“An amazing book with an ending that made my jaw drop. A vivid glimpse into the experience of a human mind in the Vietnam War.” —Andrew Wakeling, 18 “I'd like to see this read in high school history classes covering the Vietnam War period, read by young men AND young women.” —Ginny Wakeling, his Mom “I don’t usually read books outside school, but I couldn’t put this one down. My dad and I need to talk.” —Ryan Forest, 19 “This guy got it right. I know. I was a medic too. Yes, my son and I need to have the talk I’ve been avoiding for thirty years.” —Don Forest, his Dad “Everyone who has registered in the Selective Service should read this book. I also found that my mother (48 years old) liked the book a lot. Maybe it shouldn’t only be targeted at just men.” —Angela Lopez
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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About the Author
Drafted in the summer of 1968, as the war in Vietnam and the protests at home escalated, Ben Sherman went from being a college student playing Goofy part-time at Disneyland, to serving as a field medic in Vietnam. After thirty-two years, he’s decided to tell his story.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1
Bags
The bags are exactly where I should begin. They are where the war ended for fifty-eight thousand, and where it started for me. Black rubberized bags with reinforced plastic handles on each end, they were strong and durable, with heavy zippers you could pull with your whole fist.
Entering the morgue tent, one hesitated to take a full breath. My first duty in Vietnam was spent zipping up smells. The only solace was that the remains had quit screaming. Some bodies had the distinct odor of burnt cloth or flesh. Others simply gave off old sweat, bad socks, tobacco, or belly gas. Even a tent vaporized with Lysol couldn't cut the continuous olfactory blight of human waste staining the underwear of the shell left behind.
Our caring was meticulous, even while we tried, in our own way, to put our minds elsewhere. Each personal item was tagged, each button refastened. Neglected pockets and stripes were neatly resewn. Homely, wondering faces were shaved and cleaned. Without a sound, we each functioned with one mind, one obligation. Someone inventoried each coin, chain, watch, wallet, ring, and all were placed in small brown paper sacks. No one wanted their loved one coming home with someone else's personal stuff in his pocket or with field dirt ringing his neck. And the army didn't want a hometown mortician opening the box to find a mess instead of a hero.
For every face locked into every rubber womb, I made a quiet promise to do this or that with my life for his sake. With some pride, I thought that as a medic I stood for part of the solution. I had come to this place to save a life, not take one. This plugging of rectums with cotton balls was a temporary setback. In one year minus one day, I could scrutinize my life for whatever meaning this horror held. A year from now I might even laugh out loud again.
"Graves Registration?" I asked the clerk. "But I'm a medic."
"New medics get the morgue tent first. Anything's better than the bush. Nobody asks for the morgue. But it'll pop your cherry. You'll be ready for anything after a few days of body-packing."
"Uh, I don't . . ."
"I know. The guys over there'll show you what to do. They're not grave diggers, either. Plain old medics like you."
"We dig graves here?"
"Nope. 'Grave diggers' are what we call the regular morgue specialists, lifers in Saigon at the big hospitals."
"Uh-huh." I scrambled to keep up. His words and feet were way ahead of me, heading down the dirt road.
"We don't get that many DOA anyway. It'll be pretty boring here. Just passing a few days, y'know? Only bodies we get are those who died in flight or across the street at 3d Surg. Most field KIAs go straight to Saigon. Then home."
KIA. Killed in action.
Upon entering the tent, the clerk handed me a blue tunic to exchange for my fatigue shirt, then disappeared without another word. Two lanky black medics worked over a corpse on a stainless steel table. They nodded politely but didn't speak. Their mouths puffed forward in a pout, like you had to hold your lips a certain way to concentrate. Their eyes were swollen, and I rubbed my own as the stench of disinfectant mixed with the humidity in the tent. I hung my fatigue shirt on a hook by the door next to their two. The stenciled names weren't showing. I didn't introduce myself, and they didn't offer.
