THERE WERE NO FLOWERS

In this memoir, a man remembers his perilous service as a combat surgeon in Vietnam, an experience that prompted deeper reflections on his father’s time in the same position during World War II.

In 1942, when Meffert was only 6 years old, his father, Clyde, left for Europe to serve as a combat surgeon in World War II. Clyde was the chief surgeon in the 109th Evacuation Hospital in Gen. George S. Patton’s 3rd Army. When Clyde returned from the war, he resumed his surgical practice but as a changed man—now quieter, he reticently refused to discuss experiences that clearly troubled him. A quarter of a century later, when the author was 29 years old and a physician like his father, Meffert was deployed to Vietnam to work as a combat surgeon as well, a grim experience that gave him a small portal into his father’s own soul. But the author still remained unsatisfied—at the age of 81, he traveled to Normandy with his son, Stephen, also a surgeon, to retrace Clyde’s movements with Patton’s Army. Two years later, Meffert and Stephen would make a similar trip to Vietnam. With impressive candor and thoughtfulness, the author reflects on his own bleak encounter with war as well as the fraught but joyful nature of fatherhood. His meditations are brimming with insights, including about the limited guidance in combat one can limn from the Hippocratic Oath: “But what if all choices are bad, even catastrophic?” Meffert returned from Vietnam a transformed man—he was deeply disillusioned by the lies that catalyzed a war that killed and maimed so many. In achingly poignant terms, he conveys the understanding he achieved of his father’s eerie silence: “How can you talk about the dead, the torn bodies, and the desperate surgery without pulling unwanted memories out of your mind and reopening pathways to the horror that had slowly faded through the years?”

A surgeon’s remarkable family account, emotionally affecting and profound.