Word: medicant
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...rate among G.I.s in Viet Nam is so high that Brigadier General David Thomas, the U.S. Army's top medic in the war zone, has suggested a drastic solution: Army-run brothels. Understandably dismayed by such a proposal ("Government-sponsored moral collapse"), the weekly California Southern Baptist countered, tongue in cheek, with an even farther-out suggestion. "Perhaps," the magazine editorialized, "we ought to send into battle zones only married men whose wives can accompany them to a relatively safe zone near the battle area, and the men could spend a week on the front line and a week...
...that, the black soldier in the bush still helps his white comrade and wants his help as well. At Phuoc Vmh, a black 1st Cavalry trooper recently dragged a wounded white from a rocketed hootch when no other black or white dared to venture in. A black Navy medic who had been in Viet Nam only two weeks fell on a grenade near Danang to save a white Marine and lost his own life. When black Lieut. Archie Bigger was three times wounded capturing enemy artillery pieces, eleven whites held, him aloft above the suffocating napalm smoke until a rescue...
...make contact with Ho in 1945 in the jungles along the China-Viet Nam border. Under the code name "Lucius," Ho provided the OSS with intelligence about Japanese forces and, a generation before U.S. air attacks on North Viet Nam, his guerrillas rescued 17 downed American flyers. An OSS medic probably saved Ho's life by treating his tropical fevers with sulfa drugs...
...military, of course, has tremendous bases all over the South. There's a big Air Force one right across the street from the MG dealer's in Montgomery. Hitchhiking back from picking up a new water pump, we got a ride from a big smiling native Brazilian para-medic in his air conditioned Volkswagen bus with two little children. During the week he flies over to Vietnam and parachutes into the combat areas to save the wounded soldiers. He does stuff for them right there while the shooting is still going on, and then flies all the way back...
...campuses, I sincerely hope that someone tries to stop a Marine "leg" from going to class, or that some sorry, smelly, social reject tries to plant a Viet Cong cross next to the artificial leg of a Seabee, or spits in the burned face of an Army medic. I guarantee that it will only happen once...