Publisher's Weekly Review
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. Agent: Ike Williams, Kneerim & Williams. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A distinguished physician reflects on a tormented life haunted by memories of his one-year war. Given his tumultuous upbringing, perhaps Parrish (Between You and Me: A Sensible and Authoritative Guide to the Care and Treatment of Your Skin, 1978, etc.) would have ended up on the psychiatrist's couch in any event. However, this anxious, bright and dutiful son went on to Duke and to Yale for medical school. By then, married with two children and facing the draft, he volunteered for the Navy and served a 1967-68 tour in Vietnam. There, treating the horribly maimed and looking into the face of dying grunts, he acquired the "invisible wounds of war" that have haunted him ever since. Parrish's recollection of that harrowing year and the collision of his Christian morality and boyish notions of soldiering with the war's too-real trauma constitute this memoir's most memorable passages. The rest is a dual tale of remarkable professional success and private pain and instability. After obsessively rewriting his own war story, silently visiting a homeless veterans' shelter, living alone and celibate, or together with mismatched partners, Parrish finally sought help to treat his clinical depression. Only after exhausting a menu of spiritual remedies, finally getting with the right woman, submitting to an uncommonly adept therapist, reconnecting with his wartime hooch-mates, revisiting Vietnam, and today directing the Home Base Program (for veterans suffering from brain injuries and PTSD) has he found a measure of peace. After recounting his bumpy road to recovery, Parrish wonders if this unvarnished revelation of personal suffering amounts to little more than a continuation of the self-centeredness that drove him professionally and trashed his family. Some readers will answer yes, while others will credit him with an honest attempt to explain the full dimensions of an affliction we still know far too little about. A useful introduction to the causes and consequences of PTSD.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* For 40 years, Parrish, a physician at Massachusetts General Hospital, has wrestled with his experiences in the Vietnam War, writing and rewriting his own story. Before the term post-traumatic stress disorder was coined, Parrish suffered the destruction of the war in personal ways, finding himself unfit and unable to reconnect to U.S. culture and personal relationships when he returned. Parrish was raised in the South by a strict father a former military man and minister who never recovered from the death of his first son. Married and the father of two young girls, Parrish was just out of medical school when he was sent to Vietnam and felt a fracturing of his personality that only continued as he compartmentalized the war and his life back in the U.S. As a U.S. Navy physician serving with the Marine Corps, he worked sometimes in triage at the base and sometimes out in the fields with soldiers, watching the horror of combat and learning from the grunts the drudgery of just trying to stay alive. On his return, as a catharsis, Parrish wrote 12, 20 & 5: A Doctor's Year in Vietnam (1973) but could not banish his demons. His latest book is a deeply personal examination of the aftereffects of war that is often disturbing in its graphic descriptions but penetrating in its search for atonement.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2010 Booklist