Let me back up, just a little bit, since I was a photographer when I joined the Reserve, I requested to be a photographer mate in the Navy. They would not do that for me without sending me to their own school. I was a graduate of one of the most prestigious photography schools in New York with a diploma but they would not accept that. That sort of upset me.

My next choice was to go the submarine service, I figured that would keep me out of Vietnam. They would not take me for that. So I said, all right it's your choice, "What do you want me to do?" They told me that they needed corpsman; Navy Corpsman is the equivalent of the Army-medic. I was ordered, as I said before, to go to Great Lakes, Illinois to learn to become a Corpsman. It took about eight weeks. I am not positive. We had approximately ninety-five students in my particular groups that become corpsman. Upon graduation from Corps school, most of the Corpsman received orders to go to a training program called the Fleet Marine. One of the duties of the Navy Corpsman is to take care of Marines. Something that I was not aware of at the time considering that I was so afraid to go to Vietnam. I was one of the lucky ones that did not get Fleet Marine school because I became interested in medicine; I was interested in surgery. So, I got orders to go to Bethesda Naval Hospital and become an operating room technician. I went to Bethesda. I spent about three or four months waiting for my school to start, while I was waiting, I was assigned to the central supply area where we did the sterilization of instruments, cleaning of syringes and needles. This was long before disposable syringes and needles. We had to wrap them up and sterilize them. I started school. Very, very aggressive school. I learned everything I could possibly learn about surgery. Hoping that I would get a job in a major Naval Hospital. Again, always keeping in mind that I would not have to go to Vietnam. When I finished the course, I was lucky enough to be ordered back to Bethesda. But this time at the Naval Research Institute, where we would be doing very aggressive and dramatic research with animal studies at that particular facility. I was there for about one year doing all kinds of fascinating research. Stuff that we now take so much for granted. For instance, I worked on the first pediatric oxygenator, for bypasses which is in existence and is used everyday. I worked on the first Doppler that was developed. I was doing fetal surgery on cows. Shock lung studies on baboons. My primary job believe it or not was anesthesia. I would do anesthesia to the animal; maintain and treated them just like a human being. Extremely expensive volatile animal. Anyway, that's another story. Probably about a year after I start doing research, I decided to go back to college. In the Navy, you can't do much of anything without asking permission. So, I went to one of the Lieutenants and said, "I hereby request permission to attend American University in Washington, DC and get some credit courses." He okayed it, but he said that he was under the impression that I was getting orders to leave Bethesda. That came as quite a shock to me. I had not heard anything. So, smart me, I decided why don't I volunteer to go to the Mediterranean instead of waiting to get ordered to go to Vietnam. So, I called the Bureau of Personnel. The Navy Bureau of Personnel who are responsible for cutting orders. I talked to some Navy fellow, "Hi, my name is Jules Hamu, I understand that you have orders for me." After about fifteen minutes, he comes back and says "we certainly don't have any orders for you." "But since you called." So, at the point I just wanted to find a hole in the earth. So, I volunteered, if possible I would like to have a hospital ship or send me to the Mediterranean. He said they would send me orders. A couple of weeks later I received orders to an aircraft that I knew belonged to the Mediterranean fleet. So, I was really excited that I was going to the Mediterranean and see all of Europe. Well, of course, the way things go in the Navy, that was not the case. I reported a long about way to my ship and while on the ship we got orders to go to Vietnam. I did not feel all that scared at that point, because an aircraft carrier nowadays, as you can imagine very large, carries about five thousand men, one hundred aircraft. It is a rather large city. The medical department was very impressive. We had over one hundred corpsman. We had a full operating room which was going to be my duty since I was an OR Tech. One other corpsman and myself were in charge of the operating room. We had physical therapy, pharmacy, two one hundred and four bed wards plus the private rooms for the officers. So, we had pretty much a full sized hospital. We left in the first quarter of 1968; we traveled south to St. Thomas, from St. Thomas we went to Brazil, from Brazil we headed west across the south Atlantic under South Africa to the Indian Ocean, the Madagascar Strait. And eventually we went to Subic Bay. Our main base was in the Philippines, though we visited other ports we kept coming back from the Gulf of Tonkin to the Philippines. So that was my duty in Vietnam. As an aircraft carrier, we sent what are called sorties, which are flights of fighter-bombers. We had to share of losses of pilots and co-pilots, radar intercept officers. Overall, I can not really say that I had the "Vietnam experience" as many of my fellow corpsman had. I say that because as I mentioned to you before, there were ninety-five corpsman that graduated from that course. Toward the end of the war, I did find