4TH OF JULY PARADE

1995 Alpena, Michigan

No stirring music announces the approach. No Seventy-Six Trombones, nor Stars and Stripes Forever that used to thrill my children and me as the bands and flags passed by years ago.

Only a slowly moving police car sounding its siren periodically, followed by a car towing an oversized rigid American flag on a trailer. Silent.

Then a dozen men in battle helmets and camouflage. Desert Storm, I think at first, but no. As they come nearer, there is no parade formation, no marching step; no banner or label. Gray-painted faces, blank expressions, large automatic weapons held loosely, some with infra-red scanners attached, one man festooned with machine gun belts. They walk along slowly, seeming uncertain, surrounded by a crowd like this. As one young soldier half turns toward a cluster of small boys, his automatic weapon inadvertently points into their midst. A nearby soldier growls a command, and he sheepishly raises the muzzle to point skyward and moves along. Silently.

Now World War II veterans are passing by with their battle flags, and the crowd applauds the elderly men and women who fought fifty years ago. But I gaze thoughtfully after the silent, camouflaged men. I am a stranger here, and I wonder what I am getting into . . . . try to recall which Michigan town has the militia. Are these gray-faced men defenders of America, or of some private political credo? I don't know whom to ask. Keep silent. Watch the parade.

Children scramble into the street for the candies tossed from almost every vehicle. Here is the parade marshal in a car far back in the line; there comes a beauty queen, young and serene on her float. Pre-teens in motor-powered go-karts spurt back and forth with a roar, looking back over their shoulders at friends in the crowd, oblivious to the children scurrying for candies. Only one woman restrains her grandchild until they pass.

And here, can it be – yes – finally a real live marching band! Raising their trombones and trumpets to the sun, the lone drummer rapping out a catchy marching rhythm in counter-point to the music. Then they, too, are gone – the only real band to march in the entire hour-long procession. We are back to fire engines, trucks advertising local businesses, boat safety organizations, children's bicycle groups, all of them throwing candy. Finally, two police cars end the procession, followed by campers and RV's reclaiming the highway, and the crowd breaks up.

Old folks with their folding chairs, young families with baby strollers swirl around me as I stand people-watching on this fine summer day. What sense of heritage would my own children get from this parade if they had been here? What would I tell them about what it takes to make a nation? A partial answer, at least, came from an unexpected direction. For there was a second parade soon afterward, at the edge of town. The Vietnam veterans held their own procession, perhaps still searching for an identity from an ambiguous era. Maybe reminding us of a task done for small thanks. Or expressing bitter grief for companions who did not return.

Not many spectators stay, only one or two deep along a couple of blocks on a cross-street. Some of them attracted by the “Traveling Wall” replica of the Vietnam monument in Washington, featured this week at the town's museum near by. A bearded man near me in the small crowd wears the legend “Vietnam Veteran” on his cap, and under those words a row of campaign ribbons.

The parade is not long. Police car and rigid flag-on-a-trailer again. Then massed flags, borne by a truckload of disabled veterans whom I feel moved to salute.

Then a platoon of middle-aged men and women marching to a traditional cadence chant. The tenor voice of a sergeant sings a phrase, the response from the ranks full- throated and firm:

Sound off! ONE, TWO!

Sound off! THREE, FOUR!

Bring it down! ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR, ONE TWO - THREE-FOUR!

If I die in Vee-et nam . . . . IF I DIE IN VEE-ET NAM!

Mail my body home to Mom . . . . MAIL MY BODY HOME TO MOM!

Pin my medals to my chest . . . . PIN MY MEDALS TO MY CHEST!

Tell my girl I did my best . . . . . TELL MY GIRL I DID MY BEST!

The sound gradually fades as they march on: Sound off! One-Two! Sound off! Three-four!

Bring-it-on-down-now! One-two-three-four one-two – three-four! . . .left. . . left. . . left . . .left . . .

A woman breaks ranks and runs up to the man in the veterans cap, standing next to me. “Pete, they want you to march with them!”

He shakes his head. “No . . . I don't want to . . .”

