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They were surgeons on a warship who didn't much care about Navy regulations -- and that made all the difference.
When Commander P. M. McGuigan, MD, arrived aboard the USS REPOSE in December 1968, he s...
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They were surgeons on a warship who didn't much care about Navy regulations -- and that made all the difference.
When Commander P. M. McGuigan, MD, arrived aboard the USS REPOSE in December 1968, he stepped into one of the busiest, most irreverent, and most remarkable floating hospitals in the history of American military medicine. Operating west of the dateline during the deadliest year of the Vietnam War, the medical staff of the REPOSE treated thousands of combat casualties -- and found ways to preserve their sanity that the Navy Regulations definitely did not cover.
West of the Dateline is a memoir unlike any other Vietnam account. There are no politics here, no polemics -- just the hilarious, harrowing, and deeply human story of a crew of surgeons, nurses, and corpsmen who performed miracles in four operating rooms simultaneously, kicked live grenades off a flight deck, trained a Catholic chaplain to perform subclavian punctures, invented their own unit of nautical measurement, lost two anchors in a typhoon, and drew Snoopy on the captain's door in permanent marker.
Told with the dry precision of a combat surgeon and the warmth of someone who loved his shipmates, this is a story about what humor, camaraderie, and the occasional bottle of Jack Daniel's can do for the human spirit in the middle of mankind's ultimate idiocy.
For anyone who has ever served, laughed through something terrible, or wondered what really happened on those hospital ships -- this is the book.
