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Cover Story
He’s given up flying and has donated his home-built Viking airplane
to the Wings of Hope humanitarian group in St. Louis. “They’ll use it
in their medical missions around the world,” Foshee says. “I’m just
glad to be able to help.”
Recognizing the Enemy:
Terrell Spencer, Vietnam War Veteran
Like countless other physicians around the country, Terrell Spencer,
M.D. (’68), attended medical school under the constant shadow of the
Vietnam War. “Nearly everybody was being called up,” he says. “I
could have been deferred an extra year for more training, but since I
had to go anyway, I decided to go.”
enemy soldier came in wounded, it was my job to treat him, too.
There’s an old saying that war is 29 days of boredom followed by one
day of sheer terror, and that’s very true.”
Two indelible memories of Spencer’s Vietnam service are the .45
automatic pistol he carried everywhere, but never had to fire, and the
phone call he received in the middle of the jungle telling him his first
child had been born.
“The main thing those experiences taught me,” he says, “is how
similar all people are, how many things they have in common.
Under stress, you learn pretty fast which aspects of our lives are just
cultural and which ones strike a chord with everybody. The
Vietnamese prisoners had the same fears and wants as everybody
else. You learn to connect with patients as people, because all those
surface differences just wash away.”
Left to right: During his time in Vietnam, Spencer was awarded the Bronze Star, the Air
Medal, and the Army Commendation Medal; Henderson prepares for a training
parachute jump with Vietnamese special forces troops; Ronald Orso poses with General
Norman Schwarzkopf in Saudi Arabia during Operation Desert Storm.
As a member of the Army Medical Corps, Spencer was stationed
in the rural town of Pleiku in Vietnam’s central highlands. “It was
a fairly primitive setup, from which we crafted a very fine medical
group,” he says. “We had some 30 medics, aid stations, helicopter
services, ambulances. We learned from scratch, and as a result we
learned quickly.”
A popular misconception, according to Spencer, is that military
doctors mainly treat combat wounds. In fact, he says, “Illnesses always
outnumber injuries. You can have whole divisions taken out by diarrhea,
malaria, dengue fever. We saw injuries from field stoves blowing
up, from two-ton truck tires falling on people.
“Then, once every few weeks, there were combat injuries, which we
tried to stabilize in the field and then medevac out. And when an
In the Line of Fire:
Robert Lee Henderson, Vietnam War Veteran
Robert Lee Henderson, M.D. (’62), went to Vietnam a few years
before Spencer. After failing to get the field surgery slot he wanted
because too many other doctors had already applied, Henderson volunteered
for the Special Forces. He went to jump school at Fort
Benning, Georgia, studied special warfare at Fort Bragg, North
Carolina, and was assigned to a unit outside Saigon whose job was
transporting medical supplies to hospitals in the hinterland.
“Besides furnishing supplies and protecting soldiers from tropical
diseases,” he says, “we did medical visits to local villages, trying to get
people more on our side by taking care of their health problems.”
But some days, the stakes were much higher. Henderson remembers flying
in to treat soldiers at an American camp that had been completely overrun
by Vietcong forces, and its two medics killed. “It was nighttime, and
there were .50-caliber tracer rounds coming up alongside the helicopter,”
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