The two of them taught me by show rather than tell. When they were done preparing the corpse, I helped roll him onto an open rubber bag. One of them placed the brown paper sack full of personal belongings carefully between the knees as the other zipped the bag from the feet up over the head. A chill rocketed from my toes to my neck at the sound. The two of them picked up the full heavy bag by the two side handles and slid it into a silver aluminum box, then closed the cover and snapped it shut.
The gurney bumped over the back threshold of the tent as they rolled the box out to be stored in a refrigerated steel building behind the morgue. Somebody else would ship him home.
Stacked at the end of the morgue tent were more six-foot-long aluminum boxes. Ten or twelve of them. Each one eventually took somebody home. Near the stack of caskets, an open shelf stored extra sets of large fatigue pants and shirts and piles of olive drab T-shirts and socks. An open bandage box held dozens of packs of varying brands and quantities of cigarettes.
I helped with the next KIA, who was about five years younger than I. This one's fatigues were wet and bloody, so we cut the clothes off. We carefully washed his arms, face, feet, even behind his ears and between his fingers. Then we dressed him carefully in new starched fatigues from the shelves in the corner. We all scrubbed our hands thoroughly afterward.
On the second day we packed three more bodies, all dank with the musk of too many days in rice paddies. You couldn't inhale in our tent without the sharp medical scent of liquid soap and alcohol cutting through the stench of death. One of the medics showed me how he stuffed unused cigarette filters into his nostrils. It didn't work. The disgusting odor cut through everything.
The morgue tent could have been called Purgatory. The casualties weren't part of the fighting force anymore, but they hadn't yet touched down in their hometowns, where friends, family, and high school teachers would be there to greet them for the final time. Where they'd soon be war heroes.
Until then, inside this tent, the three of us took our time and paid attention to detail. These bodies were important. They were different from us only in that they were going home early.
In bags. Once closed, you couldn't see the bewildered faces anymore. You couldn't smell the blood, excrement, dried mud, or urine. Each one we zipped meant everyone had quit messing with him. No snipers or booby traps or command-detonated mines to slow his walk. No weight of cumbersome gear, weapons, and ammunition. No whistling rockets or mortars in his ears just before they hit. No sudden flinching or jerking. No fear. What a way to leave.
Repeatedly before me, on a cold stainless steel table, lay the one common denominator of escalated conflict: dead bodies. No matter what provokes nations to war upon each other--land, oil, trade, religion--this bagging of boys is as fundamental to war as haiku is to poetry.
High speeding metal
Slamming through muscle and bone
How war begins, ends
I scribbled the words on the back of a red toe tag. I didn't know it yet, but the tranquility of this Purgatory was far better than the screaming that preceded it, the hysteria I would catch up with soon enough in the field. For now, our shop remained eternally mute.
As soldiers, we were all isolated from the World. None of us saw the nightly news or read the newspapers. We didn't know enough to care one way or the other. GIs are not allowed opinions. Basic training whips the smartass out of every individual, one at a time, and creates a government-issue fighting soldier who doesn't have too many original thoughts. Real warriors are either alive and afraid, or dead and quiet. In the field there were no lines, no battles, no war strategies. Guerrilla warfare is nowhere and everywhere at the same time. My recollection of Vietnam has nothing to do with politics or Americans shouting in the streets back home. It's about serving in a humid foreign jungle, flicking horsefly mosquitoes, eating crappy food, trying to find a bit of shade or a beer or a soft breeze to slice into the humidity that hung on our necks. And about trying to stay alive.
My official papers said I was a noncombatant, which meant that I didn't carry a weapon. It didn't mean I wasn't going to get shot at, it just meant I didn't carry a weapon. But being a medic meant much more than carrying a weapon. It meant ten weeks of bloody movies, hypodermic needle drills, greased catheters slipped into wilting penises, splints made of tree limbs, fireman body-carries through mud, machine gun tracers colliding over crawling bodies, a morphine Syrette administered to a bare thigh in front of the whole gawking platoon.