I want to ask him about it; want to get his story. But something in the mixture of emotions on his face tells me this is a private moment.

Ila's Faith

What I remembered most about ninety-year-old Ila Mae Wild at her funeral today was her faith one week in 1995, when her then-20-year-old grandson, Marine Lance Corporal Zach Mayo, was reported missing from the aircraft carrier America in the Arabian Sea at night.

On a Saturday afternoon, marine officers visited his parents' Idaho home to report that after an unsuccessful search by four helicopters and two escort ships, Zach was missing at sea and presumed dead.

It was grandmother Ila who quietly but firmly maintained that Zach was not dead, and she prayed for his safety during the next four days. Even after a return visit from the marine officers on Tuesday brought no news except to confirm Zach was lost at sea, Ila still said Zach would be OK.

On Wednesday Zack's father's phone rang at 4 a.m. (in western USA) It was the American embassy in Pakistan, who put Zack on the line to tell his father of his rescue by a Pakistani fishing boat after 36 hours of treading water.

The national newspapers the following day were full of his story. According to the Chicago Tribune, Zach, an airplane maintenance expert, had gone out on deck to get some night air, and an opening door had brushed him into the sea. He followed marine training and tread water while fashioning make-shift life preservers by trapping air in his shed pants and shirt. The fishing boat found him a day and a half later and took him to the small seaport of Gwadar in Pakistan. It took a while to find an official who spoke enough English to connect him with the American embassy.

I talked with Zach today, now a 40-year-old civilian, at the reception after his grandmother Ila's funeral. Asked him how he had felt after treading water that long. “Very tired” was his sober response, “I was unconscious when they lifted me into the boat.”

The miracle was not only his endurance, but that anyone happened to spot him at all in the vast Arabian Sea. I have witnessed faith many times in my medical practice, but have never seen faith to match Ila's assurance that, with God's help, her grandson was safe.

Getting Back Online

Dahlbergbooks.com has been on the Internet for about sixteen years, ever since Judson Press published the first edition of my father's biography. At the time, I had just published my first novel, Flame Tree, which required a lot of research on Burma in addition to my own experiences during five years there. Burma (now Myanmar – two syllables, silent ' r ') is changing. The military government has mellowed somewhat but still maintains tight control. Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi is no longer under house arrest, and is an active member of Parliament.

My original URL was hosted by an outfit that no longer functions. Its successor still carries the site, bills me every year, but rarely answers phone calls or emails, and seems unable to update content. I can access each page, and connect with updates of existing links and my blog (a different website), but I can't enter anything about my two more recent novels or the book to come.

The local techie at the computer shop assures me my physical house network is connected right, and a friend with more cyber-expertise than I is building a new URL for me that actually works, and allows reader input.

Meanwhile my new collection of people who successfully accomplish their goal is starting to come together. Some interviews need updating, and in a couple of instances, I must be careful not to encroach on books they are working on. But it's fun to be back at work.

Injured Elephant Driver

At the age of 64, I volunteered to work at a Thailand hospital for nine months, while its only doctor, Phil McDaniel, was in America. I closed my office in Idaho and semi-retired. For the next eleven years I would work whenever I chose, as a locum tenens or “rent-a-doc”, filling in for doctors who were on leave for one reason or another.

Kwai River Christian Hospital has 30-beds, complete with lab, X-ray, and operating and delivery rooms, and some very competent Thai nurse-midwives. It's in a rural setting much like other Asian hospitals I have worked in. I am not a fully trained general surgeon, but have had a couple of years residency, plus forty years experience. At KRCH, it would soon be tested.

Many Thai sawmills still employ elephants to move the logs. The driver sits astride the animal's sturdy neck, steering it by jiggling his bare feet behind its ears. One night, after I had been at KRCH a month, a sawmill's pickup truck brought in a 25-year-old Karen man who had fallen off his elephant, striking his left lower ribs on a log. He had severe left-sided bellyache.

