[Texas Across The River (1966) Western, Dean Martin.mp4
Iberio Ralda
I spent 3 years in the U.S. Army as a medical corpsman, ambulance orderly, and laboratory technician. I enlisted in October 1963, 10 months before the Tonkin Gulf Incident that sparked the Vietnam War, and I was discharged 3 years later, 2 years into the war.
I never set foot in Vietnam, but Vietnam set foot in me, at the 106th General Hospital, at Kishine Barracks in Yokohama in Japan, where I worked for 9-plus months as a laboratory technician. Soldiers wounded in Vietnam were evacuated to Japan, treated and returned to duty in Vietnam if possible, or stabilized and sent to the United States for further treatment, recovery, and rehabilitation. A few died in the hospital and were flown home in caskets.
I am writing this half a century later. 50 years is not a long time in the flow of human history, but it is a significant period in the life spans of the people who passed through the 106th in the late 1960s. I was 24 when I arrived in December 1965 and 25 by the time I left in October the following year. This means I am now in my 70s, as are most of the thousands of personnel, wounded, injured, and ill who crossed paths at the 106th between 1965 when the hospital opened and 1970 when it closed.
Most patients who passed through the 106th were affiliated with the U.S. Army, most were men, and most were Americans. But some were from the Marines or other Navy units, and a few were from the Air Force and even allied military forces. Local national (Japanese) staff and the denizens of Yokohama also figure in this story, as do of course the men and women, Americans and others, assigned to the 106th at Kishine, and even the families of those who were there.
"Kishine Barracks and the 106th General Hospital" is at once a personal, social, political, and medical history. I could not have written this if I hadn't been there, and I wouldn't have written it if I didn't have strong feelings about why I was there, and what I did and didn't do while I was there.
While the months I spent at Kishine left an indelible mark on my life, I have tried to make this story more than a self-congratulatory "I was there" sort of vanity piece. I've endeavored to balance accounts of my own experiences with those of others I knew and remember, or have met through correspondence, or know only through memoirs, newspaper articles, and official records. Some of these people are no longer alive, and among those still in this world, not everyone wants to revisit the past. All whose names I mention here, though, have somehow captured my interest and compelled me to write about them as though I had shared their space and time.
Research and writing have been my principle vocations, and people who know me understand that almost everything I have written is deeply related to my interests in one or another historical or social issue. Even my choices of what to translate from Japanese literature into English, and the themes of my own short stories and other literary efforts, have been inspired by my fascination with the human condition and my impulse to imagine what it might be like to have been born a different person in a different place or age.
Many of my stories I have related here meander. In the course of telling one story, other stories occur to me. At times I simply digress for a while. At times I wander so far astray that the story within the story becomes the story.
By embedding this story of Kishine and the 106th in a larger narrative, I don't mean to imply that the larger narrative is more important than the personal experiences of the individuals who were there for whatever reason. I do, however, feel that the significance of being there in any capacity, regardless of personal circumstances, cannot be fully appreciated without understanding the place and time in the larger sweep of local, regional, and even global history.
I have always been interested in my own family history -- in knowing everything, not only about living and dead relatives, but also about their living and dead friends and enemies. I have no interest in conventional genealogy, which focuses on family trees and heraldry and celebrations of celebrity connections. I see lineage as nothing more than a biological consequence of sexual reproduction. For me, genetic ties are merely a pretext for exploring the times and surroundings of the people who happen to be in my own network, and often find the friends and enemies of relatives more interesting as subjects of my writing.
This story about Kishine Barracks and the 106th General Hospital grew out of the work I had been doing on my family history. I see it, in fact, as a component of my family history. Most who were there, as personnel or patients, never knew each other. But we were akin to members of the same extended family.
