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Book
Excerpts - Page 4
Almost
40 million encounters between American military physicians and
Vietnamese civilians occurred from 1963 to 1971 in the Medical
Civic Action Program (MEDCAP) alone during the Vietnam conflict.²
In 1963, almost seven hundred thousand civilians were treated,
and this number increased four-fold the next year, reaching
a peak of more than 10 million in 1967. Thereafter, as U.S.
troops departed, the number of civilians treated rapidly declined.
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From
June 1964 through December 1968, there were 69,590 civilians
admitted as inpatients to U.S. Army hospitals in South
Vietnam, for total bed occupancy of 246,010 days. In addition,
786,472 civilians were treated as outpatients.³ Aside
from questions about motivation for the programs
and policy considerations, the sheer volume of
this experience, with its associated expense, risks to
personnel, and expenditures in time, warrants examination.
There is no previous comprehensive study of the various
programs that provided medical care to Vietnamese civilians
during the war. This book will examine the motivations
for these programs as well as their implementations.
It will also try to determine whether the programs were
successful in achieving their goals. To do that, it
is necessary to define what these goals were. Was the
major aim the provision of medical care, or was it,
alternatively, the use of the programs to advance the
war aims of the administration-that is, the use of medical
care as an instrument of policy? In either case, did
the programs provide good medical... Go Back
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Copyright © 2006 Robert J. Wilensky MD, Ph.D.
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