12, 20 & 5: A Doctor's Year in Vietnam

The wry and heart-wrenching memoir of a young doctor’s year behind the frontlines in Vietnam.
Assigned to the marine camp at Phu Bai, Dr. John A. Parrish confronted all manner of medical trauma, quickly shedding the naïveté of a new medical intern. With this memoir, he crafts a haunting, humane portrait of one man’s agonizing confrontation with war. With a wife and two children awaiting his return home, the young physician lives through the most turbulent and formative year of his life—and finds himself molded into a true doctor by the raw tragedy of the battlefield. His endless work is punctuated only by the arrival of the next helicopter bearing more casualties, and the stark announcements: “12 litter-borne wounded, 20 ambulatory wounded, and 5 dead.”

12, 20 & 5 is an intimate and unique look at the effects of war that Library Journal calls “an autobiographical M*A*S*H* . . . phenomenal.”