Literally and figuratively, I like to open draws and closets, peek under carpets, rip up floors and break through ceilings. I don't look for skeletons, but if I find them, they get equal if not more time than the people who buried or hid them. Letters in a trunk in an attic were left to be read. A cave that opens off the wall of a cellar has to be explored. At the end of the day, there are no secrets between us.
My telling of the history of Kishine and the 106th touches upon a number of political issues. I am not, however, interested in flags, patriotism, or heroes. I am interested only in the people who were there as people.
Most of the people I gossip about happened to be wearing U.S. military uniforms and represented the Stars and Stripes during what was essentially an American war in Vietnam. Contemporary political conditions at Kishine and the 106th, and elsewhere, warrant commentary. But the people I introduce here are merely people who did the variety of things that people do under such circumstances, regardless of their political sentiments.
I have based this history of Kishine Barracks and the 106th General Hospital on numerous primary and secondary sources of information. My most important sources have been memories, both my own and those of others who have written about their experiences at Kishine Barracks and/or the 106th General Hospital.
Memories, however, are apt to be lost, or faulty or creative. The accuracy of personal accounts in correspondence such as letters or email, in books or on websites, or in recorded interviews, cannot be taken for granted, no matter how seemingly credible the witness. Hence I have devoted independent sections to Memory, Fact checking, Editing, and Corrections (below).
3rd-party accounts of matters related to past events such as the Vietnam War -- by scholars, journalists, novelists, film makers, and others who write or dramatize as historians, political analysts, or story tellers -- are important as guides to how public awareness of the event is created and maintained in government and academic institutions and in mass media and entertainment. Here, too, researchers and other consumers of Vietnam War beware -- belief is likely to trump truth.
The "Vietnam War" in the imagination of 21st century classrooms and movie theaters in America and Vietnam, for example, bear practically no resemblance to the war as it was witnessed in real time by those in the combat zones of Souteast Asia -- or in a communication zone such as Japan, in which the 106th General Hospital operated -- or in the United States, where U.S. military personal returned one way or another, alive with memories of perhaps lost limbs or faces, or dead -- or in Vietnam, which was left to clean up the mess of over a decade of mindless military murders and massacres, and destruction.
Electronic databases have become universal ways of collecting and collating information about all manner of topics. Some are accessible only through terminals controlled by the agencies, companies, or individuals who created them.
An increasing number of databases containing information obtained from public records are being made available on the Internet, some with open access, others on a fee basis. I have availed myself of both.
The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has a website called Access to Archival Databases (AAD). The AAD website is a portal to numerous databases created and maintained by NARA, including one called "Combat Area Casualties Current File" (CACCF), which is listed under both "Military Personnel" or "Vietnam War" on the "Browse by Category" menu.
Brief Scope: This series contains records of U.S. military officers and soldiers who died as a result of either a hostile or nonhostile occurrence or who were missing in action or prisoners of war in the Southeast Asian combat area during the Vietnam War, including casualties that occurred in Cambodia, China, Laos, North Vietnam, South Vietnam, and Thailand.
What information is in these records?
This series, otherwise known as the Combat Area Casualties Data Base or CACDB, contains records of U.S. military officers and soldiers who died as a result of either a hostile or nonhostile occurrence or who were missing in action or prisoners of war in the Southeast Asian combat area during the Vietnamese Conflict.
Why were these records created?
The agency created this series as the official repository for records on US. military casualties in the Southeast Asian combat areas during the Vietnam Conflict and used the database as the source for official information about U.S. military personnel casualties related to the Vietnam Conflict and for disseminating statistical data concerning them.
The Coffelt Database (CDB) of Vietnam casualities is the brain child, and the fruit of the labor of love, of Richard Coffelt and others. The CDB website describes him as "the first person to make a dedicated effort to identify the unit assignments of the Army's Vietnam dead, and did so with only the assistance of his wife Jo Ann Jennings until the late 1990s." From 1998, others, practically all veterans like himself, have joined him in compiling massive quantities of data on Vietnam veterans from various public records and other sources.
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