Failure to Atone: The True Story of a Jungle Surgeon in Vietnam

ISBN: 097760490X

Author: Allen Hassan

Condition: New

Failure to Atone is Dr. Allen Hassan's graphic memoir of the trials and tribulations of a Volunteer Physician for Vietnam on the front lines of a no-holds-barred war, and of a courageous people's battle to survive. Two years out of medical school, as a doctor from a small town in Iowa, he volunteered for an American Medical Association program to help the war-damaged civilians of Vietnam. Even for a tough former Marine Sergeant, the experience of trying to give civilians good medical care in the middle of a ferocious war was a difficult, life-changing experience. In a poorly equipped jungle hospital, Dr. Hassan found himself the only medical doctor in town for hundreds of old people, women and children horribly wounded during the height of the Vietnam War. As a doctor struggling to treat 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 small jungle 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. The atrocities and brutality he saw and experienced left Dr. Hassan forever opposed to the horror and tragedy of war. Failure to Atone tells the story of those trying war years for the first time, and brings to light the hell, the horror, and the heroism of war.