365 Days Read Free

here in Japan.
    There was a tennis court here once, near the lab building. During the Tet offensive, the fence was torn down and the asphalt used for another helipad. Tet has been over now for some time, but nobody’s even thought about putting back the fence. No one mentions it; it is just understood that the court stays a landing pad. It is the way the Army handles its concerns; each individual, of course, handles it his own way. Grieg’s developed an ulcer, Dodding is letting his hair grow, Lenhardt sends every patient he can back to Nam; he does it even if he has to extend their profiles 120 days. He’s sent troopers back to the paddies with thirteen-inch thoracotomy scars and bits of claymores still in their chests. But he believes in the war and the sacrifice, in the need for making a stand and dying for it if you have to.
    Peterson sends everyone he can home, or used to, until he began finding them showing up again in his ward five or six months later. “One laparotomy per country,” he’d say. But the Army feels differently, and so there is a pretty good chance that by feeling sorry for these kids and sending them back to the States he’s killed a few. A tour in Nam for an enlisted man is not considered complete unless he has been there ten months, five days. It’s considered good time if you are in a medical facility even if you spend your whole tour there—the Army simply counts it as Vietnam time. But if you are in a medical facility, discharged and declared fit for duty, and have served a combined time, either in Nam or in a hospital, of less than ten months, five days, you go back into the computer and if the Army still needs you, you get spit back to Nam. Not for the rest of your tour, but for a complete new twelve months. There are fellows who have been there for a year and a half. It’s the Army regulations, and at the beginning Peterson, who thought being an Army doctor was different from being an Army officer, simply didn’t spend the time to learn the rules. And so for months he’d profile guys back to the States, where they’d be discharged from the hospitals and returned to Nam.
    He tries to hold them now; if they’re getting close to the ten-month, five-day deadline, he’ll try to extend their profiles thirty days to keep them in the hospital over the deadline. It doesn’t go over very big with headquarters, but he’s the Doc and you don’t need a panel for a thirty-day extension of a temporary profile. You can fool around with the Army if you want and do it very effectively without having to go outside the system; it’s all there and ready to use in that formal structure written down in the AR’s, which, if definitely applied, would be impossible for anyone to work under. But you have to care, really care, because the Army doesn’t like to be fiddled with. You can hold onto patients and refuse to discharge them, clogging up beds in the evac chain. You can put any cold or runny nose you see, no matter what his job, on quarters until every unit commander is screaming. You can demand that the most rigorous rules of hygiene be enforced and drive the senior NCO’s crazy. You can ask for a consult on every case, or simply be slow in your dictation until the personnel office is frantic.
    The Commander is ultimately responsible for all, and when the patients start piling up at Yokota and the Air Force generals begin to complain, it is he who must answer. At Kishine there was a commander who insisted, despite formal complaints, in interfering with the doctors to the point of demanding that only certain medications be used. He ordered that the “foolishness” be stopped, and everyone obeyed. They discharged their patients, but with a note on the chart that the discharge was under protest, against their medical judgment, and only done under direct orders of the hospital Commander. Everything was put on him, and if indeed anything went wrong anywhere—if a patient died on a plane or even