The situation is the same as a car accident in USA: any ER doc knows that left-sided rib fractures can signal a tear in the spleen, a delicate, fist-sized organ serving as a filter for the body's blood supply. The treatment is emergency surgery to remove the torn spleen and stop the internal hemorrhage. Trouble is, I had never done that operation, and had only seen it done once.

In such emergencies, I have found it useful to quietly pray as I work, and this seemed like a good time to do so. “Please, God, don't let this be a ruptured spleen! I've never done that operation, and there is no anesthetist; if I operate, he'll die on the table!” As I took his blood pressure again, the next unwelcome words came to mind unbidden:

He'll die if you don't.

That made me realize that I was stalling for time, and I gave the orders to call out the team. (No phones, but the night watchman knew which houses to go to.) A lab tech to get blood ready, three extra nurses, one to scrub and assist, and one to circulate, and one to monitor the man's vital signs after I injected a spinal anesthetic, and during surgery. The sawmill boss had brought the man and his family in; and he agreed to round up blood donors – no easy job in Asia. A nurse aide translated my Thai into Karen language, explained to the man what we had to do and had him sign the permit. She asked him if he had any medical allergies (Hkui hpae yaa rui plaaw?) He said no.

I operated, with a surgical textbook on a music stand nearby, opened to Removal of the spleen. Opening the man's abdomen, I found a belly full of blood and a torn spleen, still bleeding. I carefully clamped its blood vessels and removed it, avoiding damage to the nearby stomach and pancreas, conscious of God's help in remembering the steps I had once learned. (Readers wanting the details of the drama can find them in my novel Flame Tree, chapter 8. . . . fiction is often based on fact.)

The operation was successful, and a week later, after 3 pints of blood, the man went home. When they left, his wife had her small son place palms together, the Thai way of saying thank you. He had his daddy back.

So why am I adding this chapter to a book about pure chance versus the presence of God?

I do it to add my testimony that I believe that God exists, cares about us humans, and offers help when we ask and are willing to listen. In my experience, that seems far more likely than a mythical lady luck, or blind chance, or what-have-you. If that is true, we ignore him at our peril. Granted we have freedom of choice, our insisting on choosing our own path is arguably the cause of much of our ills, and those of the world's.

One postscript: On a coffee break last week, I chanced to get to know an acquaintance better. As often happens to a retired doctor, he turned the conversation to a recent health episode of his own. He has been diabetic for years, taking a modest dose if daily insulin. He described a recent personal “aha moment”, when he discovered that his bed-time blood sugar tested 380 for no apparent reason. He was debating how much insulin to take, when he received an unbidden thought: Sit on it. Puzzled, he continued to prepare his shot. Again came the emphatic thought, Sit   on   it. Not knowing why his sugar was that high in the first place, he interpreted the thought to mean Wait. He laid the insulin aside and went to sleep. When he tested his blood sugar again next morning, he found it to be 40, very low. Neither of us could discover any reason why it was so low, but if he had taken the night dose of insulin, his morning blood sugar level might well have been even lower, low enough to produce coma (a.k.a. “insulin shock.) Potentially fatal.

The question arises, how do we tell the difference between a presumed message of God's Spirit, or some other source? The first thought that comes to my mind is, prayer and practice.

Mass Response to Genocide: Part 3

Everywhere there were volunteers who came in from Bangkok on a day-to-day basis. The American Embassy sent a daily bus; others came by car. Some volunteers took over the job of keeping the diarrhea patients clean (There were new clothes and blankets now); Some spoon-fed the weak. Others ran errands, or helped discharged patients get settled out in the camp, or passed out food. One afternoon I found each patient holding a hard-boiled egg (which not all stomachs were up to handling); another day each had an orange or a loaf of French bread. One elderly European man, with whom I could speak only in Thai, stayed in the tent next to ours all night watching over an especially sick Khmer whom he had sort of adopted.

