BRATTLEBORO — As an army doctor in Vietnam from 1968 to 1969, Robert Tortolani got to see the war from a variety of perspectives.
He saw the jungle on the ground directly supporting the medics and soldiers in harm's way. He also saw it from the air, as he would be taken by helicopter between the five companies for which the young doctor was responsible.
“I was doing house calls constantly in helicopters,” he told The Commons.
He was stationed at a “fire base” - a site created by bombing the countryside - about 75 miles northwest of Saigon in Tây Ninh Province.
Now retired from a long practice in Brattleboro, Tortolani periodically speaks with local groups. He will do so again from 7 to 9 p.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 26, at Brooks Memorial Library at 224 Main St., where he will show slides and 8 mm film that he shot at the time.
Off to a war zone
In a 2015 interview with Bill Holiday of the Brattleboro Historical Society, Tortolani explained that he graduated from medical school and was working in Burlington in 1967, when “it was pretty clear that everybody who was a doctor in training was going to go to Vietnam.”
“It wasn't a question of whether you're going to go or not - they needed thousands of doctors,” he said.
After a 12-week course in tropical medicine at Fort Sam Houston in Texas, he was sent off to combat.
“I was kind of eager to go and help out,” he told Holiday. “I thought in my role as a physician, I would be doing more good things, helping the soldiers, as opposed to the fighting.”
“I'm not particularly a fighting-type person,” he said, calling himself an “I'd-rather-heal kind of guy.”
His job there was to serve 900 men in all, divided among five companies, each with its own fire base.
“Each company had five medics; each company had five platoons, one medic to a platoon. Those are the real heroes: the grunts and the medics. They were the people who were really in harm's way, and I was the support for them.”
For the last four months of his service, he moved from working with the sick to working with the wounded.
Stationed in a field hospital, Tortolani cared for soldiers injured in combat, sometimes in mass-casualty situations that would bring them up to 150 patients at once.
Tortolani told the historical society that “about 90 guys I knew got killed over there,” in one case as the result of a plane-and-helicopter crash that he saw with his own eyes.
'A responsibility'
The doctor's presentation comes with the support of the local chapter of Vietnam Veterans of America, and representatives of the group will attend and participate in a question-and-answer session that will follow the presentation.
Tortolani describes himself as “very interested in veterans' issues - in what military people do and with what happens to them after their exposure to conflict.”
“Most people were not there,” he said. “I feel like it's my responsibility to share these experiences, now that I have more time.”