he wanted to talk to me, he had some serious talking to do. He has either found out I’m still moonlighting, or I am going to be shipped to Southeast Asia, I said to myself.

You aren’t going to be with us much longer, he said after we were both seated in my office. I just got a wire in, and I wanted to tell you right away.

Southeast Asia? I queried.

Vietnam, he said.

I felt like I had been hit with a sledgehammer. My wife, Joan, and I had been talking about this very possibility for several months, and both of us knew it could happen. However, subconsciously. I guess, I thought that it could never happen to me. Well, by God, it not only could, it had.

You will report to Brooke Army Hospital on the twenty-eighth day of June. You will be there about a month, then will spend ten days at the surgeon general’s office at Randolph Air Force Base. You will then go on to Vietnam. There are two or three other doctors and one medical service officer from Air Training Command besides you that will be going.

What’s the thirty days at Brooke for? I asked. A course in tropical medicine?

It’s hard telling. You will just have to wait until you get there, he replied.

A million thoughts raced through my mind, but I was hard put for any words, I swallowed hard. Any words of advice or suggestion? I asked, knowing that he had been there and had received a medal.

Well, it’s not good, he replied sagaciously, and I appreciated his honesty. It is a dirty place, but the assignment is not really as bad as you might think.

He arose and stood in the hallway. I hate to bring you the bad news, but I thought I had better tell you as soon as I got the wire.

Thank you, I replied, as he turned and walked off, leaving me with my own thoughts.

My first thought was how I should disclose the unnerving event to my wife. I was about to call her, but then I remembered she had to give a panel discussion that night at the night course she was taking at Arizona State University. If I told her, she would be so nervous that the panel would be a failure, and she was the chairman of the panel. She had enough to worry about without thinking about my going to Vietnam. I would tell her after class.

My next thought was about life insurance. If I ever went to Vietnam, I had always planned to have $100,000 worth of life insurance. I decided that I had better get that purchased and set up a life insurance trust for my family. At least, just before they put the bullet through my head, I would have the satisfaction of knowing my family would be well cared for. I already had a good list of common stocks selected to buy. These could be bought, and they could live off the dividends, plus social security.

Perhaps I had better increase my moonlighting activities, I mused. I had better go ahead and get a Texas license. I’ll have forty days in Texas I could work. I needed all the money I could get to finish paying off my medical school loans and buy insurance; also, I was buying a farm back in Indiana. There was just no end to my monetary needs.

Joan came home from school jubilant over the success of her panel. She suddenly became morose when she heard the news, and took it like all women. Need I say more?

March 23

I thought I would try to learn some of the language of Southeast Asia and got a book from the library on Chinese. It looks impossible, and I wonder how much difference there is between it and Vietnamese. There were no books available on the Vietnamese language. It had apparently never been of importance before. Dr. Thiele said French was widely used, so I guess I should try to learn it. It seems a waste of time to learn something I’ll use only one year, but I might as well try and get the most out of the tour.

March 29

I think I’ll write my congressman. I have nothing to lose and everything to gain. I have no real interest in an Air Force career, and I have no use for the war in Southeast Asia. Power rules, and I don’t think we can prop up a weak country when it does not want to be defended. The people in Vietnam have no sense of common unity. All they are concerned with is the price of rice, their potbellied god Buddha, and staying alive in a war-ravaged country that has been fighting for three decades. They have no interest in nor comprehension of political or economic theory. As a country, they are very poorly educated, and the form of government which they would be most interested in is one which would offer them some respite from the wars which have consumed almost a generation of their life, and they could care less whether this form of government was based upon a capitalistic or communistic theory. If they don’t want their country protected from communism, why should we save it?

War is man’s folly, I don’t want any part of it. If there was a cause worth fighting for, I might take up arms, but I don’t think Vietnam is such a cause. We cannot win, and in war, if you can’t win, you lose. There is no such thing as a tie ball game.

March 31

I have found that one of life’s unique experiences is trying to buy life insurance when one is assigned to a war zone. The life insurance companies seemed to have about as much regard for my life as I would for the life of a sixty-year-old hypertensive in a coma with an intracerebral hemorrhage. I contacted most of the companies in the Phoenix area, and when they discovered I was headed for the Vietnam war, they eschewed me as though I were a leper. However, I was compensated for this snub by finding that the verbose and overzealous, obnoxiously friendly and omnipresent life insurance salesman had suddenly become a taciturn recluse. I had been hounded and harassed by these monetary leeches of society through undergraduate school, medical school, internship, and on into private practice. Now I was the hunter, and they the prey. It gave me great pleasure in seeing the reversal of the roles, and it was good to see them run, the cowards.

It seems ironic that when a person really needs life insurance, he can’t get it. Likewise, people who really need medical hospitalization insurance, such as those with chronic illnesses like diabetes, hypertension, rheumatoid arthritis, and advanced arteriosclerosis, can’t get it. Insurance companies will only insure risks that can be measured with actuarial accuracy, and any risk that cannot be measured, or is measured and found wanting, is cast aside as unprofitable, left to fend for itself in a vicious world, to survive as best it can. They obviously adhere to the Darwinian principle of the survival of the fittest, and with my extensive background in the biological sciences, I consider this one of the very few and fundamental laws of life, so I cannot contest the reality of their policy, but I think their hypocrisy needs to be made obvious to the public. I am not criticizing the system or insurance companies, but the economic truth of health and life insurance remains that if they cannot make a dollar off of your life or your health, they are not going to insure it. This then raises the murky question that if they will insure a person, and if they feel so confident that they can make a dollar, why doesn’t the individual share their confidence, cancel his policy, keep his money and let his money make him money? But this is to be a war story, and not a treatise on insurance, so I shall not get into that. However, I have had so many bad policies pushed upon me by high-pressure salesmen and companies that I have to vent my wrath when the opportunity arises.

