Retiring surgeon recalls trying to save lives in Vietnam

Posted 6/5/20

Dr. Rilling meets with a patient at Lock Haven Hospital, from which he will be retiring on June 11 after a long and distinguished career as a general surgeon. by David Rilling, M.D. Ed. note: Dr. …

This item is available in full to subscribers.

Please log in to continue

Log in

Retiring surgeon recalls trying to save lives in Vietnam

Posted
Dr. Rilling meets with a patient at Lock Haven Hospital, from which he will be retiring on June 11 after a long and distinguished career as a general surgeon.

by David Rilling, M.D.

Ed. note: Dr. David Rilling, 79, who grew up near Olney and graduated from Central High School and Hahnemann Medical College, is retiring June 11 as a general surgeon at Lock Haven Hospital upstate. He was previously at Grand View Hospital in Sellersville, where at various times he served as president of the medical staff, chairman of the department of surgery and director of the vascular lab. Dr. Rilling holds the distinction of being one of the nation's first surgeons to successfully re-attach an arm that had been severed at the shoulder in 1977. Here he writes about his medical service during the War in Vietnam:

I was drafted into the U.S. Army Medical Corps after my first year of a four-year surgical residency program at Abington Memorial Hospital. I was first sent to the Officer Training Course at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas, for six weeks and then to Vietnam, where I served from Aug. 17,1968 until March 16,1970.

My unit flew out of Oakland, California. I still have a vivid memory of that day. As the group of us in military uniform walked to the plane, we had to walk through a long gauntlet of hippies and draft dodgers who cursed us and spat at us. I’ll never forget that disturbing scene.

Today, fortunately, things are different. Sometimes when I’m walking through an airport, I’ll hear the distant sound of applause. As I draw closer to the scene, I will see a group of military men and women walking through and people clapping and acknowledging them for their service. Quite a change from 1968!

In Vietnam my first assignment was with the 101st Airborne Division as a General Medical Officer (GMO) stationed at the Base Camp in Phuoc Vinh, 55 miles northeast of Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City). On Feb. 17, 1969, I was transferred to the major command headquarters and logistic center in Long Binh, outside of Saigon. I was made Commander of the medical dispensary, where I worked until July 28, 1969 … I felt relatively safe there until the famous surprise “attack on Long Binh” on February 22, 1969. Many Americans were killed that night including a colonel whom I had just met.

Dr. David Rilling, seen here in the late 1960s when he was a “M.A.S.H.” combat surgeon in Vietnam.

When I had revisited Camp Evans at the DMZ in June, I learned about the battle that my unit of the 101st Airborne had fought from May 10 to 20,1969, in the A Shau Valley at the famous “Battle of Hamburger Hill.” It was a direct assault against a heavily defended and strategically insignificant hill, resulting in 46 Americans killed and 400 wounded. It was called Hamburger Hill because the killing and slaughter was like raw hamburger meat.

I was lucky to have missed that horrible massacre, which was fatal to so many. Tragically, a friend, Lt. Jim Groff, had been severely injured and paralyzed leading his troops up that hill. Recently I reconnected with my friend, Dr. Joe Iovino, who was one of the doctors there during that battle.

He told me that they made a make-shift hospital out of a cave on the side of the mountain and treated 400 casualties in one 24-hour period, including a lot of chest tube insertions and amputations. The 101st captured the hill, but that victory was short-lived for on June 5, two weeks later, the decision was made to abandon the hill to the enemy.

This battle and the questions that it raised were a major factor in changing the public opinion of the war and added to an already strong anti-war sentiment. At the end of my first year in Vietnam I decided I would like to stay for another tour of duty but only if I would be able to work in a surgical hospital.

When I met with the Colonel, he looked at me in disbelief, got up from behind his desk, pulled down the map and just as General George Patton might have done, took a long pointer and pointed to the 45th surgical hospital at Tay Ninh on the Cambodian border, also known as “Rocket Alley.” “This will be a good place for you”, he said.

The hospital was called “Rocket Alley” because it was frequently bombed with rockets and mortars. The North Vietnamese Army (NVA) was located right across the border in Cambodia at the bottom of the Ho Chi Minh trail and launched rockets and mortars into our large base camp, usually at night, aiming for the air field and fuel storage tanks, but many would fall onto the hospital.