A few came only to sight-see. The French ward got a group who wanted to feed patients lunch. The doctor explained that they had already had their lunch but some were badly in need of a bath. The visitors said they didn't come to do that kind of work, they just wanted to feed people. We had a couple of Thai student volunteers who mostly just drank our pop. But another Thai girl student stayed with an old lady who was too listless to eat, and kept gently spooning gruel into her. “She's not going to die is she?” the girl kept asking me nervously, “I don't want to see anyone die!” But three or four days later when another patient died, it was the student who rounded up stretcher bearers and escorted the body over to the morgue tent, where a group of Buddhist monks took care of burials. The Khmer refugees themselves had teams of girls (Khmer army medics, we were told) who helped bathe and feed people. Like the volunteers from Bangkok, some were very good, and others not very useful.

As time went on, CAMA sought other temporary help. A Brazilian doctor and his nurse wife arrived, a couple of doctors from USA, and a young Khmer girl now living in New Zealand (who was at first terrified that the Khmer Rouge would murder her.) We now had at least two doctors in tent number 8, and sometimes three. We still received about ten new patients per day, but many others were getting well enough for discharge out into the camp, so our patients no longer had to lie shoulder-to-shoulder.

Cameras and reporters were everywhere. As I worked with an unconscious kid a man with a microphone squatted down beside me and asked me to describe the case. I'm told I was on Voice of America that night. Another night I was on NBC-TV all over both America and Europe as a “malnutrition expert”. I tried to send them to the camp's nutrition doc, but it turned out I was the only doctor in camp that day who had been in Asia a while and who had an American accent. Probably my audience in the next 24 hours totaled around one hundred million. I remember struggling to explain how starvation of the degree seen after six months in the jungle was like being isolated in a blizzard. When the firewood was used up, you will burn the furniture to keep life alive, and finally you burn the house walls themselves. And I remember that my main concern was to keep the TV cameras from showing the folks back home how swollen my own legs had become after a week of twelve to fourteen hour shifts.

Not everyone realizes that Lois was also on TV, her back to the camera as President Carter's wife, Rosalyn, walked through our tent and talked with her briefly. Lois' most memorable utterance was about the horde of reporters, who kept shouting “Get down! Get down” at her while they tried to get the First Lady's picture. Lois finally said, “If they just moved back a little, they wouldn't be standing in the patient's latrine ditch.” And a Secret Service man in the group grinned to Lois, “Say it louder. We're being recorded.”

That second week,we were still dog-tired but felt we could probably make it till more help arrived. Lois and I, with another nurse and Tann, our interpreter, even took our turn at night duty – fourteen hours watching over the whole hospital. There's not much you can do for a thousand unfamiliar patients. Most of the ward aides were sound asleep. We toured all the wards every three hours, restarting a few IV's, carried out a couple of dead bodies (whose beds were shared with other patients) cleaned up one teen-age boy covered with bloody diarrhea from the waist down, watched over a couple of women in labor. Took a 2 am break to visit with the Israeli doctor in the emergency tent – the only other doctor permitted to stay through curfew. He and I watched a Thai construction crew digging a deep-water well and erecting tall poles to light the area. I looked up at the poles and said meditatively “Haman built a gallows, fifty cubits high . . .”  The startled Israeli looked at me; “How did you know what I was thinking? Where did you hear that story?”

“Hey, the story of Queen Esther is in the Christian scriptures too.”

We left ward 8 in the hands of a Dutch lady, Eva Hartog, a TV personality who brought a team of eight Dutch nurses to work with the three American doctors who would inherit our tent. A letter from our Brazilian doctor friend several weeks later said the whole hospital is now in more permanent buildings, and there had been a day when there had not been even one death in the whole hospital. New waves of refugees were coming in then, some with war wounds on top of their starvation and diseases. Sa Kaew now had a small surgical unit, he wrote.

The day we left, several cases of epidemic meningitis (meningococcemia) threatened the camp, but I guess it did not develop. Most of the patients were visiting back and forth. Kids were playing games, or standing in line for milk, wearing their tin bowls on their heads as helmets. The girl on the TV spot who couldn't walk squealed in pretend terror and ran, when her sister told her I was coming to give her a shot. It's good to know we made a difference, but I don't mind admitting that all of us were glad to get away and rest.