out that there were probably between five and six of us still alive from that class. Corpsman were a high kill item from what I understand. I am truly grateful that I was never exposed to the trauma that so many veterans are dealing with today. Yes, I was away from home. That's trauma sure, but certainly not anywhere near what my fellow veteran's who were in not only hand to hand combat but just in the country and had to see the horrors and the pains in this war. I stayed aboard ship once in a while when we visited the port. The ports were many. We went to Japan, New Zealand, Hong Kong, and Australia. I am not quite sure which port it was; a fellow corpsman that I had gone to school with came to visit me. I was so glad to see him. We had been very close going through school. He had also gone to operating room school with me. So when I got orders to go to the research institute, he had gotten orders to go to Vietnam. His was probably one of the worst jobs because he was in what was called a battalion aide station similar to a "MASH" situation. They did surgery that was unbelievable. Luckily he is still alive. That was really my only contact with the war. Sort of a dream like state, I remember one night going to the combat information center in the middle of the ship, a very protected area, it's an area that has pretty much all of the intelligence of what's going on. We were approximately between 80 to 100 miles away from land in the Gulf of Tonkin, and there were other ships around, nothing that you could see with the eyesight, but radar could. I remember going up to a large, flat screen similar to a table and there was an operator on it and I noticed the little bleep on land. I asked the fellow, "What is that?" He said that is a MIG 21 leaving Hanoi airport. I sort looked at him and said we have that information, we know that much of what is going on over there? He said sure. That was pretty much a turning point for me. I remember that conversation. I basically walked away thinking what the heck are we doing here? I don't know much what was going on politically. I went there scared but I also knew that this was my adopted country and I needed to do something because so many other people had been drafted or volunteered. Many people were dying; we certainly were exposed to the news so we knew. But I had to do my part to a feeling of what the heck are we doing here? I am not going to say it was right or the thing was wrong. I never did at the time. But I felt what the heck are we doing here? Eventually my tour aboard the aircraft carrier was over. Coming home, we came down toward Australia and New Zealand, we crossed the South Pacific this time. We continued on an Easterly course and under South America and up to Brazil and eventually to the United States. So one thing that I am gratified about is that I am one of the few people that can say they circum-navigated the Earth. I miss Europe. To this day I haven't been to Europe. When we came back, not too long after we returned, I was discharged from the Navy. I did some odd jobs. I was never really exposed to what was going on with the veterans. I learned about this much later. I am not quite sure why it took so long for me to learn. I guess maybe because the war was not over yet. I think we finished in what 1971 or 1972. It was still going on. There was no great mass of veterans coming back. I guess that's my excuse for not knowing it did not exist at the time. I do remember when things were over, when people started coming back, the television showing how ungrateful the citizens seemed to accept the veterans in such an ungrateful way. I don't consider them baby killers. I never did. We were not just following orders; we were gone because we were Americans. We were told that this is our duty and we tried to do the best we could. Sure, I heard stories even while I was there of terrible things that both the Vietnamese and the Americans were doing but such is war. Those who criticize probably have never been involved in a conflict. I have always felt that you have to wear the shoes of the fisherman to be able to criticize how he conducts his fishing. Anyway, I did some odd jobs and eventually I decided to go back into the operating room since that was my training in the Navy. My first wife and I had a child in 1969. We moved to the eastern part of Long Island. I applied for a job at a small hospital in Long Island -- nice job there. About a year after I met a young fellow who was doing orthopedic residency. He was a member of the Public Health service out of Staten Island, New York. He mentioned to me that there was a new program going on there; keep in mind this was 1970; who will train people who had been in the service as medics or corpsman to become what was to be a physician assistant. I knew absolutely nothing about what a physician assistant was but I started reading about it. At that time if I recall, there were only really two programs that had begun. One was the medics program in Washington State and the other one was the Duke Physician Assistant program. This one was created by the United States Government to train Marine Physician Assistants and eventually became to trained physician assistant in civilian life who go out and help out those who were under-served medically. So I went to school and graduated about a year later and got a job as a physician assistant. I have been a physician assistant since 1972, when I graduated. I have done many things. I have done family practice, emergency medicine, cardiac surgery and now I am a physician assistant in Corrections and that is a challenge.