The U.S. government will only insure a soldier for ten thousand dollars. I assume they believe this is enough to pay burial expenses and to placate mom and dad. I didn’t think it would placate my wife and children very much, so I continued in search of my prey, an insurance company that would write me some kind of policy. I had about given up when I did find one, and a good one; The Equitable Life Insurance Company of New York. They said their experience during the Second World War had been good, and they had found that the risk of a soldier being killed in action was not much greater than the sudden demise from whatever cause of any citizen in the U.S. population as a whole! I had to buy one of their higher-priced policies, but at least I got one. I am amazed, though, to find just one company out of at least a dozen that would write a policy. I would recommend this company to anyone, but try to buy what you need and not what they want to sell you. They still follow the insurance salesman’s credo: Sell the most expensive policy that he can possibly afford. (I have since converted my expensive policy to paid-up term.)

Besides buying insurance, discharging my duty as an Air Force medical officer, and moonlighting as an emergency room doctor in various local hospital emergency rooms, I find I am beset by a plethora of problems that can only be appreciated and comprehended by a fellow soldier who is suddenly and unexpectedly assigned to a war zone, but who also has family, financial, legal, business, and professional obligations that must be fulfilled. These are indeed busy times, and paramount among these problems is what to do with my family. Joan is enchanted by the desert scenery of central Arizona and says she would like to stay here, but I find it a dull landscape compared to the sweet green verdure of my native Midwest. Furthermore, ultimately I shall probably locate my practice there––if not in west central Indiana, then in some neighboring midwestern state. It seems logical that if I can move them to or near the place where I shall probably be going, then it will make the transition from service life to private life an easier one. Also, both of our families live in Parke County, Indiana, and I think they will be able to give Joan and the children a lot of support while I am gone, if they need it. All things considered, I think it would be best to locate the family in Rockville, Indiana. While not definite, this is probably where I shall start my practice. I own a farm in partnership with my father-in-law, and my father is also a farm owner, so there are strong economic, social, and family ties to this area.

This brings up an interesting observation on why doctors locate where they do. I have traveled from Maine to California, and almost back again a few times, and I have seen and read of these small towns with signs at their city limits stating: We need a Doctor. These towns do not understand why they cannot get a doctor, and they offer every inducement imaginable to attract a doctor, including free office space and nursing help. I once sat in on a discussion by physicians of why doctors chose particular practice locations. The consensus was both informative and illuminating, and on final analysis, innately human. (I wish there was a synonym for the word human which would encompass all life, for what is innate to Homo sapiens is also innate for all life, plant and animal. But we humans, being of shallow intellect and unable to comprehend our true importance in this universe and our relationship to other living organisms, and even to inanimate matter, have raised ourselves upon a pedestal above all other forms of life and have arbitrarily divided life into three categories: human life, animal life, and plant life. Therefore, we have no acceptable word that will combine human and animal in the same context; this is just one more testimonial to the ignorance and irrationality of the human race.) The doctors’ opinions offer an answer, if not a solution, to the plight of all these small towns and communities. Their feeling was that doctors locate where they do for three main reasons: (1) it is home or near home; (2) it is in an exotic part of the United States, such as California, Florida, Denver, Phoenix, or some such place; (3) it is a nationally recognized center for scientific, professional, and cultural advancement, such as any major city with a medical school.

Now there you have it, Jackson Junction, Iowa, and Piney Fork, Ohio; if you have a medical school, or a hometown boy that is a doctor, or if you have an exotic image, then you have a doctor. If you don’t qualify in one of these three categories, then forget it; climb into your trusty Chevrolet and motor on down the road to a town that does qualify. It doesn’t seem to matter that you have a need and offer an opportunity to a young doctor looking for a place to practice. I don’t care whether a doctor goes to New York, New York, or Kingman, Indiana; the opportunity is much the same and he can probably do equally well in either place. So the final decision on a practice location seems to depend on the personality makeup of the doctor and his wife. If they are sentimentalists, they go back home or within easy driving distance of home; if they are adventurers, they head for some of the exotic watering spots of the world; if they are academicians, they stay on as staff members at their local medical center and weary away their life trying to advance medical science and train new doctors in the profession. Wherever they go, they all serve well, and I am proud to be a member of the profession.

I do not mean to sound facetious or callous regarding the medical needs of the smaller and more remote communities in the United States. Their problem is a real one, and I think a solution is slowly being worked out for them. Their medical needs will be supplied by a new type of health care personnel called a physician’s assistant. Some of these individuals will have almost as much training as a doctor, although most of them will probably have from two to four years of formal training; they will still be able to carry out many medical tasks in remote medical facilities under the guidance and direction of a physician or a medical institution. This concept has been utilized in scattered areas throughout the United States for almost ten years now, and it seems to be gaining in popularity. It is meeting a lot of resistance from private physicians, osteopaths, chiropractors, pharmacists, and state legislatures but is being more readily accepted in governmental medicine. I am convinced there is a complete lack of medical services in various areas of the United States, and this vacuum is going to have to be filled by either private medicine or government medicine, and it is going to have to be filled by something other than an M.D., namely, a physician’s assistant. Private medicine seems to be losing by default, for they are resisting change, and this has been tantamount to extinction since the first unicellular organism appeared on the earth eons ago. But I am sure the people don’t care who fills their medical