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By Root 974 0

tangle were fourteen bamboo platforms, twelve feet square and elevated eighteen inches, and on each sat thirty tons of bagged rice protected from the rain by tarps strung pup tent style above them. A matted bamboo trail led to a motor pool with axles, wheels, engine parts, and drums of gasoline and oil. The grunts were eating a lunch of NVA rice and C-ration meat, mixed with tomato sauce, and Kuter had a meal with them after holding sick call for the company. The grunts had ringworm, immersion foot, jungle rot, and intestinal flu, and Kuter knew that they were going to have malaria. The jungle was alive with mosquitoes, and although the men took their daily little white pill that prevented one strain, many couldn't stomach the weekly giant orange pill. They called it the Orange Bomber, the side effects of which were cramps and diarrhea. As the operation wound down, the malaria that had incubated for two weeks would flatten part of the battalion.

After sick call and the meal of captured rice, the battalion command ship brought Kuter back to Myron. The next morning, he was again holding sick call, this time for a group of Cambodians from the local village who had come up to the wire:

I went out and we treated many skin diseases, fevers, intestinal problems, and conjunctivitis. The montenyard people are so gratifying to deal with for they are friendly and seem to enjoy being helped and seem to want to exchange brotherhood as opposed to the Vietnamese, who it is very difficult to like. The village chief invited us into the village, so some of my medics held a Medcap there this afternoon. They were very enthused and enjoy the chance to help people rather than fill sandbags.

The next morning, seventy-five villagers, red skinned, clad in loin-clothes and skirts, appeared outside Myron. When Kuter followed them back to their village with his medics and an infantry squad, he was astonished to find that between his two visits the people had built a hootch for him to work in. The villagers also presented gifts of gold and silver bracelets. Wishing he had a microscope to examine blood smears, he did what he could about the skin diseases, tuberculosis, leprosy, elephantiasis, meningitis, and malnutrition. Back at the firebase he put in a request for vitamins, antibiotics, children's aspirin, and malaria pills. The medcaps continued over the coming weeks with medics Horner, Allison, Sines, Vogel, and Dove. Kuter's enthusiastic letters home re-called the experiences he'd had at a bush missionary hospital in Nigeria:

We treated about 60, and by now we are noting improvement in many of the people we've been treating for several days. That is very gratifying. We took down some of our captured rice and it was very gratefully received, for though there is not starvation in the village, these people have to labor very hard for every meal….

On Medcap today, I did some surgery on a lady with a tumor of the great toe. I wish I had laboratory facilities…. One of my medics, George Horner, has really become the village physician. He works hard preparing our medical bag, ordering supplies needed for Medcap, and has an excellent “doctor-patient relationship” with the people we treat. The child with the dog bite is doing fine….

I'm picking up simple Cambodian expressions just like in Nigeria and can now pretty well determine symptoms of pain, cough, stomachache, diarrhea, etc. I haven't mastered telling people how many pills to take how many times a day. Our communication sometimes gets quite cumber-some–English to Vietnamese by our battalion's interpreter, Vietnamese to Cambodian by a POW captured at the rice cache and now working for us, and Cambodian to the local montenyard dialect by the village chief. Then the answer to the question comes back through the chain in reverse. It all serves to make life interesting–especially when all confusion created is met with a smile of friendship.

One of the villages in the area was also visited by a platoon from G Troop of the 11th ACR, and that night the roasted pig was good and the liquor was flowing