When Michael Reeder was drafted in 1966, he assumed — like most of the young men trained as combat medics that year — that he was headed for Vietnam. Instead, because his younger brother was already serving in-country, the Army sent him somewhere almost no one has heard of: the 106th General Hospital at Kishine Barracks, Japan. It was one of a handful of hospitals built to receive the most severely wounded American troops, evacuated by helicopter within hours of their injuries. Over the next three years, Michael estimates more than 45,000 patients passed through that single hospital.
He spent his first six months on the burn ward and the next two and a half years in orthopedics, treating amputees, gunshot wounds, and the aftermath of Viet Cong booby traps — including electrocutions from wires rigged to power lines that Viet Cong forces buried as souvenirs for unsuspecting GIs. He learned techniques the Army never taught him, reading a secondhand orthopedics textbook from a Japanese department store to better care for his patients. He read letters aloud to men who’d lost both arms — including one from a wife filing for divorce because she “couldn’t stay married to a man without arms.” He held pressure on a severed artery with his thumb until a surgeon arrived. And in the end, he never knew what happened to almost any of them. They left on a bus or a plane, and that was it — no name, no story’s ending.
What makes Michael’s account remarkable isn’t just what he saw — it’s what happened afterward. Because he was never in combat, he spent decades believing his experience didn’t “count.” PTSD wasn’t even a diagnosis until 1980, a decade after he came home to a country that, in his words, greeted him with protesters shouting “baby killer” and a family that told him not to talk about the war at all. It took him until his late 70s — after a breakdown triggered by a routine hospital visit decades later — to finally get diagnosed and begin to heal, in part through 25 years of mosaic art, and in part by walking up to strangers with Vietnam veteran caps and asking them to talk.
This September, on his 80th birthday, Michael is returning to Japan for the first time to see the place where the hospital once stood — now, he’s told, a public park. It’s a story about the parts of a war that rarely make it into the history books: the ones who treated the wounded, carried the weight of thousands of strangers’ worst days, and are only now, more than half a century later, learning how to put it down.
Episode 55 of Ask A Vet is available now on YouTube, Spotify, and everywhere you get your podcasts. If you’re a veteran who’s struggling, dial 988 and press 1 for the Veterans Crisis Line.