get them all designated i'll go back and see what's going on. so i go back and i look and the anesthesiologist he's looking me daggers saying you got me doing this for a dead guy. i'm watching. pete's exploring the abdomen and he's like you better get a drink. all of a sudden the anesthesiologist said i think i have a blood pressure here about 60. a couple minutes later, i think i feel a faint pulse. and it was 80/50. about 20 minutes later it was 120/80. a pulse of 80 and they finished the surgery and repaired his intestine. the next day he's awake and alert and ready for medevac. that's a chapter in the book. and it's a story i tell because i'm still amazed when i hear myself say it. it's an absolute experience that we had. and i think the end result of it

is something that i've talked about before. and that is when you do enough of this, when you triaged and treated as many casualty as we have in this experience, you come to realize that there is a certain force beyond what you can do. and i don't really care what your religion is or what your philosophy is or whether you believe in god or buddha or the force or whatever you want to call it. when you have experiences like that, you have to come away from it saying, there's something else going on here. because there is no question that very, very competent physicians pronounced this guy three times okay and the next morning he was fine. fit as a fiddle, okay? unfortunately, like so many of our other experiences, we got very little follow-up. i think one of the marvelous things that's happening now in iraq and afghanistan is that the system now is so well recorded and computerized and followed that they're getting much, much better information today on what they did and what the results are than we could back then.

this poem, which i hope you'll read quietly to yourselves, is a reflection of our experience at graves registration. and this is another story that never gets told. and i'm telling it because i think it has to be. after an experience with lopez and there were others not frequent but similar to this, somewhere in the upper commands came the order that whenever kias come in by chopper and go over to graves -- when the choppers land and casualties come into us and the kias quietly go off the other side of chopper and quietly go over to graves it's a holy and sang moanious place. -- sanctimonious place. they sign their duty of honor to arrange the bodies carefully and identify them, bag them and so forth. but the order came down that we had to go over and pronounce them dead.

because they were concerned about some of these experiences. so we went in turn doing this at the combat base. and i can still to this day remember going over and looking at this assortment of body and body parts. and i'm telling you this not to depress you or frighten you because these are the parts of war that nobody talks about. and these are the things that i think people need to know. it's very, very unusual for a surgeon or any physician who's used to dealing with living people and whose dedicated his life to keep people alive and walk in a fairly large room and see a torso without a head, legs with no torso. half of a torso and so forth. very, very very stark and disturbing scenes. all of which tell a story of war that is not frequently told.

my purpose here tonight is not to revulse by these things but from the surgical medical point of view but from the pure combat point of view there's a side to this and one of the purposes of this book is to let you know that these things happen. and this is what we see and this is what can happen in war. that's kind of a dark picture of me and dr. feldman. we grew up after the war and they gave us white suits. [laughter] >> all right. i want to finish there. i just want to make sure that i covered the rest of what i wanted to cover. i wanted to tell you that with all of this experience -- and today others can tell you far

better than i can because today the database is so much more sophisticated. but again, in the '60s it was fought. but some marvelous things came out of the war in terms of changes in medical treatment. let me just mention a few to you. so you have some idea that these things resulted in some pretty good things. all of you are now totally familiar with trauma centers. everybody has one. every major city has five of them. well, in 1960 there were no trauma centers anywhere. no one ever heard of them. every hospital had its own staff of surgeons, took their turns in the emergency room and you had trauma and you took care of. as a result of the work in vietnam with casualties, it became very clear that specialized concentrated efforts in the care of injured people produced better results. and so you'll notice that in the mid-'70s the concept of the trauma center was born. and now, of course, there's thousands of them all over the

country and all over the world. but those are the things that come out of war. famous boston surgeon whose name was churchill not related to winston. once said the only victor in war is the surgeon and there's an element of truth in it. the other thing that came out of vietnam was what was called a vascular registry. you can imagine with all the jashz that -- injuries we saw there were a number of blood vessels boys that had brachial vessels that were blown with shrapnel. as a result of the experience in vietnam, an army colonel named norman rich began a registry of vascular injuries which was the basis for many of the modern advances in the treatment of vascular injuries.

so if there's a good side to any of this, it is that we learned lessons from these casualties and the way they were treated. and make new advances to offer to the civilian population. okay? all right. i think i'm -- they start blinking the lights it means i'm time for me to go. i have to do one thing at the end that i've been holding this to the very end and i know he's going to be extremely mad at me. but i have to tell you about eddie feldman. eddie, fast eddie, lieutenant eddie feldman, my lifelong dear buddy from vietnam -- it's not that he just stood by my side in khe sanh. as did joe and don. in a totally separate incident on his own he removed a live mortar shell from a marine's liver for which he was awarded the silver star. and as we sit here tonight, he is a nominee for the medal of honor.

