ALL BLEEDING STOPS

An idealistic surgeon must face the horrors of the Vietnam War and his own limitations in this first novel by Collins.

In 2017, intern Megan Parker treats a man with a steel bar in his chest who, remarkably, is not only conscious, but also a doctor himself; he even assists with his own triage care. In a parallel story, an inmate and former lawyer named Wesley Underwood Tillinghast reflects on his time with the U.S. Navy in Vietnam. Both stories shed light on the life of Lt. Matthew Barrett, a gifted surgeon drafted into the Vietnam War in 1967 who’s easily set off by the deaths of his patients and the cruelty of his captain. Soon, the gruesome realities of war begin to break Barrett, and only a blossoming romance with a nurse allows him to endure the senselessness. But as the war drags on, he finds himself questioning not only the value of practicing medicine, but of living at all. After tensions with his captain erupt, Barrett is court-martialed, ending his service. The traumatized man returns to an inhospitable United States for a time, until fate brings him to a Biafra relief camp. There, he hopes to rediscover what initially drove him toward medicine. Collins’ novel is a gut-wrenching and expertly wrought drama, plunging readers into the atrocities of war as well as offering uplifting moments of human connection. The prose, though occasionally long-winded, features lush and sometimes-upsetting imagery, as in this passage set in a Vietnam operating room: “They know now, these shattered young men, and the knowledge hemorrhages from them, drips down the side of the table….They, too, have learned there is no preparation for war, no defense against it, no vocabulary for it, and ultimately, no survival from it.” The accounts of Barrett’s treatment by enemy combatants, his corrupt superiors, and his own demons are visceral and poignant, but amid all the sorrow, the author never strays from his commitment to reveal empathy as a core tenet of a doctor’s work.

A harrowing, evocative drama about the ravages of war and the power of compassion.