FAILURE
TO ATONE

This is a book that will have a very special appeal to the many New Zealand health professionals who served in Viet Nam during what the Vietnamese refer to as the American war.

The population at large should also read it, though I suspect that there will be many who would have doubts about the truth of many of the situations that Dr Hassan describes so vividly. It would seem to them that such awful things could not possibly have happened. However happen they did, and a number of local authors such as Michael Shackleton, have written about the horrors of the deaths and injuries that were inflicted on the civilian community as a direct result of the war.

Dr Hassan, a farm boy from Iowa, who had served in the US Marine Corps before studying Veterinary Science and then Medicine, was singularly well prepared to undertake his voluntary medical service in Viet Nam to provide medical and surgical care for civilian sick and war wounded. He describes with great frankness and clarity his self doubts, but his writing indicates that he coped well with the enormous workload of the war surgery that had to be practiced against the background of a wide spectrum of infectious diseases; malnutrition; severe limitations on the availability of drugs, dressings, and equipment; and perhaps worst of all, an indifferent and unreliable nursing service.

The non-medical facet of the book is somewhat more difficult to deal with. Dr Hassan, as a result of what he experienced during his two short tours of duty in Viet Nam, became severely disenchanted because of what he perceived as the unjust nature of the war. He describes at length his unsuccessful efforts to implement official investigations of atrocities that he himself had observed.

I recommend this book to my older medical colleagues who have an interest in medical history, and to my younger colleagues who may be considering volunteering for service in Developing countries.