Soren Kierkegaard once said something to the effect that life must be lived forward but can only be understood looking backward. Since I recently turned 70 it seems like time to do a little looking backwards. Most of life seems to go by in a hurry. One minute you are graduating from high school. The next it's college and a wedding and a trek across the country to start graduate school. The year is now 1970 and the protests against the Vietnam War are the big story on most campuses. It was at The Ohio State University in any case. Classes were often dismissed that spring due to the tear gas that permeated the atmosphere making lecture halls un-inhabitable. When I got my draft notice that spring to report to the induction center for processing I had just learned of the combat death of one of my high school friends. I had been so self absorbed in education and getting ready for a career in Bio Physics that I had not paid nearly enough attention to politics. Especially the politics of protest. I was late to form opinions about the value of the conflict. I had been raised in a household where General MacArthur was revered as nearly a member of the Heavenly cabinet. I naively went along with that for a long time. I eventually came to the conclusion that Ho Chi Minh was more a nationalist than an existential threat to the American way of life. As always the issues were complex but it often goes unnoticed that Ho Chi Minh had received help from the OSS and joined in America's fight with Japan in the closing months of WWII. Specifically U.S. Army Major Allison Thomas and the deer team from OSS had been tasked with training Vietnamese guerrillas to prevent Japan's rail access into Southern China in 1945 via Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh had been in contact with the US as early as 1942 and the original "read" on his politics was that he was primarily motivated by the goal of a Vietnam independent from France. Only after the war did his communist politics trouble the US government. The swirling alliances in South East Asia during the war are difficult to understand from our point of view in the early 21st century. A simple acknowledgment of Vietnam's independence in 1946 would have saved a ton of treasure and many thousands of lives. The Cold War mentality of the day saw Communism as a world wide conspiracy orchestrated out of Moscow. The failure to recognize the aspirations of a country that wanted to be free of it's colonial overlords as a bid for freedom and not a call for slavery by the puppet masters in the USSR was a tragedy paid for in blood by at least 58,200 US soldiers, 200,000 South Vietnamese soldiers, and nearly 2 million civilians. In addition South Korea who also sent soldiers to the conflict, lost over 4,000 and Thailand and Australia lost hundreds each.
In any case at the time I did not feel I could support the war and joined the protest movement. Since I was not willing to fight in a war I did not believe in, I had a choice to make. I could either become a draft dodger and leave the US, or I could seek a deferment to continue my education. I chose the latter. Since no deferments were being given to graduate students in Physics in 1970 only two options were available. Deferments were being given for students in Divinity Schools and Medical Schools. Since medicine had been an early career option, strongly recommended by my father, I chose that path. Applications were sent quickly and interviews by telephone followed. My undergraduate course work had included all of the pre-med course work and I had for reasons unclear to me at the time taken the MedCat exam the previous year along with the GRE exams in both Biology and Physics. The scores for. the MCAT were still valid in the spring of 1970. I got sympathetic hearings from several medical school admissions deans and was finally accepted by Loma Linda University Medical School for the Class of 1973B. The B was because this class was being accelerated and would finish only 3 months later than the A class of 1973 which had started nearly a year earlier. I found out about the acceptance by telephone on a Thursday in late May of 1970 and had only a few weeks to sell our house, pack up and move across the country from Columbus Ohio to Loma Linda California in order to start classes. Looking backwards now it seems improbable to have so many things fall into place. I put up a 3X5 card in the break room of the local Worthington Foods plant in Worthington Ohio with a For Sale note about our house on a Friday afternoon. Sunday we got a phone call and a couple wanted to see the house. They made a cash offer and we accepted. I dropped out of all my classes and rented a trailer and we packed and drove across the country. Medical school was a bit of a culture shock since the information being thrown at us came from a fire hose. It was like trying to get a drink with out having your head blown off. Classes met 6 days a week and there were no breaks to speak of for the next 38 months. One of our professors made the comment one day that in the years to come we would look back at these days as the best in our life. We thought he was nuts. Who could think of the stresses we were under as the best days of our lives? Survival was the main goal. Now I think I understand what he meant. They were great days! Unfortunately my marriage did not survive the stresses. But that is a subject all it's own.
I graduated on the last Sunday in September on 1973. I gave the class response to the graduation commencement address as the class president. The next morning at 6:30 AM I went on call as a new Intern at the County Hospital. It was a work oriented program and you definitely learned by watching and then doing. The old mantra was in place of: watch one, do one, then teach one. The first time I was asked by a nurse to place an NG tube I missed out on ever seeing one placed before I stepped into the patients room to do my first one. I knew by observation that the tube went in the nose but the details of how it got into the stomach were a bit vague. I carefully lubricated the end and started advancing the tube into the external nares of the patient. I knew something was wrong when the patient started gesticulating wildly and pointing to his mouth. I kept advancing the tube and suddenly the patient opened his mouth and the tube exploded out of his oral cavity. I was dismayed and knew enough to cut it off at the nose and pull the remainder out of his mouth. A passing nurse took pity on me and got another NG tube and showed me how to get the patient swallowing with a glass of water while advancing the tube. Success finally. Looking backwards I can see how some additional training before being turned loose would be helpful, but the arrangement did teach you how to become self sufficient quickly. Limits on working hours were unheard of and 80 hour weeks were the norm. More reflections will follow after further cogitation.
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