and we are all striving mightily to see that as a reality before we die. so just so you know, out of all these little stories casually pops up a super human being whose credentials are beyond my comprehension and i love you, eddie. thank you. [applause] >> thank you very, very much for a wonderful presentation. dr. finnegan, what we want to do now is have our q & a. you should take 6 to 8 questions and if i can have a hand, we'll go ahead and start. >> i enjoyed your presentation very, very much. >> thank you, sir.

>> the changes that you were talking about, the information, giving back, that started in the first gulf. the surgeon general at the time started the whole project. and i was the chief surgeon consultant at the time and the surgeons who are extremely young right now, they are the ones who are benefiting for what you've suggested. in regards to the pictures you show opening the chest, to me what's fascinating because one of the things that the medics on this special forces led right now is to open the left chest, put the hand and push against the aorta and stop the bleeding. thank you, sir. i sound better without the microphone.

because like you said it's very difficult to kill an 18-year-old kid. and that is saving a lot of lives right now on the war that we are having. i enjoyed very much. i thank you for your presentation. and by the way, sir, i salute you. [applause] >> other questions? sir? >> for all of us who have served in the gulf wars, we really do appreciate your service. and the experiences that you gained to support all of us. i was in iraq with the navy. and i'm curious -- when you talk about the evolution in military

medicine and what -- what you've gained through experience, have you noticed new inroads that have been made in recent events such as the gulf war? >> well, i'm not sure i'm qualified to comment on improvements in the later wars. i'm a bit long in tooth for that. i think the only ones i can actually comment on are the ones i experienced myself the improvement in vascular surgery and so forth. if there's one thing that's coming out of the gulf wars and iraq and afghanistan it's once again further advancements in the treatment of shock. in this case it's hemorrhagic shock. people who are so badly wounded they are bled out. for example, there's been a long ongoing controversy as to whether to give people whole blood, plasma, red blood cells. so much of the data of those recent wars have advanced that whole science.

but beyond that, i'm not much of an authority. >> other questions, please? doctor, you mentioned you had everything that you needed. what do you sense -- [inaudible] >> what do you sense now the difference where we have only two casualties today in terms of the time element. they get there faster but also it can be immediately addressed by whatever part of the team you need? where at times in the kind of combat that occurred where we're talking about helicopters bringing them in 8, 10, 20 at a time as fast as they can unload, what is the effect of that on obviously the great percentages that we have today? >> thank you. it's a question that we've been asked many times. i fear sometimes that my

credibility is at stake because again the team can tell you that sometimes the casualties come in two, three, four, five and that's pretty easy. but there were times in a major battalion sweep or so forth you could suddenly have 24 drop in on you. we always used the same triage system. and i do not recall -- and i would be happy to have the other guys comment. there was never a time in that whole year, including khe sanh, where we said put this guy in a corner, we can't get to him. never. when i say that and given the volume of the casualties and the adversity of the tactical situation, i sometimes think people are saying it sounds nice but we just don't believe you. but i think we can say with all honesty that we lined them up according to what we thought was the severity of their injuries and we took care of them. and there just was not a time when any of us said, you know, this is overwhelming.

we just can't get to this guy. so for us at least it didn't happen. >> can i make a comment, please? >> we have to pass the microphone around -- we have to pass a microphone to a questioner. we have c-span here tonight. >> oh. >> so we have to do it right. [laughter] >> don't you think, sir, the problem that they were asking -- you're in a teaching hospital. the residents are spoiled? that the time we were a resident you work and you do what you have to do. but now if somebody is not holding your hand, do you love your mother, the hours -- the thing of vietnam was that everybody was there to do a job. and they did it. >> that's correct. yes.

