CHU LAI, Vietnam — Fifty-three years ago, Gary Saunders' life was forever changed as he stepped foot onto a plane bound for the hell of war.
“These men never had visitors, and they just were in beds side by side and literally watching other men die,” said Saunders, describing the infirmary of the Mobile Army Surgical Hospital he served at during the Vietnam War.
As an x-ray technician, Saunders was on the front line of treatment for those fighting.
“That's what bothered me the most, to work with the most severely injured,” Saunders said.
He had watched the movie M.A.S.H. in the theater three times before he deployed. The movie depicts a M.A.S.H. unit operating during the Korean War.
Saunders said he loved how the movie showcased the operating room working together and how the characters reacted and handled each medical situation. He wasn’t disillusioned from the movie and knew the reality of war would be a much different experience despite Hollywood’s best attempt at realism.
His work was continuous at times with the distinct thumping sound of inbound helicopters bringing the next round of injured soldiers to the MASH unit.
“I worked a lot in surgery because most people don't realize that x-ray techs film during surgery procedures to find metal. Did you get the metal, did you not? To put pins and plates in, is the pin in the right spot? This is every day,” he said.
A soldier by the name of Steve still sticks with him all these years later.
“He was missing large parts of his body ... it was a bad, bad, bad trauma,” Saunders recalled. “He could have never lived I don't think if he would have even come home ... it would have been a horrible life.”
There were quieter times when he visited the local Vietnamese orphanage. There were also some days of rest. But there was always the reminder of the war ever present.
Saunders liked working the late or overnight shifts on guard duty. The work was often less chaotic and gave him a break from the hectic world inside a war zone emergency room.
The night of March 27, 1971 was like any other night. Saunders had completed a long day of x-ray work at the 27th Surgical Hospital and was set up to guard one of the entry gates, checking vehicles entering and other sentry duties.
Before long, it was the next morning and at 0300 he received a call from one of his commanders telling him he needed to get to x-ray immediately. Saunders replied that he couldn’t leave his post to which he said the officer told him he would be down to relieve him.
Saunders was unaware that while he stood guard on a relatively quiet night in Chu Lai, the Viet Cong had attacked Firebase Mary Ann. Saunders' somewhat mundane guard duty suddenly transformed into chaos.
“We got 35 severely injured men at one time and that was, that was horrible,” Saunders said.
He said it was a scene right out of M.A.S.H. when they showed the ER overwhelmed with bodies on every gurney available.
“When I walked in, the emergency room was full,” he said. “The hallways were full, x-ray had people in them.”
This is just a glimpse into some of his daily routine during his time deployed in Vietnam that he scribbled down in a small notebook that can fit into the palm of your hand. He would spend his downtime taking those daily notes and transcribing them into a journal with more in-depth thoughts and reflection on the events.
“And 50 years later during COVID I found everything,” Saunders said. “And that's when I started to write. I thought I was doing it for my children and my grandchildren.”
His reworked journal turned into a 109-page book called “Hold Your Breath — an X-ray Technologist’s Vietnam MASH Experience.”
“I'm getting phenomenal response,” Saunders said. “I had dinner with some people who had purchased the book and just wanted to talk and one of them was a physician who had been in Vietnam. And he said this just opened him up.”
After coming home from the war, Saunders continued in the field of x-ray for 48 years. He says his compassion for the young men never faltered during the war and it was something he carried with him for nearly five more decades.
“I can tell you caring for the patient was my number one goal and even as a manager, that was my number one goal, what's best for the patient? And I've had a wonderful career,” he said.
If you’d like to get a copy of Saunders' book you can follow this link to Amazon’s website.
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