NEW YORK -- Brian C. Halpern was 19 when the war in Vietnam ended. He lost no members of his family in the war, nor does he see much of the legacy of the war in his medical practice. Halpern is a specialist in sports medicine and a successful one: He's associate team physician for the Mets, attending physician at Manhattan's Hospital for Special Surgery, with an office in New Jersey and another in Manhattan.
But in the past year Halpern, 42, has made three trips to Vietnam to set up a program in which doctors and physical therapists from the Hospital for Special Surgery will instruct doctors at the Bach Mai Hospital in Hanoi.Halpern's memories of his first visit to Bach Mai are vivid.
"It's one of the largest hospitals in Vietnam, and in 1972, in the Christmas bombings, we destroyed their pediatric ward and killed all the inhabitants," says Halpern. "It's a 1,000-bed hospital, but there is more than one patient in a bed. They were making crutches out of bamboo by hand."
Disturbing, certainly. But why does Halpern feel so concerned about Vietnam?
"You could ask why Vietnam and why not the Bronx," Halpern says, skirting the personal. "My answer is, there's need everywhere. Also I think the war does have something to do with it. We demolished this country, we affected a lot of lives. Maybe this is a way of repairing the damage."
Orthopedists, some believe, are among the least analytic of doctors. Their expertise centers upon a concrete framework of muscle and bones. So, in deference to Halpern's specialty, the bare bones of Halpern's life and career:
Reared in Lakewood, N.J., the son of an obstetrician-gynecologist father and a mother who was an assistant prosecutor. Graduated Middlebury College in Vermont and Cornell University Medical School. Founder of the American Medical Society for Sports Medicine.
Did the doctor always want to be a doctor? "No," Halpern says. "I didn't know what I wanted to do. Middlebury was a great liberal arts school in the middle of ski country, so I could decide what I wanted to do and ski at the same time."
"I volunteered on the ambulance up there, we got called out at 5 in the morning to a gas station where one of the attendants had had a heart attack. I was doing the breathing part, mouth to mouth. That's a very, uh, intimate thing. The guy didn't make it. I was very upset, crying. I found myself wandering through the campus around sunrise, and it turned out to be the most unbelievably gorgeous day."
Halpern is at a loss to explain how a beautiful sunrise following a death made him decide to become a doctor. He can only say he made the decision that morning.
The road to Vietnam is more easily explained. In 1995, Halpern was the medical director for a 13,000-mile, round-the-world bicycle trip, sponsored by World Team Sports, a nonprofit organization based in Charlotte, N.C., which highlights the accomplishments of disabled athletes. Halpern rode with the team for six weeks and found the experience inspiring. But he also wanted to leave something of permanent medical value.
When the same groups planned a 1,200-mile bicycle trip through Vietnam for disabled American and Vietnamese veterans last January, Halpern convinced the Hospital for Special Surgery to train doctors to establish a muscular-skeletal clinic in Hanoi.
He remembers particularly a talk by an American veteran who had been blinded.
"He told the kids, 'I'm embarrassed to tell you this, but one thing I remember is running through the rice paddies and shooting at anything that moved, even if it was a 12-year-old kid,' " Halpern recalls. "He was crying and so was everybody else and one of the Vietnamese girls came up to him and gives him a hug and say, 'It's OK, the war is over.' This kind of humanity you don't see in New York. It's there. I just don't see it every day."