an American doctor in the Vietnamese Health Service, 1966-1967
In 1965, drafted into the Army to serve in Vietnam, Lawrence Climo, a young physician just out of training, learned of a unique humanitarian mission with counter-insurgency objectives that was looking for doctors: Military Provincial Hospital Augmentation Program (MILPHAP). Because it seemed an honorable as well as a doable enterprise he volunteered and began keeping a journal. At the time he appreciated the varied interactions with people of different relitious, social, radical, and ethnic cultures. But then he encountered a culture shock that proved toxic and threatened to corrupt everything.