Medics carried responsibility for more than dry feet, salt tablets, syphilis, and puncture wounds. A platoon leader relied on his medic to report on the morale and mobility of the troops. A medevac pilot relied on the medics to get out into the battlefield and back quickly. Operating room surgeons who had years of study and more years of practice relied on "ten-week wonders" like me to scrub, monitor vitals, sponge, pass instruments, administer anesthetics, even carve out and sew up wounds.
The grunts called me Doc, and it sounded like both Mom and Priest.
Medics were trusted to perform when needed. We treated abrasions, gave haircuts, soothed anger, and inspected rashes of unknown origin in all the typical places. We also confiscated marijuana; treated cuts, bug bites, and abrasions; and continually nagged people to keep their feet clean and their dicks to themselves. Yet no matter how much a medic bitched, he held your ticket home alive--if he knew his stuff. For that reason, I belonged to a proud fraternity.
I wondered if all new medics caught morgue duty as a way to desensitize us. You couldn't have one of us puking into an open wound. The clerk had said "temporary" duty. To some extent the whole war seemed like a fleeting mishap in my otherwise normal life. "Temporary" would have to be my mantra.
Working in the morgue tent may have been gruesome and smelly, but it kept us feeling reasonably safe. The hundred-degree heat started early, stayed through the afternoon, and hung on late into the evening. Inside the tent seemed even hotter than outside. If a monsoon dumped rain on us for fifteen minutes, the temperature might drop five degrees. Minutes later it climbed back up to over a hundred, with ninety-nine percent humidity. It seemed t...
Bags
The bags are exactly where I should begin. They are where the war ended for fifty-eight thousand, and where it started for me. Black rubberized bags with reinforced plastic handles on each end, they were strong and durable, with heavy zippers you could pull with your whole fist.
Entering the morgue tent, one hesitated to take a full breath. My first duty in Vietnam was spent zipping up smells. The only solace was that the remains had quit screaming. Some bodies had the distinct odor of burnt cloth or flesh. Others simply gave off old sweat, bad socks, tobacco, or belly gas. Even a tent vaporized with Lysol couldn't cut the continuous olfactory blight of human waste staining the underwear of the shell left behind.
Our caring was meticulous, even while we tried, in our own way, to put our minds elsewhere. Each personal item was tagged, each button refastened. Neglected pockets and stripes were neatly resewn. Homely, wondering faces were shaved and cleaned. Without a sound, we each functioned with one mind, one obligation. Someone inventoried each coin, chain, watch, wallet, ring, and all were placed in small brown paper sacks. No one wanted their loved one coming home with someone else's personal stuff in his pocket or with field dirt ringing his neck. And the army didn't want a hometown mortician opening the box to find a mess instead of a hero.
For every face locked into every rubber womb, I made a quiet promise to do this or that with my life for his sake. With some pride, I thought that as a medic I stood for part of the solution. I had come to this place to save a life, not take one. This plugging of rectums with cotton balls was a temporary setback. In one year minus one day, I could scrutinize my life for whatever meaning this horror held. A year from now I might even laugh out loud again.
"Graves Registration?" I asked the clerk. "But I'm a medic."
"New medics get the morgue tent first. Anything's better than the bush. Nobody asks for the morgue. But it'll pop your cherry. You'll be ready for anything after a few days of body-packing."
"Uh, I don't . . ."
"I know. The guys over there'll show you what to do. They're not grave diggers, either. Plain old medics like you."
"We dig graves here?"
"Nope. 'Grave diggers' are what we call the regular morgue specialists, lifers in Saigon at the big hospitals."
"Uh-huh." I scrambled to keep up. His words and feet were way ahead of me, heading down the dirt road.
"We don't get that many DOA anyway. It'll be pretty boring here. Just passing a few days, y'know? Only bodies we get are those who died in flight or across the street at 3d Surg. Most field KIAs go straight to Saigon. Then home."