A week or two later, my colleague at Maesariang, Dr. Bina Sawyer and two more nurses went down to another refugee camp. Even being the only doctor there, in her absence, seemed leisurely in contrast to Sa Kaew.

But once in a while I still reflect on how much difference a single piece of mail can make when it carries the right offer.

Mass Response to Genocide part 2

The dead bodies were still there or, more probably, new ones. What struck us most about the hospital was the lack of conversational background noise. Just coughing, in a constant undercurrent.

Our new tent, Ward 8 (someone later altered the numeral to depict a snowman-like figure gripping his belly) was ninety feet long and twenty feet wide, open sided, with 150 sick human beings, everyone crowded in at random, lying on bamboo mats on the ground. About fifteen more outside the far end of the tent were under lean-tos of plastic and sticks. Some had tags noting treatment given at the Thai border; others had letters inked on their arms standing for medicines they had received; Q for quinine, F for fansidar (another anti-malaria drug). We had no idea what some of the other letters meant. We had no translator the first couple of days, and the patients spoke only Khmer.

If any of them had education, they weren't about to let the Khmer Rouge soldiers among them know about it. It is said that Pol Pot's government summarily shot anyone wearing eyeglasses. The Khmer Rouge's brave new world had no use for any schooling other than their own indoctrination. Those first few days, no refugee wanted to call attention to himself by being the first to do anything.

Lois and I, with a clipboard and basket of medicines, started on the nearest patient. We marked a number 1 on her arm, listened to her chest, felt her abdomen. Started her on

anti -malaria treatment, B-complex for beri-beri, and iron for anemia, made a note on the clip-board, and moved on.

Patient number 4 had diarrhea. There were no bedpans. Those patients who were strong enough crawled to the 8-inch-deep latrine ditch at the edge of the tent. Weaker ones lay where they were. There were no clean clothes to change into; that first day there wasn't even a rag to wash them with. We found some old newspapers to put under her, gave her paregoric and an antibiotic, started a bottle of intravenous fluid, hanging the bottle from the tent frame on a bent piece of wire.

We moved slowly on down the tent. Some had massive swelling of their legs and bellies from protein deficiency; many were burning with fever. Many were pale from severe anemia, or too weak to stand, from lack of vitamin B. Both the Khmer (Cambodian) and Vietnamese armies, seeking to win their war at any cost, destroyed each others farm crops. Many of these people had had nothing to eat for months, except leaves from the trees in their forest refuge; no protection from malarial mosqitoes and other jungle fevers. Several had deep ulcers, bed sores from lying for days in one position out in the jungle. Many children lay listlessly, or having a futile try at their mother's dried up breasts. Children and some adults had arms and legs not much bigger around than my thumb.

      I felt a dull, bitter anger inside me toward leaders who make war and make other people pay the price. But mostly there was only time for squatting down again to listen to another chest, feel another abdomen, start another IV bottle. My muscles ached with the constant bending, kneeling, and stooping. We drank quarts to replace the sweat. On later days we ate all the lunch that Winnie and Aree packed for us, but that first day the scene was all too new for us, we weren't hungry. Somewhere in that day, an American Embassy doctor pitched in and helped; but by sunset, when it was time to go, we still hadn't seen everybody.

      Bob Jono and I had to stay after dark to attend the nightly staff meeting, where the day's problems were ironed out. When I learned that each group had to provide a doctor and nurse every five days to cover the whole 1,200-bed hospital from 6 pm to 8 am, I thought I'm finally getting too old to take it anymore! We got back to town about 7:30, ate supper and fell into bed.

But as we weathered he first few days, things got better. We got a small tent to keep our medicines and eat our lunch. We built up our stock of medicines, and what we didn't have we knew where we could trade. Bob found us a refugee who spoke fluent Thai and a little English, and we could finally communicate with our patients instead of practicing veterinary medicine. Weena mass-produced a gruel of milk and protein food made by Thailand's Kasetsart University and passed it around, a cupful to each patient twice a day, to supplement the food from the camp kitchen. We got so we could finish morning rounds by 3 pm, and one afternoon we cleaned out the dirtiest mats and had the patients lie in three rows, with space to walk between. We discharged enough healed patients into the larger camp (now numbering 35,000), bringing our tent's count down to 100, and moved all the outside patients in under the tent. We shared medicines and nurses with tent 9 next door, where a couple of American doctors on loan from some research group were getting acquainted with clinical medicine.

