[.ca] Phan Rang Chronicles: A British Surgeon in Vietnam, ... (ISBN 1430320079)

An extraordinary document:
Dr. Hamilton's powerful and utterly fascinating account of his experience as a surgeon in Phan Rang should be read by anybody who is interested in the Vietnam War. His daily chronicle covers the main period of the war's escalation of military force on all sides--American, NLF, and NVA-allowing readers to experience a vivid sense of the tragic momentum with which the war drove itself toward the Tet Offensive of late January and February 1968. Dr. Hamilton gives unique and (as we can now appreciate in the hindsight of over forty years) astonishingly clear-sighted perspectives on the tactical conduct of the war on all sides, the complicated ideological motivations of the overall American mission in Vietnam, and the terrible effects of the war on the lives of those hundreds of Vietnamese subjects-peasants, teachers, doctors, soldiers, maids, children-with whom he came into contact, often quite intimately, over the course of almost two years' service as a volunteer physician. Indeed nowhere is it truer than in this chronicle that "a hospital alone shows what war is" (Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front). Phan Rang Chronicles also offers a detailed and very human picture of daily life in Phan Rang, including descriptions of the land and weather; the working conditions of a provincial hospital; the living arrangements of the medical personnel and their sometimes quasi-comical attempts to improve them; their diet and recreational activities; their movements along the roads, into towns and villages, into the countryside, or onto the grounds of the American Air Force base at Phan Rang. I have encountered no other account as rich or concentrated in its rendering of the personal, social, and historical materiality of daily existence in the Vietnam War. The immense value of this account, finally, lies in Dr. Hamilton's clarity of vision (one inflected by a classic sense of British wit and reserve), indeed in his fierce and eloquently realized commitment to describing what he saw with his own eyes, what he thought, and what he did on a daily basis over the course of some twenty months of the Vietnam War. - Professor Michael Zeitlin (U of British Columbia), co-editor of Soldier Talk: The Vietnam War in Oral Narrative (Indiana UP, 2004)