After forty-five years, Gus Kappler has published his recollection and analysis of the experience as a trauma surgeon at the 85th Evacuation Hospital, Phu Bai, Vietnam ’70-’71. Welcome Home From Vietnam, Finally is a truthful accounting of war’s devastating effects on body, mind, and soul. All lives enmeshed within the Vietnam War, as any other combat zone, have been to some extent scarred irreparably.
Is the Hippocratic Oath rewritten in a combat zone when abiding by the moral code of war, not peace? The fact is warriors, corpsmen, nurses, and physicians usually existed and functioned within a moral limbo, vacillating between both the moral codes of peace and war. In Vietnam, when I triaged a mass causality in the ED, I condemned the very most seriously wounded, who may have been salvageable, to death in order to treat others with a better prognosis.
Is it intellectually honest for the public to apply and therefore judge a warrior’s actions by the moral code of peace, while safe at home, as the warrior is fighting to stay alive and being guided by the moral code of war: the concept of justified killing versus murder?
For years I attempted to rationalize my actions in Vietnam, some of which were immoral by the stateside moral code of peace, and to modify my complete disdain for the Vietnamese. Time did soften my war-zone feelings. A chance meeting with a brilliant Vietnamese medical student completed my exoneration.
Today, I’m finally home. Not welcomed by our ungrateful citizens but by the steadfastness of my wife’s support and my self-generated efforts to become resurrected from my mental morass.
My wish is to relate a truthful accounting of war and equip the reader in their better understanding of its aftermath and how easily we in recent years have ignored these historical lessons.
