Word: medicant
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...technique of being a soldier in Vietnam, one of the movies that's probably the neatest is the one on counter-insurgency. I saw it three times, twice, in basic and once in medic. This Communist dude with his little flying cap, he's the Communist guerrilla and he's in the jungle with his executive officer who looks an awful lot like Fidel Castro. They have this salute where they close their fist and shoot out their arm. It reminds you a little of Nazi Germany, just enough so you know the tie-in is there...
Army propaganda is funny because it hits at a very high level and also, at the same time, a very low level. It has a double meaning. But it's not so subtle--you can see it and ignore it. The best propaganda movie I saw was in my medic course. A guy gets up there on the screen and he says "Would you like to know what Communists call you in different countries? In London they call you bubble gum chewers. In France they call you gangsters. In Korea they call you murderers!" And he makes this a very...
...many technical lectures during training, most on the sixth grade level. Although during medic training most were conducted on the eighth grade level. I learned that helicopters are really an amazing innovation: it's a brand new kind of war over there. They keep pounding it into your head that in Vietnam there is no front. You can just as likely be killed by a sniper when you step off the plane as you can out in the woods outside the city or in the Delta region. One of the friends I graduated with from high school was a medic...
...black belt for judo, then becomes an Army paratrooper, and finally winds up in Special Forces school where he writes down a song that has been on his mind for years. He copyrights it and sends it to a publisher, where it languishes for months while Sadler plays medic and sings some more in Vietnam. An ABC film crew happens by the camp and records Sadler singing his "Ballad," and he is flown to Saigon to sing for the general. In the hospital (with a leg infection he got from stepping on a poison stick) Sadler "resolved that...
Most CO's reject this interpretation. A sophomore CO pointed out that the Army Field Manual describes the primary duty of the medic as no different than any other soldier--to contribute to the victory of the command. "If I were a medic," he continued, "I'd feel obliged to aid the most seriously injured first, regardless of whether they were friend or enemy. The army doesn't allow that." Another CO said, "If I patch someone up just so he can go back and kill some more, I might as well do the killing myself...