"Most important, there is no evidence that the good will built by U.S. doctors transferred to the South Vietnamese forces, and in fact the opposite may have been true: American programs may have emphasized the inability of the South Vietnamese government to provide basic health care to its own people. Furthermore, the programs may have demonstrated to Vietnamese civilians that foreign soldiers cared more for them than their own troops did. If that is the case, the programs actually did more harm than good in the attempt to win hearts and minds."--BOOK JACKET.
A 'how-to' book for medical aid workers - doctors, nurses and paramedics - working in hostile environments (natural disasters, man-made disasters, conflict in all its forms and remote or austere industrial settings). This manual provides information on what is going on, how to get involved, how to get ready, guidance on what to do out there, and how to get home bridging the fields of medicine, nursing international relations, politics, economics and history.
Navy Medicine in Vietnam begins and ends with a humanitarian operation-the first, in 1954, after the French were defeated, when refugees fled to South Vietnam to escape from the communist regime in the North; and the second, in 1975, after the fall of Saigon and the final stage of America's exit that entailed a massive helicopter evacuation of American staff and selected Vietnamese and their families from South Vietnam. In both cases the Navy provided medical support to avert the spread of disease and tend to basic medical needs. Between those dates, 1954 and 1975, Navy medical personnel responded to the buildup and intensifying combat operations by taking a multipronged approach in treating casualties. Helicopter medical evacuations, triaging, and a system of moving casualties from short-term to long-term care meant higher rates of survival and targeted care. Poignant recollections of the medical personnel serving in Vietnam, recorded by author Jan Herman, historian of the Navy Medical Department, are a reminder of the great sacrifices these men and women made for their country and their patients.
"The goal of military medicine is to conserve the fighting force necessary to prosecute just wars. Just wars are defensive or humanitarian. A defensive war protects one's people or nation. A humanitarian war rescues a foreign, persecuted people or nation from grave human rights abuse. To provide medical care during armed conflict, military medical ethics supplements civilian medical ethics with two principles: military-medical necessity and broad beneficence. Military-medical necessity designates the medical means required to pursue national self-defense or humanitarian intervention. While clinical-medical necessity directs care to satisfy urgent medical needs, military-medical necessity utilizes medical care to satisfy the just aims of war. Military medicine may therefore attend the lightly wounded before the critically wounded or use medical care to win hearts and minds. The underlying principle is broad, not narrow, beneficence. The latter addresses private interests, while broad beneficence responds to the collective welfare of the political community"--
Includes a foreword by Major General David A. Rubenstein. From the editor: "71F, or "71 Foxtrot," is the AOC (area of concentration) code assigned by the U.S. Army to the specialty of Research Psychology. Qualifying as an Army research psychologist requires, first of all, a Ph.D. from a research (not clinical) intensive graduate psychology program. Due to their advanced education, research psychologists receive a direct commission as Army officers in the Medical Service Corps at the rank of captain. In terms of numbers, the 71F AOC is a small one, with only 25 to 30 officers serving in any given year. However, the 71F impact is much bigger than this small cadre suggests. Army research psychologists apply their extensive training and expertise in the science of psychology and social behavior toward understanding, preserving, and enhancing the health, well being, morale, and performance of Soldiers and military families. As is clear throughout the pages of this book, they do this in many ways and in many areas, but always with a scientific approach. This is the 71F advantage: applying the science of psychology to understand the human dimension, and developing programs, policies, and products to benefit the person in military operations. This book grew out of the April 2008 biennial conference of U.S. Army Research Psychologists, held in Bethesda, Maryland. This meeting was to be my last as Consultant to the Surgeon General for Research Psychology, and I thought it would be a good idea to publish proceedings, which had not been done before. As Consultant, I'd often wished for such a document to help explain to people what it is that Army Research Psychologists "do for a living." In addition to our core group of 71Fs, at the Bethesda 2008 meeting we had several brand-new members, and a number of distinguished retirees, the "grey-beards" of the 71F clan. Together with longtime 71F colleagues Ross Pastel and Mark Vaitkus, I also saw an unusual opportunity to capture some of the history of the Army Research Psychology specialty while providing a representative sample of current 71F research and activities. It seemed to us especially important to do this at a time when the operational demands on the Army and the total force were reaching unprecedented levels, with no sign of easing, and with the Army in turn relying more heavily on research psychology to inform its programs for protecting the health, well being, and performance of Soldiers and their families."
