Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)A good quick read. The author is recounting a period of dangerous times for young Americans who were assigned to Vietnam. What is most interesting is that this person was a Flight Surgeon for VAP-61. The VAP outfits (VAP-61, VAP-62, VCP-63, VQ-1) all flew the RA-3B Skywarrior aircraft which provided photo reconaisance for fleet commanders. I had never known the exact scope of the squadron tasking until reading the book and seeing/hearing about how many missions each aircraft and crews flew.
The book is good but you'll either agree or have to disagree on the benefits of the war as the author , not too subtly, will leave you an impression as to what he thought of it.
Bear in mind when reading the book is that it's written by a Doctor who probably has seen the worst that war can throw at you. I'm sure the crews (usually Pilot, Nav, and aircrewman)may have told the story with a slightly more heroic spin.
For those that want to tie a face to a name, please visit [...] and look under memorials for all aircrew killed in action during the war.
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Blair Beebe, M.D.Medical lessons from Vietnam; what did we learn?Almost fifty years after the beginning of American involvement in the Vietnam War, we still remain embroiled in military actions that generate disease, disability, and death. Frontline physicians who were in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Vietnam faced the medical consequences of war every day. My new novel, Doc Lucas USN, based on real people and real events, brings the war down to a human scale, one person at a time. History gives us statistics and dates, but fiction helps us to better understand the meaning behind those facts. One of my old professors defined history as "lies we tell about dead people." We understand more from reading Homer, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Margaret Mitchell, and Stephen Ambrose than we ever learned from dry history textbooks. Paradoxically, the truth comes out in fiction.During my time in Vietnam, and for many years after, I listened to stories from other physicians who served during the war and from naval aviators and marines who faced combat every day. I also heard different points of view from Vietnamese civilians who had come to America to escape the chaos after the war. Their eyewitness accounts are the true history, but unless someone writes them down, we lose them forever. Moreover, individual stories may have little meaning to us if they lack context. I've often heard both veterans and civilians say, "I don't talk about my experiences, because anyone who wasn't there could never understand how bad it was."That's why we need a novel to give us a complete account in an organized way. Each character and each scene moves the action to develop a central theme about the war. We want more than anecdotes. We want to understand the how and the why of the unfolding tragedy. Doc Lucas not only recounts the stories, he lives them. We feel his anxiety, his terror, and at times, his joy. When things go wrong, we know why, and we can feel his despair. In the good times, and there are many, we laugh along with him. In the end, Doc Lucas learns important lessons about himself and his values centered on human rights and the relief of suffering. He emerges from the war better equipped to take his place with stronger convictions about his role in his society.
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