War Story

"Doc, you gotta help me. I can't take it any more." In the midst of the assorted humdrum and the occasional catastrophe, that was the complaint I heard the most when I served in Vietnam. And mind you, compared to the grunts, I had it way good. I, and the people for whom I was a doctor, lived on a base, not in the jungle. It was up north a ways, not far from the DMZ , and 160 mm rockets thumped (when far away) and crashed (when close) their way across the base pretty much every night. "Oh, Rocket City," was what people said when I told them where I'd been assigned. Still, by some measures, you could call it cushy. And that's my point. War, even at its edges, ravages people. The threat of random rockets dropping through the roof of your barracks can lead to "I can't take it any more." Think of the guys on patrol in Iraq and what their job does to them. A twenty-two year old Marine from my community -- he went to school in the district for wh