Children of Viet Nam

"The purpose of the mission was to find war-injured children suitable for medical treatment in the U.S." How many such children were found by the three-doctor mission sent to Viet Nam by the Committee of Responsibility to Save War-Burned and War-Injured Vietnamese Children? Thirteen, for now. Eventually, reported one of the doctors last week, the program would probably transport from five to ten children a month to the U.S. for plastic surgery or prosthetic-device fitting too complex to be carried out in the western Pacific.

What of the Ramparts report of a million child war victims that provoked the formation of the Committee of Responsibility in the first place? The three doctors--Internist Henry Mayer of Redwood City, Calif., Plastic Surgeon John Constable of Boston, and Pediatrician Theodore Tapper of Philadelphia --struggled to establish reliable casualty estimates. They visited 37 of the Viet Nam government's provincial hospitals in three weeks, but in the end could do no better than accept the Vietnamese Ministry of Health's report that casualties are now being admitted to its hospitals at the rate of 50,000 a year. Among them: 10,000 children. The doctors noted that according to some estimates, only one-third of civilian casualties ever reach a hospital. That would mean 30,000 child casualties a year at current rates, and perhaps 150,000 since the war began.

Speeding Aid. As for the claim that Vietnamese hospitals are crowded with burn victims in need of plastic surgery in the U.S., the committee tended to agree with Dr. Howard A. Rusk, the U.S.'s best-known rehabilitation expert, that such is not the case. Among the hundreds of casualties the doctors saw, only 38 were suffering from "war burns" (both phosphorus and napalm), and 13 of these were children. They found no patients with third-degree burns covering more than 20% of the body surface. This, they concluded, jibed with the opinion of U.S. military experts that the most severely burned victims of napalm and phosphorus die, sometimes of suffocation, without reaching a hospital. The C.O.R. doctors discounted Rusk's theory that many civilian "napalm burn" cases were actually injured trying to cook with gasoline: several victims they saw described the bomb that hurt them as a "gasoline bomb."

The C.O.R. doctors noted, as has every U.S. visitor to Viet Nam, that civilian hospitals there are piteously inadequate, understaffed, and lack essential supplies. U.S. military and civilian authorities are now speeding aid to the Saigon government to enlarge and improve the hospitals and build several new ones. And since a major difficulty for civilians is getting to a hospital in time for treatment to be effective, Major General James W. Humphreys, who has been in charge of U.S. medical assistance to Viet Nam, has been trying to get helicopters to airlift casualties, as is now done for the military wounded.

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