The Bridge

The Bridge by Alan Ramias is a book that was 50 years in the making, a story about his time in the war in Vietnam where he was deployed as a reporter/photographer for 12 months during 1967-68. However, I must write that this review is about me as much as it is about Ramias’ story. The US Embassy in Saigon was abandoned in 1975, and although there was no direct connection between that and my decision which occurred about six months later during my senior year of medical school, I turned my planned medical career from a medical-surgical direction to psychiatry. I had already been exposed to Vietnam vets in two VA hospitals in Indianapolis, and soon, there were two more VA’s in California. When I graduated from med school and four years later the residency in psychiatry, I began teaching, first as a formal part of the faculty and then as a volunteer faculty member at the medical school at UCSD. That lasted for the next 30 years. I am certain that I talked with, formally interviewed, evaluated, and treated and supervised  the treatment of more than one thousand Vietnam vets. I know so many war stories, the most harrowing of which were from soldiers who were assigned to back country reconnaissance duties, but the stories came from a variety of war experiences. I don’t remember whether it was a year or two that I volunteered to run group psychotherapy meetings at the Vet Center in San Diego during the early 1980’s. One of my most cherished plaques is the one of thanks from those vets when my time there came to an end. Although I did not set foot in Vietnam until 40 years later, as the result of listening to those stories, I developed a mild form of PTSD that stayed with me for many years, symptoms which finally abated when enough time passed and the focus of my practice turned primarily to psychoanalysis and civilian patients. The point of these revelations in this book review is that the material that author Ramias presented was both familiar and meaningful to me.

 This is a short novel, only 118 pages, some of which were poems written by the author after his return from Vietnam. However, he had misplaced the writing he had done during those years, until he unexpectedly discovered them hidden in a box. He had long thought of writing a book, and he was encouraged to do more with this material and the poems, and so this book is the result of this. The book must be considered to be historical fiction since his stories were told in part from his own experiences, but also from other stories that he knew about, other soldiers he interviewed. But his own memories and the interviews that he included are clearly consistent with the stories that I heard during the thousands of hours I spent listening to Vietnam vets.

 

Ramias described the horrors of a soldier being one of the few survivors of an ambush by enemy forces. He wrote of the soldiers' sometimes futile efforts to save their wounded military brothers. He described the difficult and conflicted feelings and a sense of uncertainty as the result of making humanitarian efforts on behalf of Vietnam’s civilians. And he noted the difficulties that so many soldiers encountered on their return to life at home in the US. For those, it was the life of war and not peacetime that seemed more familiar and comfortable.

 

The Bridge is not the work of a writer who has earned his living as a novelist. However, with the combination of his prose and poetry, he has successfully depicted the troubling, debilitating and prolonged emotional aspects that arose for so many as the result of the US military engagement in Vietnam.