Nexus - 0220 - New Times Magazine-pages

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completely controlled by the Israelis, so they had competent mili- | Harvard Medical School, my last year of medical school, and then tary leadership to run the military operation and they had a vested _as an intern, and then as a pre-doc fellow and a post-doc fellow. interest in winning, and therefore that's why we had the outcome So I was there when I got my draft notice, and everybody said: we had. "Go to the National Institutes of Health and go to Walter Reed and The American Military is grossly incompetent, ran by cowards, _do research in the service." And I thought.I knew better. and poorly equipped. Gilbert and Sullivan would have a wonder- G: The right career path? ful time with the American Military. L: Right. And so I went to this Navy captain; I walked into his In order to be promoted in the American Military you have to _ office, told him my name and that's all I had to tell him. He knew know the right people and do the right things and avoid combat. where I graduated, where I was, where all my friends were. The I'll tell you that right upfront. In the main, the academies— West guy must have been a genius, anyway. But he had all of us identi- Point, Annapolis and the Air Force Academy—teach people how _ fied, because apparently there were just a few docs, maybe twelve to avoid combat. So if you get into combat, you are really a bad hundred, who hadn't followed the Berry Plan, who just absolutely politician; you don't know how to deal with it right. Clearly, if got axed. you kind of peek your eye into combat and get yourself a Silver G: You mean because they needed doctors? Star or something, that's fine—like Lyndon Johnson did. But to L: Yes, because they needed doctors because they were going be in there on a regular basis, that is, as a "grunt", means youdon't to have a war. This was before the Gulf of Tonkin incident. know very much about how to get out of it. Obviously, as we now know—it was kind of like the burnirig of G: Tell me about your experience in Vietnam and how you first the Reichstadt—they tooled up for the Vietnam War. They said, figured out the connection between the military industry, the drug "We need a war, and we'll have it in Viemam, and we have to fill industry and medicine. I mean, how did you get to be a "quack"? these ranks before we decide to have the war because these guys L: Well, it's a long story and I wrote a book on it, though it has- may not want to come if we're having a war. So, in any case, even n't been published at all. I started out, kind of, as avery naive per- _ then I didn't know exactly what was going on. son. I was an academic superstar, and I always thought that I You know, he said: "Well, what do you want to do, son?” wanted to learn to fly. I wanted to fly, as So I said: “I want to fly.” you can see here in this office. eee = He said: “Okay.” G: I saw the aviation magazines in And I said: "You know, I like research." your waiting-room. And he said: “Well, we have an astronaut W L: I love airplanes. Anyway, so when ...they needed program. Why don't you go into the astro- I was in college I dropped out to go to the naut program? We have slots for doctors Naval Air Cadet Program, and, you know, docto rs because they there.” everyone said: "Why is a nice Jewish boy ‘ And I said: “Boy, that sounds great." doing that?" And they talked me into were 80Ing to have a And he said: “All right. All you have to going back to college. It was 1965. 1 got F do is sign on the dotted line, and get your drafted. At that point they had the Berry war. This was before Navy wings, and we'll send you to the astro- Plan. Basically this was that the medical the Gulf of Tonkin naut program." students would commit themselves to a z il Well, to make a long story short, that did- branch of the Military—Armmy, Navy, Air inc ident. n't happen, Force—and, in exchange for that commit- G: You mean, you signed and they didn't ment, the branch of the Military would . send you? allow the medical student to continue his L: That's right. I had "the wrong stuff". or her postgraduate training to a specialty, and then promised the G: Did they test you? physician that he or she would practise in that particular specialty. L: No, no, When we got to carrier quals [qualifying tests for You know, we had a draft—otherwise you would just get draft- aircraft carrier duty], among other things, they just didn't like me. ed and randomly get stuck in whatever part of the military that just | My personality was a bit irascible. For example, when we did the happened to need doctors. So, it was a way of guaranteeing your _carrier qualifications in these little airplanes, the tradition is that postgraduate education and delaying your draft time, and then also _ they let the wives aboard the USS Lexington while you do your guarantecing what you were going to do in the Military. For carrier qual, and they wouldn't let my wife aboard because I was a instance, if you were taining in paediatrics you'd be in a paedi- _ reservist. They would only let the regulars' wives aboard. And so atrics hospital, and if you were training in orthopaedic surgery _I called the Navy captain "a senile old bastard". you'd be an orthopaedic surgeon instead of just a general medical G: Oh, great. officer. L: Those were the kinds of things that didn't make me popular My philosophy was: "Just ignore them. Don't let them know among the Military folks. So I got my wings and they shipped me who you are and maybe they'll just forget you." I called that 'The out to the Marine Corps. The funny part of it was, the truth of the Levin Plan’. That was the wrong thing to do because of what they = matter was, that I didn't even know how to spell M-A-R-I-N-E. I were doing. They were planning on having a war. And I didn't didn't even know what the Marines were. All I knew was John know that. Wayne. So when I got my draft notice, at that point I thought: "Gosh, The only thing I thought about the Navy was that I was gonna this is my licence to sow my wild oats; I can go out and learn to _be floating off: even if we had a war, the worst thing that could fly and no one can complain, because I had no choice in the mat- _ happen was I'd be floating four or five miles off the coast and eat- ter." Because I was supposed to be a professor at Harvard. I was ing three meals a day, having hot showers and a wonderful time at Harvard. aboard an aircraft carrier. And that's the worst that could happen G: Harvard Medical School? to me. L: Yes, I went to the University of Illinois and then I went to G: When you were drafted you thought you were going in the to me. G: When you were drafted you thought you were going in the NEXUS 29 JUNE - JULY 1994