The Napalm Story

It has been told so often, in so many publications and on so many TV programs, that no one ever thinks to question one of the more shocking horror stories of the Viet Nam war: that thou sands of Vietnamese children have been savagely burned by U.S. napalm. Only last week a CBS-TV program on the war showed a supposed victim. Dr. Benjamin Spock has not only made the accusation in print; he has also helped form a "Committee of Responsibility to Save Vietnamese Children." The trou ble with the story, says New York Times Medical Columnist Dr. Howard Rusk, is that it is not true. Reporting from Saigon last week after a painstaking investigation, Rusk said he was unable to find a single case of a child who had been burned by napalm, and he heard of only a few.

The doctor is not a man to close his eyes to such suffering. As chairman of the department of rehabilitation of New York University's College of Medicine, he is one of the U.S.'s leading experts in the art of restoring the afflicted.-Part of his life's work has been to help the war-wounded make a comeback--first in World War II, then in Korea, and now in Viet Nam, where President Johnson has asked him to co ordinate privately financed rehabilitation programs.

Danger of Gasoline. His latest trip to Viet Nam, in fact, was taken primarily for medical reasons. He was anxious to see how an amputee program, which he started 15 months ago, was progressing. As he visited 20 hospitals from the 17th parallel to the Gulf of Siam, he was struck by the fact that some 85% of admissions were for disease and accidents. Some of the ac cidents involved gasoline burns. Because the cost of charcoal and kerosene has soared, some Vietnamese have tried to make do with stolen gasoline; hundreds have been burned in the resulting explosions. Of all the burn cases--by accident or by non-napalm weaponry--that came to his attention, only 5% required plastic surgery.

As for war casualties, Rusk discovered that most were caused by the Viet Cong, who follow a deliberate policy of killing civilians. In a hospital in the Mekong Delta, Rusk came across a five-year-old girl who had lost both legs at the knees. The Viet Cong raided her village, and when they discovered that all the men had fled, flung grenades into houses where the women and chil dren were hiding. At another hospital, Rusk witnessed the arrival of 17 civilians who had been badly mauled when their bus ran over a Viet Cong land mine--one of the principal causes of war injuries. A six-year-old child died before Rusk's eyes.

"The load of casualties superimposed on the already overburdened hospitals is unbelievable," Rusk concludes. But the U.S. has kept the system from collapsing and will continue to do more. "It has always been our policy to help the sick and the wounded, whatever the cause, and this we are attempting to do in Viet Nam."

* Among the famous patients he has helped rehabilitate: Joseph Kennedy, Roy Campanella, Martyn Green, Vincent Lopez.

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