      And the tent grew noisier. People had enough strength to talk now, and sometimes even smile. One little girl with diarrhea and pneumonia and no family to look after her, whom we left each night not expecting her to survive till morning, sat up one day and began shouting something. Tann, our translator, grinned and explained, “She' s saying she doesn't want that old soup, she wants a fish!” We not only found her that, but a banana too.

Excitement broke out at the far end of the tent one afternoon. A girl who had been separated from her family a year ago suddenly spotted her father and sister walking by outside.

      There were discouraging things too. People who couldn't be persuaded to eat, the comatose who sank lower and lower and quietly died a few days after reaching camp. (Miserable as the camp was at first, it was a big step up from starving unattended in the hills.) Our ward averaged about one death a day now, as did other wards. The record for the whole hospital and camp was 42 deaths in a single day.

      We got to know many of our patients after a fashion. (Asking their personal history was taboo; there were still Khmer Rouge agents among them.) There was the mother who hated shots more than her three kids did. The one-legged man on crutches who led his blind friend with a stick. The young man with TB. The comatose girl with cerebral malaria who developed a bed sore overnight when there was no one to turn her. The old man with gradually healing leg sores.

In our second week there, an Israeli team arrived to take over the tent next door from the departing American researchers. Wearing green scrubs emblazoned with a red star of David, they soon developed a receiving ward and accepted all new hospital patients around the clock for emergency treatment before distribution to other wards. The Israelis were a friendly bunch, but we were embarrassed to have only ham sandwiches to share the day they arrived.

      The hospital as a whole, now down to 1,000 patients was under the joint direction of the International and Thai Red Cross, but we other groups operated under them almost independently: the French “Medicin Sans Frontiers”, World Vision, C&MA (us), and the Israelis. A group of Catholic sisters took care of about 400 orphans; a German doctor had a special nutrition unit, and a lab technician from somewhere opened up a blood bank. He drew blood from the many visitors to the camp and split each unit into two two half pints. (When your hemoglobin is down to 2 grams, even half a unit of blood can double it. The French unit delivered two or three babies a day. Even at full term, they mostly weighed only 3 or 4 pounds.
     to be continued . . .

Mass Response to Genocide

Fall harvest time was never very busy at Maesariang Hospital in northwestern Thailand. Patients don't want to leave their fields unless they are practically dying. Seeing some of the refugee horror stories in the Bangkok newspapers, and having time on our hands, we wrote a letter to the mission refugee committee, offering some time if they needed us. A telegram from committee member Pat Coats asked for as many as possible to come right away to work at the Cambodian border, 500 miles to the southeast.

Half the hospital wanted to go, but of course our hospital in Maesariang had to be kept running too. Five of us finally went, Rosa, a Puerto Rican nurse; Mala, a Karen nurse; Weena, a Karen aide; and my wife, Lois and myself. We got the telegram October 25 and were on our way next morning, taking the bus to Chiangmai, and the overnight train to Bangkok.

We would be on loan to CAMA services, Inc., the service arm of the Christian and Missionary Alliance mission, which has long worked in Cambodia. We drove over to their offices to meet our co-workers and learned that the Thai military had just opened a large refugee center at Sa Kaew. The International Red Cross had set up a hospital there with several hastily gathered medical teams. CAMA had a permanent medical team forming in the Netherlands, but it would not arrive for two weeks.

Some of their workers had helped in the search for refugee groups along the border near the Thai border town of Aranyaprathet,and reported thousands scattered here and there in the bush, many dying or too weak to walk. They were being moved back away from the border to cut the risk of hot pursuit into Thai territory by the advancing Vietnamese army tanks. These refugees were mostly people pressed into service by the Khmer Rouge, whose army remnants were backed up against the Cambodian forest border with Thailand. 

