A PSYCHIATRIST IN VIETNAM
Bjornson, Major Jon
Psychiatrist in Vietnam by MAJOR JON BJORNSON Dr. Jon Bjornson is a psychiatrist who recently resigned as a Major after seven years in the U.S. Army Medical Corps. He served as the Army's only...
...While this alone is not an un-surmountable obstacle, with all the other cultural barriers it becomes a formidable block...
...They did not use x-ray equipment at night, although they had modern x-ray equipment, given to them by the United States...
...The doctor departed in a car—a fairly expensive one for Vietnam—saying he had to have sleep to be able to get up for private practice in the morning...
...approach in Vietnam is its dependence on the single premise, "Communism is bad...
...Since the military is a closed hierarchy, private attitudes must submit to what comes down the line...
...I knew they had a number of casualties to care for, the result of an ambush that day...
...Thus the Viet advisee knows that the war is considered by the United States as more our war than his...
...I found it difficult to determine the degree of dedication of the average Viet soldier...
...Commands were decentralized and re-centralized...
...When an American politician makes such generalizations as "the Vietnamese back the Saigon government," "favor U.S...
...Sensitive that we be labeled colonialists, dictators, or imperialists, the Americans were in the position of almost total inability to make decisions...
...Two of a staff of ten Vietnamese doctors were on hand, one of them not a surgeon...
...The millions of dollars, millions of man-hours wasted in the war could have built whole cities, factories, hospitals, schools, dams...
...He was praised for heroism by the international press in July, 1964, when he performed emergency treatment of approximately eighty wounded over a two-day period in the Mekong Delta...
...One, who was getting ready to go home, told me they did not need help, that two physicians were required only when "there are twenty-five or so casualties...
...So the United States in Vietnam from 1956 through 1965...
...In Vietnam he had more than five months experience as a flight surgeon with helicopter units in the Mekong Delta and Saigon...
...Instead of coups, U.N.-controlled elections...
...It is reasonable to assume that with such gifts the giver is resented for accentuating the receiver's poverty...
...Vietnam is a poor country, with numerous subcultures, closely or loosely affiliated, including the Buddhists, the Catholics, the Cao-Dai sect, the Hoa-Hoa, the twenty-two to fifty Mon-tagnard tribes (the total number of tribes is unknown, with unknown differences in languages and dialects, at best only somewhat overlapping), the Indian merchants who have settled throughout Southeast Asia, the Chinese, and others...
...Obviously they were not and, in my opinion, one of the major false assumptions related to U.S...
...Pessimism among the military in Vietnam was publicly squelched, though pessimism was vividly evident in private discussions...
...As for Vietnamese officers and doctors, their treatment of their own men was callous, to say the least...
...There was no doubt that many units were unreliable...
...Since G.I...
...For example, in June, 1964, when I was acting as a flight surgeon in Can Tho, I went to the Vietnamese military hospital to offer my help...
...I have been told by American military officers who had experienced other wars that no war has been discussed or questioned more regarding its geopolitical aspects than this one...
...More supply systems, more clerks, more problems...
...Confusion reigned...
...adviser and his Vietnamese counterpart, became the single predictably successful method of "advising...
...The wounded soldiers now include Americans, but the losers of this war are the people of Vietnam...
...The living standard in Vietnam and the low-geared economy place the American serviceman in a position where he reinforces a "Daddy Warbucks" image of the United States...
...foreign policy was that we could "sell" ideas, overtly, or subtly, especially at the upper levels...
...Now, months after departing from Vietnam, I feel more certain than ever: Instead of guns, tractors...
...Parallel channels of communication in two languages are hazardous enough...
...Both from first hand experience and from personal discussion with U.S...
...Thus, the State Department, the CIA, AID, USIS, the three branches of the military services with numerous subdivisions (even the Coast Guard), research units, volunteers such as CARE-MEDICO, and on and on...
...Our ambiguous policy left us indecisive...
...officers were killed when their Viet counterparts refused to provide adequate security...
...They are caught in a total world ideological struggle trapping them, grinding them, and crushing them in a conflict they cannot fathom...
...One way is to call for help...
...Since there was no democracy that we were supporting, it was my feeling that, when an American was not enmeshed in his isolated area problem, he could not help but sense a continuing underlying doubt as to where it was all leading to...
...advisers," both military and civilian...
...After all, he was asked to be a political scientist, administrator, economist, agricultural expert, cultural anthropologist, and military expert all rolled into one...
...There were ten or so wounded Vietnamese soldiers, moaning, apparently given nothing for pain after initial first aid in the field...
...but there is more than occasional resentment of our military power, supplies, and money...
...While the U.S...
...Army's only hospital in Vietnam at the time...
...Few advisers then —or now—spoke coherent Vietnamese or French...
