A CIA employee helps Vietnamese evacuees onto an Air America helicopter near the US Embassy in Saigon, on April 29, 1975—the day the North Vietnamese took control of the city, marking the end of the bloody, decades-long war. Photo from the Bettmann Archive / AP Photo

Veterans

Amid a Brutal War, a Bright Spot

50 years after the end of the Vietnam War, an alum shares his photos of the US Marines children’s hospital where he served

In 1967, a Vietnamese toddler changed the course of Charles C. Spear’s life.

As the Vietnam War raged, Spear (SON’76) was a Navy medic embedded with a US Marine Corps 1st Field Service Regiment. One afternoon, while volunteering with the Marines’ Medical Civic Action Program (MEDCAP) to bring aid to rural villages without medical facilities, Spear encountered a severely ill and dehydrated girl. Taking the child into his arms, Spear rushed her to receive lifesaving care in MEDCAP’s clinic near Hoa Khanh.

“I remember carrying her into the facility and immediately deciding that working in civic action might be the best contribution I could make to the war effort,” Spear tells Bostonia. He requested a transfer to MEDCAP, and,after an interview, was assigned to the Marines-run Hoa Khanh Children’s Hospital as a supervisor. Daily for the next year, Spear saw children with severe burns, broken limbs, bullet wounds, and a host of ordinary childhood injuries and illnesses—things for which the people living in a war zone could not seek care. 

Spear came home from Vietnam, and at age 26, entered the (now closed) Boston University School of Nursing in 1973. The war continued for two more years, drawing to a close when North Vietnam troops took control of Saigon on April 29, 1975. 

Now, on the 50th anniversary of the war’s end, Spear remembers his service at Hoa Khanh and shares some of the photos he took at the hospital. He views Hoa Khanh as a rare humanitarian effort by the US Marines and says the hospital was a bright spot in an otherwise ghastly conflict.

“The year I spent in Vietnam was the most meaningful of my life and changed forever who I am,” says Spear, who returned to active duty after graduating from BU and retired from the Navy in 1996. He worked a total of 35 years as a nurse in Asheville, N.C., retiring in 2012. “If I have achieved any success as a person, a naval officer, a healthcare professional, and a human being, then it can be attributed to the privilege I had of caring for the children at Hoa Khanh.”

The Marine Corps opened the rural hospital as a simple tent in 1966. Some locals believed the Communist propaganda that the Marines were there to hurt their children, not help them. But by the time the Marines transferred operation of the Hoa Khanh Children’s Hospital to the World Relief Commission in 1969, the facility had treated more than 25,000 Vietnamese children.

“The Marine Corps is not normally associated with significant humanitarian endeavors—and certainly not one as extraordinarily successful as the Hoa Khanh Children’s Hospital,” says Spear, shown above on Christmas Eve, 1968. “Among all the horrors, failures, and atrocities historically associated with Vietnam, many American servicemen cared to make a difference. And did.”

The Hoa Khanh Children’s Hospital, shown here in January 1969 following its renovation, was funded with cash donations from individual Marines and built with building materials provided by the Vietnamese and labor by the Naval Construction Force, or Seabees. Spear says the new facility featured a large, well-lit, and centrally located open ward, a nursery, four isolation rooms, multiple treatment and procedure areas, a pharmacy, emergency and operating rooms, and a functional sterile supply with a full-size sterilizer.

The new hospital had an open ward with more than 70 beds and a glassed-in nursery at the rear.

Everyone, including patients, pitched in to help feed those who could not feed themselves, Spear says.

“Our children were extraordinarily resilient, despite illness, injury, and a war from which they could not escape,” Spear says. While the hospital staff did not have the time for much play, he says, they tried to promote laughter and fun whenever possible. The hospital frequently received donations of toys and games, particularly at Christmastime. And children played on swing sets on the compound and used the hallways as play areas—especially during the monsoon season.

Every now and then, the Marines would give the kids a case of Fizzies—a carbonated, flavored drink tablet that could be added to water—leading to an evening “Fizzies Party,” shown above.

Assisting the Navy staff and physicians at the hospital were approximately 70 paid Vietnamese nursing, secretarial, and housekeeping staff who were hired from the local community. Several had formal nursing training from working at hospitals in Da Nang—but, for others, it was learning on the job, Spear says.

Flares over Hoa Khanh served as a near-constant reminder that the hospital was in a war zone.

“Caring for 120 children was no simple task, and innovation was a necessity,” Spear says. Identifying the child patients—particularly when so many Vietnamese children had similar names or were too young, too ill, or too injured to respond if questioned or called—could be difficult, he says. Upon admission, the hospital assigned each child a specific number to which everything else would be keyed: an ID bracelet, a bed tag, a simple medical chart, a Temperature-Pulse-Respiration graph, and small cards noting medications, treatments, and delivery times. “We were fortunate to have two wonderful Vietnamese secretaries, Ahn and Phuong, who tirelessly kept the entire inpatient population—and the staff!—somehow organized,” Spear says.