Viet Nam: U.S. Bombs Hit Hospital in the North

Banning Garrett, editor of Two, Three, Many Vietnams (Harper & Row, 1971), is Asia editor for Ramparts Magazine. In early January he traveled to North Vietnam as a correspondent for Pacific News and CBS News.

WHEN WE drove onto the grounds of the Thanh Hoa Hospital compound, there were dozens of people at work building new structures amidst the rubble left from the recent U.S. air strike. At the same time, they were also constructing bomb shelters.

The grounds of the hospital extend for several acres, and include perhaps 30 buildings, most of them single-story brick structures. The compound is a complete facility, with everything from surgery wards and operating rooms to a pharmacy and even a medical school.

It was Sunday morning, December 26, when the planes came. Four U.S. jet fighter-bombers dived through the thick cloud cover and dropped eight demolition bombs and four new model anti-personnel bombs on the Thanh Hoa Hospital. According to the hospital's vice-director, Vo Dinh Chi, two of the buildings were completely destroyed and three others damaged. Nine people were killed, 11 others were wounded.

This recent surge of "limited duration protective reaction raids" was not the first time that the Thanh Hoa Hospital had been bombed. Originally it was a 550-bed T.B. hospital composed of two-story wards emblazoned with red crosses on their roofs. The hospital was completely levelled on June 1, 1965. "After the first bombing," explained Dr. Chi, "we protested the bombing, saying that it was not a military target. But it was attacked again and again, along with other hospitals in the province."

The hospital was then moved into the countryside. After the 1968 bombing pause, it was reconstructed again on the old site as the Provincial Hospital.

Today, several of its buildings are once again in ruins. Only a huge crater in the yellow clay-colored soil remains where the traditional medicine building once stood. Four patients were killed, blown apart. Three days after the attack the staff found the head of one patient 150 meters from the crater. Hardly any sign of the building remains.

Not far away were the remains of two collapsed buildings; the frames sagging, debris everywhere, the twisted remnants of beds tangled in among the wreckage.

"The bombing of the hospital was no mistake," said Dr. Chi as he escorted me around, clad in his white surgeon's robe. "There is no cover, no trees; it is very visible. The planes came in high to avoid detection and then dove to attack the hospital before warning could be given."

He pointed to a huge 750-pound bomb with U.S. markings, dated "3-71," which had not exploded. It had been dug up by hospital workers and now lay on the land like a beached seal.

As the doctors explained, the worst bombs were not the conventional demolition bombs, but a new type of anti-personnel bomb used for the first time in this raid. It consists of a "mother bomb" which showers an area with hundreds of metal silver-releasing bomblets.

Inside the wards, Dr. Tran Cong Tuong, dean of the Surgery Department, walked with me as I saw for myself the results of the air attack. The son of the vice-director had been wounded. A physician, Liu Ty Tung, of the Traditional Medicine Department, received a severe concussion and suffered a broken car drum. A patient sitting near her was killed instantly. Chun Ty Mai, 13, daughter of a woman physician in the hospital, also suffered a concussion and had one big toe blown off. Her father had already died in the war.

Nguyen Ty Hin, the sister of Mai, Dr. Tuong told me, was running for shelter when she was hit with shrapnel which severely wounded her hip. A large wound was opened up by a splinter from an anti-personnel bomb.

Medical worker Nguyen Thi Vinh was having lunch with her family when a bomb fell on her house killing her husband and three of her children. She miraculously survived after surgeons removed two pieces of shrapnel from her left lung. Only one daughter, also wounded, now remains in the family.

Dispatch News Service International