Autopsy of War
A Personal History
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3.9 • 8 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
On the outside, John Parrish is a highly successful doctor, having risen to the top of his field as department head at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. Inside, however, he was so tortured by the memories of his tour of duty as a marine battlefield doctor in Vietnam that he was unable to live a normal life. In Autopsy of War, the author delivers an unflinching narrative chronicling his four-decade battle with the unseen enemy in his own mind as he struggled with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Parrish examines his Southern Baptist childhood and the profound influence of his father, a fire and brimstone preacher turned Navy chaplain, while offering a candid assessment of the "God and Country" ethos that leads young men to rush wide-eyed into war. He describes the unimaginable carnage and acts of cruelty he witnessed in Vietnam, experiences that shattered his world view leaving him to retreat from his family upon his return stateside. Living virtually homeless at times, he visited veteran shelters and relived the horrors of war in a series of harrowing flashbacks as he dealt with suicidal thoughts. The author writes honestly and probingly of his episodes of infidelity and battles with sex addiction. Readers follow his steady journey toward recovery and his professional contributions in the field of medicine and technology, as well as a joint program with the Boston Red Sox and Massachusetts General Hospital to aid returning veterans. Perhaps most poignantly, Parrish speaks of his quest to discover the identity of one particular solider in Vietnam he could not save—and whose memory has haunted him ever since.
Autopsy of War is a soul searching memoir that is both an intensely personal narrative and a universally relevant trip through the world of war and recovery.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Parrish served as a physician-in-training in Vietnam from 1967 to 1968, but suffered its psychic toll for four decades afterward. In this forceful, painfully rendered memoir, Parrish (12, 20, & 5: A Doctor s Year in Vietnam) recounts how his war apprenticeship shaped his later double life. He may have looked like he had it all as a distinguished Harvard-trained dermatologist and CEO of the Center of Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology, but to his family Parrish was a wanton philanderer, distant father, and guilt-ridden son and brother. In an excruciating account of Parrish's downward spiral before treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder from whose symptoms he suffered long before the term existed he confesses to abandoning his family, becoming homeless, and suffering mysterious physical ailments. Only when Parrish finally began medication and counseling did the cloud of his depression start to lift, and though he lost his marriage, Parrish found love again, reconnected with the men who shared his wartime experience, and even returned to Vietnam to face one of the most frightening moments of his life. With this moving work, the exorbitant costs of a long-ago war seem all too fresh and relevant. Photos.
Customer Reviews
Good book. Glad I read it!
Read many books regarding activities in Vietnam but this books really opens ones eyes regarding the PTSD that is so prevalent today but it seems no one wants to deal with. From Dr. Parrish's perspective, this must have been a hard book to write. He was a truly dedicated Dr. While in Vietnam.
I am a Vietnam veteran.