>> thank you, doctor. [laughter] >> that wasn't question, was it? [laughter] >> all right. >> before you start, there's a question here, i think. >> i'm sorry. i'm sorry. i had a friend killed in 1971. and he won a silver star. it's kind of stayed with me. it was a head injury. the platoon came up on a north vietnamese army division headquarters. and it was 60% casualties. he was hit in the head. he had a brain injury. he died the next day. and i was wondering, what was the treatment for -- >> for head injuries? >> did he suffer? >> well, i doubt that very much.

but let me just tell you we had an interesting situation with the third marine division. in eye core, again it's dictated by the circumstance which was a whole lot of heavy combat action going on very rapidly. we did not have on-ground a neurosurgeon or an opthamologist. they were out in the da nang bay. if we had a head injury or a serious eye injury, they were immediately choppered out to the hospital ship. and again the one problem we all have is that in counter distinction to the current wars, we had so little follow-up. we would stabilize them and transport them and then not find out much afterwards. joe? >> one thing we did do is give them -- [inaudible] >> true. >> we have time for one more question. one more question.

please. >> sir, thank you for your service. i have a question for you. you had talked when you first began about debunking myths, the drugs. one of the myths having grown up in the '80s was the agent orange. but i was wondering if you could comment at all on the chem bio if you had much interaction with that then or versus what you may think about that today? >> first off, i can tell you while we were there, i personally had absolutely no experience with it at all. and never heard the term and didn't know it existed at that time. so if there was spraying going on at that time frame, we were totally unaware of it. the only other thing i can tell you in follow-up is that in part of my research for my writing, there is an analysis of the agent orange that was used -- and i don't want to get into that whole political situation. but what they basically showed was if you take the total amount

that was used, the dilution factors and the ground covered, that what actually hit the ground was so completely small that it couldn't have hurt anybody at all. but that's just my reading. i'm not an authority on agent orange. >> dr. feldman? [inaudible] >> i've got an email here that was sent to jim but it was copied me a couple days ago from a very good friend, sorry. and casualty at khe sanh. by the name of bill gay. he lives locally and couldn't come this evening. so i'll just read -- it's very brief. jim, i know you'll understand i've had to move up my birthday celebrations san francisco from 14 march to this this weekend on a emergency basis to share with my old hospital mate a company commander. we promised to always celebrate together.

this is our 42nd birthday. as we both got a second chance at life in 1968. he was just diagnosed with kidney cancer and has to be operated immediately on returning from our special occasion. i pray this is not our last celebration. his company was whittled down to 125 to under 30 in 55 days of street fighting. he got hit 16 march. i got hit 8 march. i was so looking forward to giving you a standing ovation you deserve. the last is his comment but it would be mine. thank you again for being the right man at the right time for charlie med.

you had the balance necessary to steer that group through the storm of their lifetime. best regards, bill gay. >> thank you, eddie. thank you. thank you. [applause] >> dr. james finnegan served as a combat surgeon assigned to the third marine division in the northernmost provinces of south vietnam in 1967 and '68. to find oht more, visit jamiefinneganmd.com. >> we're here at this year's conservative political action conference talking to radio host jerry doyle. tell us about your new book. >> the title of the book is from like two standpoint. "have you seen my country lately? ? "and then the other is have you seen it 'cause if you've seen it a lot of people would like to go back there.

it was kind of -- when i was writing it it was hard to keep up everything as fast as it was changing. and you know we hear about hope at change but some people say whoa, slow down. and the book and i think a lot of what talk radio is and a lot what we're doing here we're like the speed bumps to get government slow down. i don't care if it's republicans or democrats. it's like slow down and let us know what you're doing and why you're doing it and figure out what the unintended consequences of what you're doing might be. >> did you write it for your radio audience or is there a different audience you're trying to reach for the book? >> no. the radio audience is the book audience. and the book is radio. it's really just -- a lot of -- we have -- what you and i do, we're in the business of information. and we have the luxury of spending our day reading and going through the trivia and the tidbits and all that kind of stuff. most people don't. they're stuck on the freeway. they're commuting. they're packing their kids lunches. we have the opportunity to take

all this information and compress it into a book or a three-hour radio show or what you guys do on c-span. and our job is to just give it to them. and say here's what i saw today. what do you think? not how to think but what do you think? and when i was writing the book it was kind of like this catharsis of like, wow, you know, you look at this mosh pit of political insanity and you're going where's the middle. how do i get my hands on this? it's for people to take a look what we do every day and maybe in 240 pages or whatever it is, you know, just get an idea of what's going on. >> and you're an actor as well. so how did you get from acting to essentially political influence in a radio show? >> i had a tv series babylon 5 it was a science fiction show and the guy who syndicates my show, mark masters is a huge science fiction fan and he contacted me through another radio host about trying to put my series back on the air. and then he was talking to me about talk radio and he says what do you think? i love talk radio.

