Not all heroes were pilots or fighters--The Dr. Jim Woods story
One of the greatest men I had the privilege to meet in telling Terry Crump's Vietnam story is his good friend, Dr. Jim Woods. Here is the first of at least two posts on this good doctor.
Dr. Jim Woods in 1970 caring for a young Vietnamese girl with a wounded foot.
An eleven-year-old Jim Woods heard the roar and eagerly looked to the skies. It was the F-86 lifting off from nearby Larson Air Force Base in Moses Lake, Washington. Jim didn’t know it, but nearby, his someday good friend and golfing partner, Terry Crump, was in kindergarten. The F-86 Sabre was the Air Force’s frontline fighter, and in 1953, when Jim was thrilled to see it climb into the blue skies above Moses Lake, it had proved its worth successfully battling Soviet MiG-15s over the Korean battlefront.
With the sound of the big swept-wing jet’s engine still reverberating in his mind, Jim returned to his bedroom. Flying above his bed and sparse bedroom furniture flew 110 model airplanes he had constructed. His mom counted them. Jim would fly a jet fighter one day, of that he was sure.
His dad had moved the family from Plymouth, Indiana, where Jim was born, to Moses Lake. A pastor in the Missionary Church Association, he was in the small town of Constantine, Michigan, when he was called to this Central Washington town to plant a church. Jim’s dreams of flying the most advanced fighter jets of that time came to an end at age 14. He went in for an eye exam and found he was nearsighted. Near-sighted pilots are not needed to combat enemies in the sky. At age 15, he found a new career path and a new passion. He became very ill and needed an appendectomy. The surgeon who operated on him made a great impression. What an amazing thing, he thought, to heal people by scalpel and skill. In a few hours he went from being very ill to feeling so much better. He looked the recovery room nurse in the eye and said, “This is what I am going to do.” A new passion grew: he would be a surgeon, not just a doctor, very specifically a surgeon.
The family moved back to Indiana in 1957, and a few years later Jim entered Taylor University in Upland, Indiana. It was the first medical school in Indiana, started in 1846. He advanced through his studies in three years, then went to Indiana University Medical School in 1964, graduating in 1968. He entered the five-year surgical residency program in Milwaukee at the Medical College of Wisconsin. There he performed surgeries night and day. It was a Level 1 trauma center with a nearly unending flow of gunshot wounds, providing plenty of experience for what would come later.
After three years of surgical residency, the US military called. With the war going on in that distant, steamy country, every available surgeon was called to duty. 100% of his medical school classmates were drafted, and Jim had signed up to join the Air Force. But, it looked like he would be spared from going to Vietnam, a war that was winding down with a continuing reduction in American forces. It was in the “Vietnamization” phase, resulting five years later in the total collapse of South Vietnam’s forces. He had five kidney stones during medical school and residency, and Vietnam was a notorious “stone belt,” accounting for a significant incidence of kidney stones throughout the world. He was declared unfit for duty, but so desperate was the need for surgeons that Jim received a letter notifying him that his disqualification status had been waived, signed by none other than the Surgeon General of the United States. This action, Jim believes to this day, was totally illegal and certainly unethical given his condition and the very likely outcome of spending time in the stone zone of Vietnam.
Jim was inducted into the Air Force. A retired military officer on his staff in Milwaukee told Jim that he would be assigned to serve as a venereal disease doctor unless he intervened and got his induction criteria changed. To Jim’s great relief, the change was made, and he was headed to Vietnam as a surgeon.
The Army had a place in mind for him –– the Special Forces camp near the South Vietnamese border town called An Loc. While in medical school, Jim had selected the Air Force as his preferred branch of service –– he still wanted to be near those jets. Jim went to basic training in San Antonio, then to Bergstrom Air Force Base near Austin, Texas. He was assigned to the Air Force Special Forces because his destination had been set from the time of his induction as a surgeon. Special Forces include service members from different branches, including the Army, Air Force, Marines, and Navy. As a Special Forces member, you could be assigned anywhere, and An Loc was where a highly experienced surgeon, specializing in treating gunshot wounds, was badly needed.
