Historical information

Recollections of Jan McCarthy:
Vung Tau, Vietnam, 1960. A tsunami was warned to be approaching, the hospital had to evacuate in eighteen minutes.

The boy in the bed had been eleven hours on the theatre table the previous day and been given thirty pints of blood. He had a gunshot in the leg that took three inches of the femoral artery. A piece was grafted from the lower leg. When he was moved off the table he started to bleed, so they had to go back in and redo.

A ramp was put up to the back of the truck to take the whole bed up and keep the boy as still as possible so the graft wouldn't shift again.

The tsunami ended up being a no-show.

The graft recipient boy was eventually med-evaced back to Australia.

Physical description

Small black and white photograph depicting a group of men in uniforms on and at the back of a truck. One man is on a bed in the back of the truck.