Care of the Wounded in Vietnam

Excellent technical review of Army medical operations in Vietnam. Sections on Dust-off, MAST pants and trauma resuscitation, field hospitals, and air evacuation were excellent. Too many statistics for the non-professional reader. Yet these were normally presented in tables and could be skipped without loss of content. Highly recommended.

The wounded in Vietnam presented uniquely new challenges to the caregivers, precisely because the evacuation system was so efficient as to present cases which had inevitably resulted in death in all previous conflicts. The "dustoff" system, networks of receiving facilities, the unprecedented surgical techniques, and other elements are described here by General (Doctor) Hardaway, an expert on combat surgery, and other first-hand participants. Some of the essays are technical in nature and intended for readers knowledgeable in trauma care, but there is plenty here for the general reader of military history as well, and especially for students of the Vietnam War or military medicine. (The "score" rating is an ineradicable feature of the page. This reviewer does not "score" books>)