More than once during his yearlong duty, thirty-two-year-old Dr. James J. Paul wondered what had possessed him to leave the security of a neurosurgery practice in the Midwest to experience the blood, guts, and gore of brain surgery at a forward marine hospital during the Vietnam War. In Blood on China Beach, Paul, a neurosurgeon from the Mayo Clinic, shares the story of how he learned his craft in a rudimentary hospital in Vietnam, twelve thousand miles from home.

This memoir picks up where most Vietnam battlefield memoirs leave off-when the choppers deliver the dead and gravely wounded...

More than once during his yearlong duty, thirty-two-year-old Dr. James J. Paul wondered what had possessed him to leave the security of a neurosurgery practice in the Midwest to experience the blood, guts, and gore of brain surgery at a forward marine hospital during the Vietnam War. In Blood on China Beach, Paul, a neurosurgeon from the Mayo Clinic, shares the story of how he learned his craft in a rudimentary hospital in Vietnam, twelve thousand miles from home.

This memoir picks up where most Vietnam battlefield memoirs leave off-when the choppers deliver the dead and gravely wounded...