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Wasn’t so much a “volunteer,” as a Flight Surgeon with the US Army. 25th ID (L) Aviation Brigade supporting JTF-FA ‘92 and ‘93 for CILHI MIA/POW recovery missions.

I cobbled together a travelogue from letters I sent home while “over there.”

MEDCAPS is an Army acronym - of sorts - for MEDical Civic Action Program. One of those hearts and minds missions from the Hah-vud boys who thought running Dr. Tom Dooley-like clinics in the third-world sh!tholes our boys often found themselves deployed to would be a great idea.

While the teams were out searching for burial sites for crash or combat victims out in some rice paddies or caves somewhere, I’d sit with a box of medical supplies and see a local or two for illness, injury, scabies (LOTS of scabies), intestinal parasites, purulent conjunctivitis, malaria, etc. Mostly they had “fever.” That’s the thing Cambodians - as a culture - get as a symptom. For anything and everything. Filipinos get “headache,” and Panamanians get “dizzy.” Americans - especially dependapotomus wives of lower-ranking enlisted guys - get “anxiety.”

So I’d see one person for something, turn around and there would be two more. I’d see/treat them, turn around and there would be fifty. By the end of an hour there would be a LINE running around the soccer stadium or grass-thatched platform (they don’t have walls in most remote places in Cambodia, too hot, too many places for scorpions, cobras or green snakes to hide) and I’d see maybe a dozen or three until the team got back, we packed up and flew out of there (soccer stadia are great places to land a couple of Blackhawk UH-60’s).

Meanwhile, whatever pills I would’ve given the locals for their condition they would be standing a few yards away jabbering with the local “shaman” (how our interpreter called them) who would tell one person I gave the wrong size, shape or color pill so he or she would trade with someone else.

You see, after Pol Pot’s “cultural revolution” towards “Year Zero” anyone with any evidence of contact with 1st world culture (capitalist, western society) whether knowledge of any other language than Khmer, dental work, eye glasses, evidence of surgery, would be sent to Tuoul Sleng prison (formerly a public school) to be tortured and murdered, their body dumped in the killing fields - you probably heard of; I visited there three times, both the prison and the fields. So, out of the culture left surviving after Viet Nam liberated Cambodia from Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge (red brotherhood) and the UN came in (my first trip in ‘92 was under UNTAC control while “free elections” were being held), the folk-medicine people would tell people things like “you have X disease, this requires a WHITE pill, not green, stupid Americans.” It seemed like nearly every street pharmacy in the country - there were thousands of them - had a little 2 or 3 cubic foot glass case FULL of UN/foreign medicine (most of it long expired) arranged NOT by alphabetical name in most cases (not a pun), but by size, shape, color and sold/dispensed that way while in the cities there WERE legitimate pharmacies, they would sell anything to anyone who had the cash - I spoke with several pharmacists, many western-educated, just trying to make a living in a once great empire propped up on cinder blocks in Communist China’s front yard.

I posted the travelogue as “Danger! MINES!” somewhere on the web many years ago. PM me your email I’ll shoot you a copy.

Very immature in many ways, very NAÏVE to be kind - I didn’t speak the language, it was mind-blowing, boring, exciting, terrifying, enlightening all at the same time, sometimes within the same hour.

Thanks for asking.