As a result, we slept underground in a large bunker covered with sand bags. The Ho Chi Minh trail was a military supply route running from North Vietnam through Laos and Cambodia to South Vietnam. The route sent weapons, manpower, ammunition and other supplies from communist-led North Vietnam to their supporters in South Vietnam during the Vietnam War.

The 45th surgical hospital received a lot of casualties from the various fire support bases nearby. But that was exactly where I wanted to be. I knew that the only good things that result from any war are well trained surgeons and important medical advances. So, to the Colonel’s amazement, I agreed. And that’s where I went – to the 45th surgical hospital!

The 45th surgical hospital was known as “the most dangerous hospital in the world” (a fact which I only recently learned). The M.A.S.H. (Medical Army Surgical Hospital) term, which had been used in Korea, had been changed to M.U.S.T. (Medical Unit Self-Sustained and Transportable) in Vietnam ... Our hospital actually was in existence for only seven years before the U.S. completely withdrew from Vietnam in 1974.

I arrived at the 45th Surgical by helicopter and was dropped off on the helipad in front of the receiving ward of the hospital. I immediately saw a memorial to one of the previous doctors — a surgeon, 28-year-old Captain James F. Sosnowski, who had been killed by a mortar in 1968. That was a wake-up call and a stark realization as to where I was.

There were three fully trained surgeons, and two of us with only one year of training. We would frequently be faced with 20-30 severely injured soldiers brought in by Huey and Chinook helicopters at 5 a.m. after their fire support bases had been overrun by the Vietcong and North Vietnamese right outside of our perimeter.

I remember going into the triage ward and seeing all of these horribly injured young men lying on stretchers with arms and legs blown off, bodies ripped apart, alive and just lying there in complete and eerie silence waiting to be treated. A scene from Dante’s Inferno and one I’ll never forget.

My initial instinct was to scream and run out of there, not believing “the horror of it all.” But this was real, and I needed to get to work. Which we all quickly did. It was our job to assess each one of these injured soldiers and operate on the most seriously wounded first. If someone was mortally injured and could not be saved, he was moved to the back of the triage area.

Fortunately, there were not many like that. In my time there we only lost one patient, a soldier who had been shot by a mortar through the center of his chest, doing irreparable damage to the major arteries and veins. Each surgeon took a patient and an OR and kept working until every injury had been attended to, often for several days straight. At first I worked with another surgeon. but as time went on and I became more experienced I often operated by myself.

It has been said that war is sometimes described as “long periods of boredom punctuated by short moments of terror.” How true. When we were not busy operating on combat casualties, a small group of surgeons and nurses would often ride into Tay Ninh city to the large old provincial hospital, which served 250,000 people. We would go into the main courtyard with an interpreter who with a bullhorn would announce that the “bacsi,”or doctors, were there.

And pretty soon there would be patients coming toward us, some limping or being carried. With all types of ailments. Leg tumors. Abdominal tumors. Thyroid goiters. We would identify the ones we thought we could help, go back to our Army camp and return the following day to find them in the operating room ready to go. Primitive but adequate. Ether anesthesia was used. At the scrub sink there was no running water. One of the Vietnamese ladies poured water over your hands while you washed up. We would operate and then leave the patients in the hospital with the nurses and then return the next day ...

With only 30 days before I was to go home I was operating one night when there was a mortar attack. One of the mortars landed about 30 feet from where I was working. Fortunately, we were saved by the sand bags that were piled around the outside of each Quonset hut. That was a close call. I kept operating but asked the anesthetist to lower the operating table ...

The U.S. withdrew from Vietnam in 1974 after the loss of more than 50,000 U.S. military lives and 500,000 injuries not counting the hundreds of thousands of civilian and North Vietnamese deaths and casualties. Today Vietnam is a communist country and doing very well economically. It has become a popular tourist destination.

I was awarded the Army Service Ribbon, the National Defense Service Medal, the Bronze Star Medal and the Republic of Vietnam Campaign Medal with '60' Device.

opinion