I had arrived early for my in-processing session at the Army Finance office in Phu Bai, Vietnam, and while waiting I got myself comfortably seated against a building with my legs extended. There was a loud explosion and everyone started running away from the explosion. I thought it might have been a mortar attack and stayed seated since there were no bunkers to run to. While seated, a street-type metal bar with double lights dislodged from a nearby pole during the explosion and fell across my knees. In extreme knee pain, I tried to get up and could not. A soldier running away noticed my plight and ran over to help me up. When I got to the nearby field hospital, an army nurse had x-rays taken and informed me that I had not broken any bones, but my knee was severely swollen. That began a lifelong struggle causing me pain to this day and a total knee replacement in one knee.
A few months after moving to the Austin area sometime in 2007 I was still having problems with my knees from the old Vietnam injury. The VA had started me on steroid injections, but that was just not working for me anymore. I was then switched to Synvisc1 injections which would work for only a couple of weeks. Not trusting the VA orthopedic clinic, I found an orthopedic in the Austin area St David's Hospital system. The orthopedic sent me for x-rays.
The lady who was taking my x-rays turned out to be a talkative middle age Vietnamese lady. As she was setting up the equipment, she asked me how I had injured my knee. I told her about my injury in Vietnam back in 1970.
“Oh, I am Vietnamese,” she said then added, “I came here for school when the communists took over.”
I didn’t want the conversation, but she would not stop. She asked me what I did over there. I replied that I had spent a tour as advisor to the Vietnamese Army.
"Oh," she said. "My older brother was in the Vietnamese army. He was killed by the VC2 when he was riding in the back of his army truck."
"I'm sorry," I said. She would not stop.
After a long pause with me saying nothing in the hope she would just stop, she continued.
“My brother went in and out of the Army several times. When he got tired of the army, he would just come back home. When he got tired of being home, he would change his name and join the army again.”3
I continued to have no interest in her story and didn’t want to mention that he was a part- time soldier/part-time deserter. She continued.
“He was riding in the back of the truck with three of his friends. They were smarter than he was. They knew there was a VC ambush ahead of them. The truck stopped, his three friends jumped out of the truck and asked my brother to jump out, too. He didn’t believe them about the ambush. They yelled at him again to jump out. He did not. Just a few minutes down the road, the VC ambushed all the trucks. My brother was killed. His friends could hear the explosion and guns firing for a few minutes. When the firing stopped, they waited until the VC left then ran to the ambush area to see if my brother was still alive. He had been shot so many times in the head and chest that he was difficult to identify, but he still had his nametag on his shirt .” His three friends were close to my family, so they came and told my mother how my brother was killed.”
Another long pause probably with her waiting for a continued dialog and me not knowing what to say. Again, I said “I’m sorry,” then asked, “How did his friends know about the ambush?”
“His friends were VC serving in the South Vietnamese Army. They knew everything that was going to happen. My brother did not believe them, so he was killed.”
She was done with the x-rays, and I was glad to be leaving. I felt sadness that these same people I had worked with as Advisor were our enemy and passed on maneuver and tactical information which I’m certain resulted in the demise of several of my fellow Advisors. She suffered the loss of her brother, but the fact that she and her family both knew and accepted the fact that her brother’s friends were Viet Cong is unsettling and unforgivable. I could find no real reason to dislike this lady, but I did.
Some two weeks after that x-ray session, I received a letter from St David's Hospital stating they were no longer accepting Medicare patients due to Barrack Obama's Medicare fiasco. They offered to send my x-rays to a doctor of my choosing outside the St David's organization. I had no other doctor to designate for transfer of my x-rays. It appears I had needlessly put myself through an uncomfortable session with that tortuously talkative Vietnamese x-ray technician.
Depression comes in many ways and from many unintended sources. My mind works overtime to suppress these manic depressive moments.
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