KIA. Killed in action.
Upon entering the tent, the clerk handed me a blue tunic to exchange for my fatigue shirt, then disappeared without another word. Two lanky black medics worked over a corpse on a stainless steel table. They nodded politely but didn't speak. Their mouths puffed forward in a pout, like you had to hold your lips a certain way to concentrate. Their eyes were swollen, and I rubbed my own as the stench of disinfectant mixed with the humidity in the tent. I hung my fatigue shirt on a hook by the door next to their two. The stenciled names weren't showing. I didn't introduce myself, and they didn't offer.
The two of them taught me by show rather than tell. When they were done preparing the corpse, I helped roll him onto an open rubber bag. One of them placed the brown paper sack full of personal belongings carefully between the knees as the other zipped the bag from the feet up over the head. A chill rocketed from my toes to my neck at the sound. The two of them picked up the full heavy bag by the two side handles and slid it into a silver aluminum box, then closed the cover and snapped it shut.
The gurney bumped over the back threshold of the tent as they rolled the box out to be stored in a refrigerated steel building behind the morgue. Somebody else would ship him home.
Stacked at the end of the morgue tent were more six-foot-long aluminum boxes. Ten or twelve of them. Each one eventually took somebody home. Near the stack of caskets, an open shelf stored extra sets of large fatigue pants and shirts and piles of olive drab T-shirts and socks. An open bandage box held dozens of packs of varying brands and quantities of cigarettes.
I helped with the next KIA, who was about five years younger than I. This one's fatigues were wet and bloody, so we cut the clothes off. We carefully washed his arms, face, feet, even behind his ears and between his fingers. Then we dressed him carefully in new starched fatigues from the shelves in the corner. We all scrubbed our hands thoroughly afterward.
On the second day we packed three more bodies, all dank with the musk of too many days in rice paddies. You couldn't inhale in our tent without the sharp medical scent of liquid soap and alcohol cutting through the stench of death. One of the medics showed me how he stuffed unused cigarette filters into his nostrils. It didn't work. The disgusting odor cut through everything.
The morgue tent could have been called Purgatory. The casualties weren't part of the fighting force anymore, but they hadn't yet touched down in their hometowns, where friends, family, and high school teachers would be there to greet them for the final time. Where they'd soon be war heroes.
Until then, inside this tent, the three of us took our time and paid attention to detail. These bodies were important. They were different from us only in that they were going home early.
In bags. Once closed, you couldn't see the bewildered faces anymore. You couldn't smell the blood, excrement, dried mud, or urine. Each one we zipped meant everyone had quit messing with him. No snipers or booby traps or command-detonated mines to slow his walk. No weight of cumbersome gear, weapons, and ammunition. No whistling rockets or mortars in his ears just before they hit. No sudden flinching or jerking. No fear. What a way to leave.
Repeatedly before me, on a cold stainless steel table, lay the one common denominator of escalated conflict: dead bodies. No matter what provokes nations to war upon each other--land, oil, trade, religion--this bagging of boys is as fundamental to war as haiku is to poetry.
High speeding metal
Slamming through muscle and bone
How war begins, ends
I scribbled the words on the back of a red toe tag. I didn't know it yet, but the tranquility of this Purgatory was far better than the screaming that preceded it, the hysteria I would catch up with soon enough in the field. For now, our shop remained eternally mute.
As soldiers, we were all isolated from the World. None of us saw the nightly news or read the newspapers. We didn't know enough to care one way or the other. GIs are not allowed opinions. Basic training whips the smartass out of every individual, one at a time, and creates a government-issue fighting soldier who doesn't have too many original thoughts. Real warriors are either alive and afraid, or dead and quiet. In the field there were no lines, no battles, no war strategies. Guerrilla warfare is nowhere and everywhere at the same time. My recollection of Vietnam has nothing to do with politics or Americans shouting in the streets back home. It's about serving in a humid foreign jungle, flicking horsefly mosquitoes, eating crappy food, trying to find a bit of shade or a beer or a soft breeze to slice into the humidity that hung on our necks. And about trying to stay alive.