i listen to it all the time and he said do you ever think about doing it and i said no. and he gave me a fill-in slot on a saturday night for one of his hosts. and he goes, three hours, you know, you get to talk to america and blah, blah, blah. i said okay i'm going to do this. i got to the studio. i was there two hours ahead of time. obviously you're the new guy. i didn't know at 12:00 you're off and 12:06 you're on. three, two, one i did my 12 minutes and i looked at the clock ahead of me and i had two hours and 4 minutes and i said everything i wanted to see and i started to panic and he backed me off. he goes okay you just did five days of radio. you might want to slow down, expand on that stuff lilth. -- a little bit. and it was -- i got done and i was like back in bed. i was in the fetal position. i was like the first puppy cold

from the litter. and i was oh, someone hold me. and i loved it. and it was -- like when i was an actor, you have to have a therapist so i used to talk to a stranger about my problems and pay them every hour. now i get paid every hour to talk to strangers about my problems. and, you know, if you can be that voice for the audience, you know, if you can be the validation of what they want to say but they don't have the opportunity to say and i think people like my show because i'm an equal opportunity offender. it doesn't matter if it's republican or democrat. if you do something right, cool, if you do something wrong, we're going to talk about it. and people have a place to come by and just be like, there's someone that's like watching out for me. you know, there's someone who's got my 6. and it's interesting to kind of watch the media because it's very agendaized whether it's fox, msnbc you pretty much know

what they're going to talk about and say. on my program what i try to give people is just an opportunity to have an exchange of ideas, front pomp, stop by, lights on if you can make it today, cool, if you can hang for 3, that's great, boom, i'll be here tomorrow. give people a little bit of insight into not necessarily what's happening but why it's happening and what the ramifications of that are going to be. >> well, the obstacles that you met when you first started in radio, was there anything similar when you first started writing the book? >> you know, with any publisher, like simon and schuster, thankfully, they have their relationships. and there are certain things that they don't want said. and in radio there are certain things they don't want shed and on tv there are certain things they don't want said. so you have to find a way around it. and you have to kind of just do it in a way that's not obvious. but they were very cool. they pretty much just gave me,

you know, the option to write whatever i wanted to write about. and, you know, it was -- i have a whole new respect for writers 'cause, you know, we have a lot of people come on the program with their books, oh, you wrote a book, that's cool. and then i wrote a book, wow, that's hard. when you talk i can always the next day or the next hour you know what i said last hour, i was way wrong. you know, i just got this information that changes whatever. but when it's on the page, it's there for all time. so what i did was i have, i don't know, 3, 400 end notes in the book. and i chronicle where i took everything from. so you can't dispute my facts. you can dispute my conclusions. but you can't dispute my facts because they are what they are. >> so do you want to write another one? >> not right now, no, no. really no. it's an interesting process. i think in writing the book i kind of then tweak my radio show

based upon what i did with the book. you slow it down a little bit and you go, what was really the book all about? what was the show all about? what is your show all about? and for me, it's about just trying to, you know, push the rock up the hill a little bit more every day. you know, i'm not here to tear down or to prop up. i'm not a cheerleader. which, unfortunately, we see a lot of in books and in tv and in radio. everybody is like, you just drop the football in the end zone. i think what we need more of in the media is coaches. you know, somebody who's going to smack you up the side of the head and go that was not good. we just lost the game but a lot what we have ideologically are cheerleaders. not challenging their own. and i think that's where the best exchange of ideas take place is when people just go, really, you believe that? why? when i hear about these financial summits that they're having with obama and his administration, dude, i can tell you exactly what you need to do. stop spending. summit over.

stop spending. but we're going to get ersk and bowles and look at all these minds going to help the deficit problem. stop spending. people are going to go we've had to do it. a lot of people got crazy in '06, '07, real estate, atm, i've always wanted a quad, an rv, i always wanted a boat. and so what we've done in the last year is reduce our spending by about 28%. and people are going, i had to do it. why don't they? you know, when i look at the government just now signing $1.9 trillion increase in the deficit to $14.3 trillion, and then i hear everybody talking about we're doing this for our children and our children's children. i'm like, no, you're bankrupting the next generation. and i think we have a responsibility to make the campground a little bit nicer

than the way we found it and what we're doing republican or democrat and everybody is like oh, obama is doubling the national debt. hey, bush did the same thing from 5 to $10 trillion. and i listen to these guys, well, obama -- i go you did it. you did exactly the same thing under the guise of compassionate conservatism which to me is rebundant. conservatism in nature is compassionate when you throw compassionate conservatism we can spend a lot of money. the whole thing about helping out religion and government and how do we advance that agenda, i don't want to protect government from religion. i want to protect religion from government. 'cause whoever writes the checks makes the agenda. ....