Medicine: Health Commandos

When slim Filipino Nurse Pet Duruin arrived in Viet Nam, the first Vietnamese words she learned were: "Mot ngay ba vien," meaning "one tablet three times a day." Nurse Duruin repeated this phrase as often as 200 times a day as she passed out quinine and sulfa pills from her own thin, bronzed hand to the equally bronzed but thinner hands of the wretched refugees streaming in from the Communist north. For this was October 1954, following the invasion debacle that ended with the surrender of Dienbienphu to the Reds.

As the flood of refugees reached its crest, and southern Viet Nam doctors were hopelessly swamped, the Vietnamese Junior Chamber of Commerce appealed to its corresponding chapters in other lands for medical help. First to arrive were six doctors and three nurses from the Philippines, financed by contributions from schoolchildren. As "Operation Brotherhood" got rolling, in came three French nurses, four Japanese, 19 Nationalist Chinese, three Thais, five Malayans, two U.S. secretaries, and some 200 Filipino doctors, nurses, dentists, nutritionists, social workers. Aged 18 to 60,they manned 14 medical centers, traveled through the Mekong delta by canoe and sampan, by army truck over the rugged roads of the Annam border country.

Something for Everybody. They made friends with the tough Cao Dai warlords and worked for several months in Red-held areas, where the commonest complaint was a bullet in the belly. Occasionally they met half-naked hill tribesmen armed with bow and arrow. They worked in Saigon's shantytowns among prostitutes and opium smokers, went among the leprosy patients at Phu Quoc, where doctors and nurses had no modern medicines.

But for the most part, Operation Brotherhood concentrated on the estimated million refugees, many of whom arrived with mutilated limbs and filthy, blood-caked wounds. Some reached the aid stations by sampan, some by oxcart; others were carried on relatives' shoulders or in a hammock slung from a bamboo pole. Accustomed to no more sophisticated medical treatments than massage, bamboo cupping or tiger balm, they were reluctant to wash the dirt off a wound. Some had shaved their heads, refused to bathe, or relied on other traditional "remedies." But all wanted the reputedly powerful medicines from the West. Said a Thai nurse: "When you start a distribution of medicine, everybody must get something or they feel offended."

Next: Laos. Brotherhood doctors performed 5,023 major operations (including countless Caesareans) with a death rate of only 2.4% despite the primitive operating conditions and the shortage of plasma. With the nurses, they gave 721,370 medical treatments. Besides antimalarial and anti-TB drugs, they passed out truckloads of sulfas, and B 1 pills to guard against beriberi. They fought the threat of smallpox, typhoid and cholera epidemics. After the new arrivals' wounds were dressed, the most pressing problems remaining were the results of poor food and worse housing—or the lack of any. Said Brotherhood Chairman Oscar Alrenano, a Manila architect: "The Mekong can flow with penicillin, but it won't solve the problem until these people get more meat at lunch, and tiles instead of straw over their heads."