During the first four decades of the twentieth century, the British Indian Army possessed an illusion of racial and religious inclusivity. The army recruited diverse soldiers, known as the "Martial Races," including British Christians, Hindustani Muslims, Punjabi Sikhs, Hindu Rajputs, Pathans from northwestern India, and "Gurkhas" from Nepal. As anti-colonial activism intensified, military officials incorporated some soldiers' religious traditions into the army to keep them disciplined and loyal. They facilitated acts such as the fast of Ramadan for Muslim soldiers and allowed religious swords among Sikhs to recruit men from communities where anti-colonial sentiment grew stronger. Consequently, Indian nationalists and anti-colonial activists charged the army with fomenting racial and religious divisions. In Faithful Fighters, Kate Imy explores how military culture created unintended dialogues between soldiers and civilians, including Hindu nationalists, Sikh revivalists, and pan-Islamic activists. By the 1920s and '30s, the army constructed military schools and academies to isolate soldiers from anti-colonial activism. While this carefully managed military segregation crumbled under the pressure of the Second World War, Imy argues that the army militarized racial and religious difference, creating lasting legacies for the violent partition and independence of India, and the endemic warfare and violence of the post-colonial world.
Only weeks after the D-Day invasion of June 6, 1944, a surprising cargo—crates of books—joined the flood of troop reinforcements, weapons and ammunition, food, and medicine onto Normandy beaches. The books were destined for French bookshops, to be followed by millions more American books (in translation but also in English) ultimately distributed throughout Europe and the rest of the world. The British were doing similar work, which was uneasily coordinated with that of the Americans within the Psychological Warfare Division of General Eisenhower's Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force, under General Eisenhower's command. Books As Weapons tells the little-known story of the vital partnership between American book publishers and the U.S. government to put carefully selected recent books highlighting American history and values into the hands of civilians liberated from Axis forces. The government desired to use books to help "disintoxicate" the minds of these people from the Nazi and Japanese propaganda and censorship machines and to win their friendship. This objective dovetailed perfectly with U.S. publishers' ambitions to find new profits in international markets, which had been dominated by Britain, France, and Germany before their book trades were devastated by the war. Key figures on both the trade and government sides of the program considered books "the most enduring propaganda of all" and thus effective "weapons in the war of ideas," both during the war and afterward, when the Soviet Union flexed its military might and demonstrated its propaganda savvy. Seldom have books been charged with greater responsibility or imbued with more significance. John B. Hench leavens this fully international account of the programs with fascinating vignettes set in the war rooms of Washington and London, publishers' offices throughout the world, and the jeeps in which information officers drove over bomb-rutted roads to bring the books to people who were hungering for them. Books as Weapons provides context for continuing debates about the relationship between government and private enterprise and the image of the United States abroad.
A Different Face of War is a riveting account of a Medical Service Corps officer’s activities during the early years of the Vietnam War. Assigned as the senior medical advisor to the Army of the Republic of Vietnam in I Corps, an area close to the DMZ, James G. Van Straten traveled extensively and interacted with military officers and non-commissioned officers, peasant-class farmers, Buddhist bonzes, shopkeepers, scribes, physicians, nurses, the mentally ill, and even political operatives. He sent his wife daily letters from July 1966 through June 1967, describing in impressive detail his experiences, and those letters became the primary source for his memoir. The author describes with great clarity and poignancy the anguish among the survivors when an American cargo plane in bad weather lands short of the Da Nang Air Base runway on Christmas Eve and crashes into a Vietnamese coastal village, killing more than 100 people and destroying their village; the heart-wrenching pleadings of a teenage girl that her shrapnel-ravaged leg not be amputated; and the anger of an American helicopter pilot who made repeated trips into a hot landing zone to evacuate the wounded, only to have the Vietnamese insist that the dead be given a higher priority.
After relatively successful military interventions in Iraq in 1992 and Yugoslavia in 1998, many American strategists believed that airpower and remote technology were the future of U.S. military action. But America's most recent wars in the Middle East have reinforced the importance of counterinsurgency, with its imperative to "win hearts and minds" on the ground in foreign lands. In both Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military has studied and experimented with the combined action platoon (CAP) concept used from 1965 to 1971 by the Marine Corps in Vietnam. Consisting of twelve Marines, a medic, and dozens of inexperienced local militiamen, the American contingent of CAPs lived in South Vietnamese villages where they provided twenty-four-hour security and daily medical support for civilians, and fostered social interaction through civic action projects, such as building schools, offices, and wells. Defend and Befriend is the first comprehensive study of the evolution of these platoons, emphasizing how and why the U.S. Marine Corps attempted to overcome the inherent military, social, and cultural obstacles on the ground in Vietnam. Basing his analysis on Marine records and numerous interviews with CAP veterans, author John Southard illustrates how thousands of soldiers tasked with counterinsurgency duties came to perceive the Vietnamese people and their mission. This unique study counters prevailing stereotypes and provides a new perspective on the American infantryman in the Vietnam War. Illuminating the fear felt by many Americans as they served among groups of understandably suspicious civilians, Defend and Befriend offers important insights into the future development of counterinsurgency doctrine.