My official papers said I was a noncombatant, which meant that I didn't carry a weapon. It didn't mean I wasn't going to get shot at, it just meant I didn't carry a weapon. But being a medic meant much more than carrying a weapon. It meant ten weeks of bloody movies, hypodermic needle drills, greased catheters slipped into wilting penises, splints made of tree limbs, fireman body-carries through mud, machine gun tracers colliding over crawling bodies, a morphine Syrette administered to a bare thigh in front of the whole gawking platoon.
Medics carried responsibility for more than dry feet, salt tablets, syphilis, and puncture wounds. A platoon leader relied on his medic to report on the morale and mobility of the troops. A medevac pilot relied on the medics to get out into the battlefield and back quickly. Operating room surgeons who had years of study and more years of practice relied on "ten-week wonders" like me to scrub, monitor vitals, sponge, pass instruments, administer anesthetics, even carve out and sew up wounds.
The grunts called me Doc, and it sounded like both Mom and Priest.
Medics were trusted to perform when needed. We treated abrasions, gave haircuts, soothed anger, and inspected rashes of unknown origin in all the typical places. We also confiscated marijuana; treated cuts, bug bites, and abrasions; and continually nagged people to keep their feet clean and their dicks to themselves. Yet no matter how much a medic bitched, he held your ticket home alive--if he knew his stuff. For that reason, I belonged to a proud fraternity.
I wondered if all new medics caught morgue duty as a way to desensitize us. You couldn't have one of us puking into an open wound. The clerk had said "temporary" duty. To some extent the whole war seemed like a fleeting mishap in my otherwise normal life. "Temporary" would have to be my mantra.
Working in the morgue tent may have been gruesome and smelly, but it kept us feeling reasonably safe. The hundred-degree heat started early, stayed through the afternoon, and hung on late into the evening. Inside the tent seemed even hotter than outside. If a monsoon dumped rain on us for fifteen minutes, the temperature might drop five degrees. Minutes later it climbed back up to over a hundred, with ninety-nine percent humidity. It seemed t...
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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A different kind of soldier,
This review is from: Medic!: The Story of a Conscientious Objector in the Vietnam War (Mass Market Paperback)
"Medic!: The Story of a Conscientious Objector in the Vietnam War," by Ben Sherman, is an exciting, well-paced narrative that reads more like a novel than a memoir. The book tells how Sherman was drafted and was classified as a noncombatant soldier; he didn't carry a weapon, but still went into Vietnam and was exposed to danger in the combat zone. As a medic, he tended the wounds of his fellow soldiers.The early part of the narrative includes texts of the letters sent between Sherman and the draft board as he sought to evade combat service. The narrative goes on to explore his work on a navy troopship and on the ground in Vietnam. He vividly describes the sights, smells, and sounds of service in the war. The book is full of fascinating scenes, such as a political debate among the doctors and medics in a surgical theater. Sherman portrays the American soldiers in Vietnam as a diverse group: people with varying backgrounds, interests, and attitudes on various topics. Much of the book is very raw, sweaty, and in-your-face. But parts of the book are also graced with a touching, poetic delicacy. The final chapter includes insight on the writing of the book. Sherman's account of the ethics and the process of becoming a conscientious objector is truly remarkable. He dramatically portrays the dilemma faced by young American men during the Vietnam era. Overall, this is a well-written narrative that is, in my opinion, a valuable and distinctive addition to the canon of United States war literature.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An Opportunity for Healing,
By
This review is from: Medic!: The Story of a Conscientious Objector in the Vietnam War (Paperback)
