Passing Through A Gate

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.) One day, as the 1968 Tet fighting continued in and around Can Tha, and the city was still under siege, Hintze and Seraile-the three of us with the International Voluntary Services-tried to drop off some food for our office manager, Pham V n Chánh, now holed up in a garage with some of his friends and afraid to leave in the mayhem of shooting which continued as ARVN troops, huddled behind an APC, were still firing into the nearby movie theatre while Vietnamese Skyraiders strafed the university buildings behind our abandoned house a half-mile away. [...]with the bombing of the university where I taught, I was finished with the International Voluntary Services. For my first few months back in the U.S., I lived with Dr. Needleman and his young family while I got my shrapnel wound treated at Temple University Hospital where Needleman was on the psychiatric staff and where a COR doctor over in Surgery discovered that, besides my shrapnel wound, I had tubercular scarring on my lungs and amoebic dysentery in my gut. In the fall of 1969, after I got better, and after the Selective Service okayed my working for COR, I went back to Saigon to look after severely wounded children slated for treatment at teaching hospitals in the U.S. My job now was to visit Vietnamese province hospitals, obtain referrals from Vietnamese or American doctors, talk to each child's parents for their approval, and then submit details of each case to a South Vietnamese Ministry of Health "medical examining commission" establishing that any child we were proposing for U.S. medical evacuation could not be treated adequately in Vietnam.