Former Navy Doc John Parrish’s Brutally Honest Autobiography

REVIEWS BY MARC LEEPSON

Warning: Skip the following paragraph if you do not wish to read disturbingly real depictions of the worst that war has to offer. The words are from the prologue to former Navy doctor John Parrish’s new memoir, Autopsy of War: A Personal History (Thomas Dunne Books, 352 pp., $25.99), a brutally honest and often brilliantly rendered account of the author’s war and postwar experiences.

“The bed of a large truck is overflowing with a jumbled pile of bodies—desperate, terrified Marines had heaved the dead and the wounded together in a heap without battle dressings, tourniquets, splints or first aid of any kind. Corpsmen and other doctors are already sorting through the pile in the bed of the truck, untangling the living from the dead, and lowering them into litters…. The vomiting Marine stops moving and is no longer breathing. I start to resuscitate him and then see brains matted in his black hair. I let him go. My hands are slippery with blood, and I have his brains under my fingernails.”

I could go on. John Parrish does—for hundreds of pages—in this well-written, searing account of his life before, during, and after serving in Vietnam. Parrish arrived in country in the fall of 1967 as a barely (and inadequately) trained U.S. Navy doctor. He went on to spend months in a blood-drenched field hospital, A Medical Co., 3rd Medical Bn., 3rd Marine Div., near Phu Bai.

Parrish wrote one of the earliest Vietnam War memoirs, 12, 20 & 5: A Doctor’s Year in Vietnam (1972), which focused on his life in the war zone. In his new book, Parrish adds riveting and often unsettling accounts of his life growing up and his decades of emotional torment after coming home from Vietnam.

Although no one Vietnam veteran’s pre- and post-war stories are “typical,” John Parrish’s are in many respects far from the norm. He had gone through a harrowing childhood and adolescence under the thumb of a psychotic father and in the shadow of the early and tragic death of his beloved older brother. Parrish persevered, though, and excelled academically at Duke University and at Yale Medical School, where he graduated in 1965. He was married with two young children and working as a resident in internal medicine at the University of Michigan Medical Center two years later when Uncle Sam came calling.

Parrish and thirty other civilian doctors arrived at Camp Pendleton in late July of 1967 for their medical training—all twelve days of it. Then they were shipped to Vietnam. Parrish faced horrible things, then came home and lived a life of high accomplishment. His career highlights included heading the Dermatology Departments at Harvard Medical School and at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

But as his professional life soared, Parrish was being ripped to shreds emotionally over what he had witnessed in Vietnam. He treated his wife and children vilely. He acted irrationally and destructively. And that behavior went on for decades.

“Twenty years after I left Vietnam my private inner core felt abandoned, abused, unheard,” Parrish says. “I was still haunted by the feelings of dread and helplessness I associated with Triage. I harbored hidden resentment, distrust of authorities, hopelessness, and cynicism. Secretly, I mourned yellow and white and black victims. I found myself increasingly restless, tortured, and lonely—never more so than at social events or professional meetings where my peers assumed I was in control. Only I knew that my one-year war was not complete and that I carried invisible wounds.”

Parrish’s bad case of PTSD cost him his marriage and decades of bitter estrangement from his three children. And it nearly torpedoed his career. But this book—and John Parrish’s life—is a story of late redemption. Mainly through the intervention of a dedicated psychiatrist and the caring of his second wife, John Parrish has all but overcome the demons that haunted him before, during, and after his Vietnam War tour of duty.

Parrish’s new book is extremely well done. He does go on a bit in some places, mainly with sometimes mundane details about his medical career post-Vietnam. But Autopsy of War ranks among the most insightful and compelling memoirs of the war in Vietnam.

HIS CREOLE BELLE

I believe I have written these words before (maybe more than once), but they deserve saying one more time: James Lee Burke has does it again. In Creole Belle (Simon & Schuster, 544 pp., $27.99), Burke has come up with yet another compulsively readable detective/thriller starring Dave Robicheaux and his associate, Clete Purcell. This is Burke’s nineteenth Dave Robicheaux, and there is nothing stale about this fast-moving, gothic novel filled with over-the-top evil characters and an ultra-violent conclusion.

Set, as usual, in the Louisiana bayou country where Robicheaux is a sheriff’s detective in New Iberia Parish, this deftly written tale has a constantly twisting plot that centers around the disappearance of a young woman singer. It also deals with the 2010 catastrophic oil well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico and its impact on the people and the fragile environment in Dave Robicheaux’s world. Once again, our flawed hero is aided (and sometimes hindered) by his larger-than-life former New Orleans PD partner, Clete Purcell, a former Marine who—like Robicheaux—still is dealing with physical and emotional issues related to his service in the Vietnam War.
“We were out of step and out of sync with the world and with ourselves,” Robicheaux (who narrates the book) says of himself and his old friend, “and knowing this, we held on to each other like two men in a gale, the fire burning so brightly behind us that the backs of our necks glowed with the heat.”

As always, the morally upright guys skirt the edge of the law in order to overcome a phalanx of sociopathic bad guys. Our heroes face constant physical danger while also battling their psychic demons. As they do so, both regularly experience flashbacks from their violence-heavy tours in Vietnam. Burke, who did not serve in the war, renders these scenes and other frequent references to the war extremely realistically. Here’s one of many examples, in which Clete Purcell is giving a self-protection lesson to his daughter.

“You don’t walk around in plain view while your enemy is wearing camouflage and setting up an L-shaped ambush,” he says. “It’s a meat grinder. We had an expression in Vietnam. We’d say, ‘It’s Vietnam.’ Like the rules there were different and whatever happened didn’t count. The truth is, the whole world is Vietnam. You either use your head and carry your own water and take care of yourself and stay true to your principles, or you walk into a meat grinder.”

SEE ALSO: Arts of War on the Web | Books in Brief