 

It's a three-hour drive by mini-bus from Bangkok to Sa Kaew; good highway through farm country, where the pervasive vinegar-like smell of the drying tapioca crop permeated the air. Our guide said we might as well stop at the camp before going on to our living quarters in Sa Kaew town, ten miles further on, so we pulled off on a dirt side-road, where armed guards checked all traffic, and handed out passes for those authorized to enter the camp.

Our first impression was of barbed wire and mud. The camp was only in its fourth day of operation, bulldozed out of swampy rice fields, sheltering about 30,000 black-clad people behind a fence. We had to step from grass hummock to tree root to get around. At one point, Lois had to reach elbow-deep into the mud to retrieve a shoe.

The hospital area was on slightly higher ground but otherwise chaotic. We were introduced to someone who said, “Fine, go to work in that tent over there.” We had been up since 5 am, some of the girls needed a toilet, and we hadn't even seen where we were supposed to lodge. But the word was “Work a little now, so you'll know the problems by tomorrow.”

I entered the indicated tent, where a harried-looking doctor was carrying a large cardboard box. Motionless patients lay every whichway on bamboo mats on the mud floor. We had to duck to avoid the bamboo cross-pieces in the tent frame. His box contained a jumble of paper cups of pills, syringes, bottles of liquids, bags of intravenous fluids, six-by-eight inch cards and so forth. The first thing that happened was the bottom dropped out of the box and everything slid among the patients. I went to find another box, finally dumping some bottles out of a carton I found in a supply tent. A patient needed a shot. I borrowed one from the more organized tent next door. The doctor himself had only started work that morning. Two Red Cross doctors had already quit after working only two days. He looked at another patient. “The A on his arm means he's been given ampicillin. We'll give him another shot of it now.”

“That's an every-six-hour drug,” I said, “Who gives it at night when we're gone?”

“Nobody.”

Most of my three-hour stint that afternoon was spent looking for things. The doctors in the far tent spoke French. The British lady presiding over a card table full of medicines in Tent No. 1 was having enough trouble supplying her own patients, so I hunted among the unattended supply tents. I began to get dizzy every time I stood up. The heat was oppressve, and I was wet with sweat. The other members of our team were presumably off with other doctors. Several dead bodies, rolled up in the mats on which they'd lain, were in a row between the tents. No one paid them much attention. It began to rain lightly.

At dusk, our guide found us and told us to round up and move on. I found Lois way over in the orphans' tents, following a doctor with no more idea than I where to find the medicines he was ordering. Then the word word went through the hospital, “They're unloading another convoy. Come and help!”

Out on the road we stood in back of several large Thai army trucks, helping down emaciated people who couldn't have weighed more than sixty pounds apiece. Most needed help to walk, and held on to small bundles or cooking pots. Several husky young volunteers scrambled up into the truck to hand down a half dozen people who made no effort to move. Some felt very hot to the touch. I found myself trying to hoist the mid-section of a rather large unconscious man onto a piece of cardboard. Four of us struggled through the mud to the fence and pushed apart two strands of barbed wire to hand him through to volunteers inside.

We were all bone-tired on the 10-mile ride into town. I admired the two Red Cross doctors who had managed to last two whole days. We got Chinese food at a restauurant, and finally arrived at the house rented for us by CAMA. A lady introduced herself as Winnie, and said there was plenty of bath water and clean beds ready, dormitory style. It was Winnie, and later her husband and Aree the cook, who made life possible during those next two weeks. Other teams told us later about their grungy hotel rooms and worse food, and coming home too tired to fix any dinner, but after our second day we always had a hot meal waiting.

Up next morning at sunrise. Our team leader, Bob Jono, told us we would have our own newly established tent to work in today. Remembering the disorganization of the day before, we stopped in town to buy a couple of folding card tables, plastic baskets, cups and tea kettles to carry water in, and five-gallon cans to carry it from the camp's water tanks.

We looked like we were on safari, moving through the hospital gate. On subsequent days we also carried cases of pop and big containers of crushed ice to combat the heat exhaustion we had felt the first day.

To Be Continued