The Inspiring Story of the Father of Global Disaster Medicine

BY MARC LEEPSON

Serving in the Vietnam War became a life-changing rite-of-passage experience for hundreds of thousands of young Americans. And for some who were not-so-young.

That was the case with Frederick “Skip” Burkle, who arrived in Vietnam in 1968 as a 28-year-old Navy doctor with a wife and three children at home. Burkle had received his draft notice three years earlier as he was just starting a residency in pediatric medicine at Yale-New Haven Hospital. He opted for a program that allowed him to finish the residency and then go on active duty as a U.S. Navy physician.

Burkle entered the Navy early in 1968. After six weeks of training, he arrived in country in August and was shipped to Delta Med, the Marine Corps’ northernmost Forward Casualty Hospital in South Vietnam. He went on to put in a memorable, event-filled tour of duty—and one that markedly changed his life’s path.

Burkle tells that ultimately uplifting tale in his new book, Water on the Moon: A Physician’s Memoir of Service from the Vietnam War to Humanitarian Crises Worldwide (McFarland, 298 pp. $39.95, paper; $25.99, Kindle).

The book includes four short but informative chapters covering Burkle’s time in Vietnam, including a harrowing stint as the medical director of the last Operation Babylift flight as the North Vietnamese moved into Saigon in April 1975.

As for his time at Delta Med in 1968-69, Burkle notes that his unit had “the dubious distinction of being the medical facility most hit during the war.” From the moment he arrived at Delta Med, Burkle and the other caregivers there frequently came under fire and more frequently were inundated with casualties, both Marines and civilians. It wasn’t uncommon for both of those things to happen at the same time.

His year in the medical trenches, Burkle says, consisted of “months of nonstop 24-hour triage, surgeries, disease and death, coupled with little sleep and little communication from back home. We saw an average of 50 to 70 Marines and almost 300 civilians every day. With triage being constant, we had to make life-and-death decisions on the spot and get creative with solutions.”

Burkle himself suffered a traumatic brain injury after an incoming shell sent him crashing helmet-less into the outside wall of a bunker, the effects of which are still with him today.

All of the above, especially treating civilians (mostly women and children), “changed me forever,” Burkle says, and influenced “the trajectory” of his medical career. In his last days in-country in 1968, Burkle came to understand, he says, “the kind of physician I wanted to be. The disease and diagnostic challenges I experienced that year were intriguing and I now realized I loved this kind of specialized medicine.”

So, after surviving his year in the war zone, Skip Burkle went on to a 40-year career specializing in the new field of global disaster medicine, a multi-faceted discipline that he helped develop. It includes aspects of pediatrics, emergency medicine, psychiatry, public health, and tropical medicine, along with human rights, international diplomacy and peacemaking, humanitarian assistance, and disaster response. Burkle practiced and taught global disaster medicine in the U.S. and around the world, including serving as a Navy Reservist in the first Persian Gulf War and in Somalia in the 1990s.

Often referred to as the “father of disaster medicine,” the much-honored Dr. Burkle, one observer wrote, for decades was “the single most talented and experienced post-conflict health specialist working for the United States government.”

Peter Osnos is a well-respected former Washington Post foreign correspondent who covered the war in Vietnam, among many other assignments. He’s also an accomplished author and a veteran New York book editor who founded his own publishing house, PublicAffairs.

So, it was an unpleasant surprise to find that Osnos’ latest book, LBJ and McNamara: The Vietnam Partnership Destined to Fail (Rivertowns Books, 177 pp. $17.95, paper; $8.99, Kindle), is a fawning look at the disgraced former Secretary of Defense who, more than any one individual, was responsible for the debacle of the Vietnam War.

On the surface, as the subtitle proclaims, the book offers a take on the much-written-about relationship between President Johnson and his inherited SecDef McNamara, as well as their prosecution of the Vietnam War in a book Osnos characterizes as “history written by a journalist who was there.”

That’s true, but it’s also written by a man who refers to his main subject as “my friend Bob,” and amounts to a weak attempt to shore up McNamara’s tainted reputation.

Yes, Osnos points out McNamara’s main failings as the war’s primary manager, but then he counters them with unconvincing excuses. By not telling Johnson, for example, that he believed the war was a mistake and unwinnable in 1965, and by continually obfuscating and dissembling about it in public, McNamara, Osnos says, was simply “doing his duty to the presidency as he saw it.” Whatever that’s supposed to mean.

Elsewhere, Osnos writes that the “perception” of McNamara’s “intensity and his publicly bumptious certainty,” rather than his outright lying, “defined his lasting reputation.” What? Almost every observer of McNamara has characterized that “certainty” as out-and-out egotistical hubris that resulted in carnage in Vietnam.

This short, lightweight book, padded out with several pages of excerpts from McNamara’s 1995 self-serving “mea culpa, but,” memoir, In Retrospect, will appeal to those who believe what he wrote in that much-criticized book—which, by the way, Peter Osnos edited.

If you don’t believe McNamara’s version of his prosecution of the Vietnam War in that, there’s little reason to think that LBJ and McNamara will change your mind.

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