Like the best of stories, this one is intensely personal, and like the best of stories, this one is also universal. Ben Sherman exposes his intense experience as a conscientious objector serving as a frontline medic with a vivid sense of visual and visceral detail. The story is of one young man's brutal immersion into the reality of war, and it is also story of wide reaching significance of human connection and the stunning human cost of war across borders, cultures, and eras. Every Viet Nam vet has his or her own story; many are left untold, relegated to the bottomless black hole of suppressed war memories. No one could have faulted the author for choosing such a path; bringing memories of war horrors to light is painful. But Sherman offers his story as a gift of grace, an opportunity for healing, and as an imperative to seek other ways to resolve conflict. Paul Ferrini says, "When you have the courage to approach the wall of your fear, it turns into a doorway." Sherman has opened this doorway for himself, and his doorway offers an opening for others. Wars are fought by individuals, but are entered into and supported by our collective identity, by nations. If we are ever to learn a different way of resolving conflict, essential for the human story to continue, then we must have full understanding of the reality of war, not the propagandized unreality we're usually fed. Sherman's book tells a story we all, young and old, need to know. We especially need to know this story together, and "Medic!" provides a powerful vehicle for the most important of intergenerational conversations. This is not light reading; it is important reading about some of the deepest --both hardest and best -- of human experiences. I was drawn in, engaged, and changed by this book like no other. Sherman's unique perspective as a CO medic is a story we all need to hear.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Memoir or novel?,
By
This review is from: Medic!: The Story of a Conscientious Objector in the Vietnam War (Mass Market Paperback)
Reviewer Mazza (11.15.04) mentions that the book "reads more like a novel than a memoir." Exactly, and that's the problem---which is it? As reviewer Bunch (1.24.06) notes, there are several events that don't ring true. For example, in 1985 the author and a friend visited a deserted Wall at 10 o'clock at night. As he knelt and wept in front of the name of a soldier whose life he had been unable to save in `69, who should appear but that same man's mother and brother (to whom he apparently said nothing). There are many books written by Vietnam vets. Read this one if you aren't troubled by repeated dramatic coincidences.
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Inside This Book
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First Sentence:
The bags are exactly where I should begin. Read the first page Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
holdover barracks, morgue tent, medic bag, surgery theater, happy ass, two medics, fatigue pants Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Dong Tam, Sergeant Bailey, Cornelius Jones, Bien Hoa, Captain Buttshot, Fort Lewis, Mekong River, Sergeant Smith, Benjamin Ray Sherman, Viet Cong, Fort Sam Houston, Phil Weber, Streets Sacramento, Tay Ninh, Wally Thomas, Betty Doolin Member, Donald Duck, Golden Gate, Major Guenther, New York, World War, Congressman Moss, Mekong Delta, San Francisco, Selective Service Board New!
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Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Surprise Me!
The bags are exactly where I should begin. Read the first page Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
holdover barracks, morgue tent, medic bag, surgery theater, happy ass, two medics, fatigue pants Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Dong Tam, Sergeant Bailey, Cornelius Jones, Bien Hoa, Captain Buttshot, Fort Lewis, Mekong River, Sergeant Smith, Benjamin Ray Sherman, Viet Cong, Fort Sam Houston, Phil Weber, Streets Sacramento, Tay Ninh, Wally Thomas, Betty Doolin Member, Donald Duck, Golden Gate, Major Guenther, New York, World War, Congressman Moss, Mekong Delta, San Francisco, Selective Service Board New!
Books on Related Topics | Concordance | Text Stats Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Surprise Me!
Citations (learn more)
This book cites 17
books:
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- Mekong First Light by Joseph W. Callaway Jr. in Front Matter, and Back Matter
- Crime and Punishment (Bantam Classics) by Fyodor Dostoevsky on page 252
- Antony and Cleopatra by William Shakespeare on page 252
- Romeo and Juliet (Simply Shakespeare) by William Shakespeare on page 252
- Romeo And Juliet (Turtleback School & Library Binding Edition) (Saddleback Classics) by William Shakespeare on page 252
See all 17 books this book cites
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