...Against it all, I recall shattered bodies of Vietnamese soldiers, women, and children on long lines of litters, in pain and near death, waiting stoically for ambulances to shuttle them to a Vietnamese hospital, which, ill-equipped, would add the final insult to their lot...
...Furthermore, the adviser and his Viet advisee are both aware that Vietnam is viewed as a buffer between East and West, between Communist China's aggrandizement, control, or influence versus that of the United States...
...Instead of destruction, production...
...It seems a paradox that the Vietcong, Communist or not, are devotedly nationalistic and fit Secretary of State Dean Rusk's description of "the brave courageous Vietnamese people...
...One suspects the average Vietnamese doesn't give a damn...
...But from a psychological standpoint, I believe the adviser was placed in an untenable position...
...The United States, with a phobic response to Communism that approaches paranoia, openly admits that if "target nations" on the Communist expansion timetable fall under Communist influence, economic isolation of this hemisphere may well ensue...
...Army officers, I learned that many advisers were not welcomed by the Vietnamese, a condition which, from a psychiatrist's view, constitutes a total roadblock...
...The spiral staircase of bureaucracy became more dizzying...
...American aid gifts often have a picture on them, referred to as "handclasp across the sea," which may be attributable to Dr...
...I am not convinced that we have ever found methods to assess what the people of Vietnam politically want or think...
...And in Vietnam, help came aplenty, mainly to Saigon...
...He was deputy surgeon of the support command and briefly served as Chief of Professional Services of the U.S...
...Most of all, I was strikingly impressed that even after ten years of war, there is no real sense of nationalism...
...For instance, when one reads in the Saigon Post, which must back the government, that high-ranking Vietnamese officers are purged for making money during the war, even by selling U.S...
...He has been awarded the Air Medal and Commendation Medal for meritorious service in Vietnam.—The Editors Today's headlines about Vietnam need never and should never have been written...
...equipment to the Vietcong, what kind of pro-government nationalist feeling is to be expected...
...I was impressed, on the whole, with the caliber of the military officer selected to be an adviser...
...Blood was all over the place and when I wondered out loud why they didn't clean their operating rooms or use surgical gloves, they said they didn't have time, though several Vietnamese army enlisted men were standing around...
...instead of military "advisers," experts in farming, industry, and road construction...
...The possibilities of any successful efforts were in the hands of the U.S...
...Who decides in Saigon...
...He served as the Army's only psychiatrist in Vietnam from May, 1964, until late April, 1965...
...People" are openly sold in the markets, it is hard to cultivate respect...
...Tom Dooley, who felt it was important that the Vietnamese like us...
...A fundamental flaw in the U.S...
...When I first arrived in Vietnam in 1964, the war seemed a casual thing, comprised of bandit raids and propaganda...
...Vietnam was the ill-chosen test...
...Basic premises regarding government, politics, economics, and military functions had to be effective at the top to work in the provinces...
...I have heard some high-ranking officers express doubt regarding the adviser role as not really "military...
...military adviser in particular and Americans in general in Vietnam could agree with this negative political premise, there was no positive alternative to sell...
...How does one handle such frustration...
...equipment and bags of grain marked "Gift of the U.S...
...Alan Moorhead in The Blue Nile describes Emperor Theodore of Ethiopia in the following terms: "The rest of the pattern is the familiar one of the dreaming megalomaniac, of the raging reformer who finds his reforms rejected and wants to pull the whole world down in ruins to appease himself for his failures...
...The war was lost long ago...
...Instead of money distributed to the military leaders, money controlled by Americans for non-military projects...
...We hear daily justification of our escalation of the war...
...I suggested he try veterinary medicine, judging from his compassion for the wounded...
...The failure of these units to prosecute the war is one symptom of the lack of nationalistic spirit, and constitutes a response to the quality of endlessness of the situation...
...Though I admire the Vietnamese as a people, I find that an acculturated characteristic among them is the enjoyment of craftiness and subtleties...
...But they are as wrong in their killing as we are in ours...
...But no one could tell the people of South Vietnam to support their changing and changling governments and no one could convince them that the U.S...
...government could do no wrong...
...This forced intercultural relationship reached the point that occasionally U.S...
...I see us as tolerated, with only occasional mutual intercultural interest...
...involvement," are "anti-Communist" (especially against Ho Chi Minh), are—or are not—capable of electing their own representatives, and similar assertions, I cringe...
...At the lower levels, blackmail with supplies, a device which does not particularly improve the relationship between the U.S...
...Another basic defect is—or was—indecision...
...One physician was complaining that he had asthma and wondered if I could help him go to the United States to study internal medicine...
...Few Vietnamese speak English...
Vol. 30 • February 1966 • No. 2
