Book Review : History/Vietnam/Memoir
Failure to Atone: The True Story of a Jungle Surgeon in Vietnam
Allen Hassan, as told To David Drum
Two years out of medical school, a doctor from a small town in Iowa volunteers for an American Medical Association program to help the war-damaged civilians of Vietnam. Even for former Marine Sergeant Dr. Allen Hassan, the experience of trying to give civilians good medical care in the middle of a ferocious war is a difficult, life-changing experience. In a poorly equipped jungle hospital, Dr. Hassan finds himself the only medical doctor in town for hundreds of people wounded during the height of the Vietnam War. The atrocities and brutality he saw and experienced left the former US Marine forever opposed to the horror and tragedy of war. As a doctor treating the civilians of South Vietnam, Dr. Hassan battled tropical diseases, primitive sanitary conditions, and all varieties of war wounds from an endless stream of patients wounded by the war. Performing emergency surgeries deep into the night, in unspeakably primitive conditions in a hospital near the demilitarized zone near North Vietnam, he worked night and day as the only doctor in a hospital in the jungle to save lives, only to see many slip away. Failure to Atone is Dr. Allen Hassan's stirring memoir of his two humanitarian tours of Vietnam. It tells the story of those trying war years for the first time, and brings to light the horror, the heroism, and the continuing atrocities of war. The book also recounts testimony of nearly two dozen other volunteer doctors who served in Vietnam, and lists the names and hometowns of all 774 Volunteer Physicians for Vietnam. Failure to Atone is Dr. Hassan's graphic memoir of the trials and tribulations of a medical doctor on the front lines of a no-holds- barred war, and of a courageous people's battle to survive.
Buy This Book
Failure to Atone Press, Los Angeles, CA; www.failuretoatone.com; 265 page hardcover (October 2006) ISBN: 097760490X
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