When Dr. James Woods arrived in An Loc on May 5, 1971, as an Air Force Special Forces Captain, the field hospital had had no American surgeon for some time. The surgeon sent there by the military had to be carried out on a stretcher as he had a complete mental breakdown. An Loc was very near the Cambodian border, and just across the border was a major operations area for both the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army. It held their military headquarters, called COSVN, as well as the offices of the political leaders sent by the Communist leaders in Hanoi to establish the government in South Vietnam once the Americans and South Vietnamese were defeated.
Because of this proximity, An Loc was a hot spot for action, both by the Americans and ARVN (South Vietnamese Army) forces, but also by the Viet Cong. Some of the largest artillery guns in the US inventory were fired from An Loc toward the Communist concentration there and an important terminus of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. These gigantic booms and the countering fire from the enemy forces terrified the surgeon, causing his mental breakdown. When Dr. Woods arrived at An Loc he had the same interpreter as the previous surgeon, Co Le (Ko Lay), who told him that when this doctor was making the rounds and the big booms started up, or even small arms fire, he would dive under patients’ beds and lie there shaking.
Without doubt, it took great courage to go about his duties performing surgeries and caring for patients in the middle of a battle zone. Jim attributes the courage he displayed in replacing the shell-shocked doctor to his experience playing football for Taylor University. Jim was very athletic, playing baseball and other sports in high school. He was tall and slender, weighing only 160 pounds when he joined the University football team. But he was fast. He was assigned to return punts and kickoffs. This was a role that featured the highest closing speeds in the sport and therefore, the highest injury rate. Facing attackers weighing far more than him, coming at blazing speeds, made him realize he had courage. It would be tested in the sparse surgical facilities at the frontline hospital.
Jim met his wife while at Taylor University and married Judy after completing medical school in 1968. When he left for An Loc in May 1971, he left her and a seven-month-old son, Jeff. Leaving his wife with a very young child while he faced a very uncertain future was very difficult, and he, 55 years later, still expresses deep honor and appreciation for the wives and families of soldiers sent off to war. Unsung heroes, in his mind. Mail was infrequent at An Loc, both sending and receiving. Usually only once every couple of weeks. But Jim made a point of recording something on a cassette tape every night. The tape would then be sent with a couple of weeks of messages. She would record messages on tapes as well, and the first few he received were, in Jim’s words, full of joy. Then, after a bit, less joy, then her voice went flat.
“What is going on, Jude?” Jim asked.
“Have you ever listened to your tapes?” she replied. He hadn’t, so he did. He would be explaining that he just got out of surgery and then BOOM, a huge explosion would be heard. He had become so accustomed to the noise of battle that he didn’t even hear them. But Judy did, and her anxiety understandably increased. Letters were sent instead of tapes.
An Loc was a very strategic location as would become clear in the Battle for An Loc, one of the most ferocious of the entire war. Getting through An Loc was the key to approaching Saigon, only about 60 miles south. The staging area for the invading NVA forces was just across the border in Cambodia. Viet Cong, the insurgent element of the conflict, were very active in this frontier city and, as elsewhere, it was impossible to tell friend from foe. As an indication of the danger, it was a “free fire zone” which meant Allied forces were free to fire on anything considered enemies or possible enemies. This designation was typically reserved for areas where friendly villagers had been cleared out, so it was assumed anyone in the area was not friendly. Because it was a free fire zone, Jim’s three nurses were male, trained as medics by the Air Force.
The small field hospital in An Loc had only two surgeons, Jim and Dr. Quy (Kwee). Dr. Quy arrived as part of the Vietnamization process, and Jim was to train him to eventually replace him as US troops were being sent home. They could not and did not distinguish between patients based on whose side they were on, nor whether they were combatants or not. A patient was a patient. Many of them were local townspeople or from the nearby farm fields with a great many land mine injuries. While no questions were asked or attempts to determine friend or foe, one woman made it abundantly clear whose side she was on. She was severely wounded by a burst from an M16 rifle. As he did with hundreds of others, Jim worked hard to save her life. He did, but all through her care, she glowered at him with a hatred in her eyes that chills today through the photo he has of her after her surgery.
(Next post: life as a frontline surgeon, the trouble that sent him home, and the dreadful 66 days of the Battle of An Loc.)