Dr. Tom Dooley’s Three Great Books

Reading these three books at one go gives an interesting overview of Dooley's personal evolution. Deliver Us from Evil is a mythic tale of good vs evil, as the cocky young Lt Dooley cuts through the red tape and bends every rule to aid thousands of Vietnamese refugees fleeing the Communist North after the partition of Viet Nam in 1954. Anti-American suspicion melts away as he brings the miracle of Western know-how to bear on their pitiful lives. The word "I" occurs at least a dozen times on every page. By the time The Edge of Tomorrow was written Dooley had discovered that one rule he couldn't bend was that forbidding known homosexuals from serving in the American military. This is of course passed over; we are simply presented with him show more in new role---a civilian working for an aid agency establishing a medical clinic in a remote village in Laos. The Night They Burned the Mountain continues this narrative, now at a different Laotian village. The locals are spoken of with great affection by Dooley but are presented as universally ignorant and desperate. The daily grind of seeing hundreds of sick and malnourished patients at the clinic is regularly punctuated by the arrival of an apparently hopeless case brought from another community several days' travel away. The victim has a disgusting disease or gross, disfiguring injury, or both, made worse by the application of useless and unhygenic local remedies. But, with soap, vitamins, and American wonder drugs (named, along with the companies that donated them), the patient is restored to health. The irony is that Dooley himself was suffering from melanoma, a cancer which if detected early has a 90% cure rate, but whose symptoms he ignored for months and treated with pain killers, until a visiting surgeon insisted on performing a biopsy which revealed metastatic cancer which killed Dooley two years later.
Dooley is a gifted and entertaining writer. The shallow anti-Communism of the first book evolves into a deeper consideration of man's inhumanity to man. Dooley speaks more of his own irascibility and short temper, his struggles with celebrity, in the last book. There are echoes of Thomas Merton. His references to Anne Frank, Dag Hammarskold, and Albert Schweitzer remind us of the moral struggles in the mid-20th C West. I have to say that in 2018 I can imagine worse things than naive idealism. show less