Dr. Robert Pacek spent his first night in Vietnam trying to sleep on his duffel bag on a beach outside the town of Qui Nhon.

	Bob Donaldson, Post-Gazette Dr. Robert Pacek displays a photo taken of him in the 1960s in Vietnam by Eddie Adams for The Associated Press. In the background is Pacek's wife, Joyce. Click photo for larger image.

The U.S. Navy had transported him halfway around the world aboard the M.S. Gordon, and then the Army appeared to have forgotten about him. The Pacific Ocean during his voyage had been warm, blue and calm. "I hated to leave the ship," he recalled 40 years later.

Pacek, 69, of the Natrona Heights section of Harrison, practiced medicine for 38 years in Tarentum before retiring two years ago.

On Sept. 6, 1965, he was an Army captain, a member of a team that included another doctor, a dentist and 15 medics. They were part of a military buildup that year that saw the number of American troops in South Vietnam rise to 184,000. He spent a year in Southeast Asia before returning to the United States and joining a medical practice started by his brother, John.

Accompanied by his wife, Joyce, Pacek recently returned to Vietnam for the first time. His trip included a visit to the towns where he had served and to the Catholic hospital where he had volunteered in his off-duty hours.

Qui Nhon is near the South China Sea, about halfway between Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City, and the old border dividing North and South Vietnam, the demilitarized zone.

While the doctors and medics had been delivered to within 20 miles of where they would serve, their equipment had been sent 300 miles south to Saigon, Pacek recalled. It would take several weeks and several trips by Pacek to recover it.

More distressing than the absence of equipment that first night was the absence of an Army presence on the beach. The Vietnamese were friendly enough, Pacek recalled, but the country was in the midst of a guerilla war. "We had weapons but no bullets," he said.

The next morning, escorts arrived and took the new arrivals about 12 miles inland to the Army's 82nd Field Hospital.

A month later, the unit moved to its final location, outside a small village called Phu Tai. There, Pacek and the other members of the medical team spent most of the next year inoculating GIs and treating their injuries and illnesses. The worst of the war was still ahead, and the sector in which he served was quiet. He treated one combat injury, an ankle wound, during his stint in Vietnam.

In his free time, Pacek volunteered at nearby Holy Family Hospital, which was administered by nuns from the Medical Mission Sisters in Philadelphia. He had been introduced to the director, Sister M. Karen Gossman, by another doctor working at the field hospital.

"So many of the Army doctors helped us out," Gossman recalled from her home in Louisville, Ky. "Not only did they provide medical care, but they assisted us with food supplies and transportation."

The need for medical care in Qui Nhon rose as the population of the town suddenly increased. "There were more and more people fleeing from the north," Pacek recalled. "The field across from the hospital was a large refugee camp."

"After sick call, we'd go in when we could to help out the nuns," he said. "If we had extra bandages, tongue blades or even some medications, we'd bring those along."

	Courtesy of Pacek family Dr. Robert Pacek and his wife, Joyce, at Halong Bay in Vietnam. The couple recently visited the area where he served as an U.S. Army doctor during the Vietnam war. Click photo for larger image.

Pacek added: "It was a nice change to go down to the hospital. The kids were especially great."

He recalled Holy Family as a pretty place. "The grounds were beautiful with flowers and shrubbery. ... It got you away from the remoteness of where you were."

Although the Vietnam War has been called the first televised war, the communications seem primitive by current standards. There was no Internet and no satellite linkups to carry telephone or television signals.

The only radio station that could be heard clearly broadcast propaganda from North Vietnam. "We saw Ann-Margret and Danny Kaye in USO shows, and there were black-and-white movies -- westerns mostly -- outdoors in the evenings."

An amateur photographer, Pacek shot color slides during his year in Vietnam. One recent afternoon, he projected some of those images onto a makeshift screen in the family room of his home. There were countryside scenes, including views of and from an ancient Hindu temple. He had some pictures of important visitors, including a very young Sen. Edward Kennedy, and many shots of local children.

One slide, taken with a self-timer, shows him writing in his tent. A large photo of his wife is visible on his bed.

While Pacek was volunteering at Holy Family, his wife, a public health nurse, and his older brother were on the other side of the world helping to collect toys, clothing and medical supplies for Vietnamese civilians.

Pacek had launched the drive with a letter home. Within days after he had made his appeal, groups had organized along both sides of the Allegheny River to collect and pack gifts in time for Christmas delivery.

His brother, Dr. John Pacek, was a friend of Lem Schwartz, then an editor of the Valley News Dispatch, and Schwartz made the collection effort the subject of several newspaper stories. By the mid-December deadline, enough items had been donated to fill a dozen cartons.

Residents throughout the Alle-Kiski Valley also donated cash, which was turned over to the Medical Mission Sisters to buy drugs and medical supplies for their hospital in Qui Nhon.

During his year in Vietnam, Pacek had a visit from another Alle-Kiski native, Associated Press Photographer Eddie Adams, who began his career at the New Kensington Dispatch.

Adams took several photographs, which he later signed, showing Pacek at work with his primary unit, the 142nd Army Medical Detachment, near Phu Tai.

Adams, who died in September, may be best known for his 1968 photograph of a Communist guerrilla being executed in a Saigon street. The picture won a Pulitzer Prize.

After Pacek returned to the United States and was discharged in September 1966, his wife continued to collect and send medical supplies to the hospital until 1975, when South Vietnam was overrun by the North Vietnamese Army. Holy Family, along with the rest of South Vietnam, fell under the control of the new Communist government.

The last four non-Vietnamese volunteers had two-hours notice to evacuate on Good Friday of that year, according to a letter Don J. Sewell, the hospital's last administrator, wrote to the Paceks from Australia.

	Eddie Adams/Associated Press Dr. Robert Pacek at work in Vietnam in the 1960s. Eddie Adams, a native of the Alle-Kiski Valley who won a Pulitzer Prize for a photo he shot during the war, took this photo. Click photo for larger image.

When Pacek left Vietnam, the worst of the war had not reached Qui Nhon. "The people seemed appreciative of what we were trying to do," he said. Although he sometimes wondered if the people he saw during the day might join Viet Cong forces at night, they were invariably friendly.

One of the things Pacek brought back from Vietnam were country scenes sketched on silk. After spending 20 years in the attic, the drawings were brought downstairs and rehung in the family room.

About the same time, the couple began to talk about a visit to Asia. "We're pretty adventurous," Joyce Pacek said. "Although he had not talked much about his time in Vietnam, I knew he was interested in going back. I encouraged him."

In February, they flew to Hanoi for the start of a three-week tour of Vietnam and Thailand. The weather in the Vietnamese capital was cold and wet, and Pacek found the atmosphere chilly as well. "The further south we traveled, the happier I was," he said.

Qui Nhon and Phu Tai draw few tourists, and the Paceks made special arrangements for a one-day visit. They took a morning flight about 300 miles north from Saigon and were met by an interpreter and driver. Qui Nhon, a town of perhaps 1,000 in 1965, had grown at least eight-fold, Pacek said. Mud streets now were paved, and motorbikes had replaced ox carts.

The former refugee camp across from the hospital was gone, replaced by new housing.

"The beach where we landed looked the same," he said. "They've added a nice park and new hotel."

In nearby Phu Tai, the yellow-stucco Catholic church where Pacek had worshiped was still operating. Not surprisingly, it was served by a new, but elderly, priest, Father Luke. The Vietnamese government, however, had taken over operation of what had been a parochial school.

The grounds of Holy Family Hospital were as beautiful as Pacek had remembered them, and a statue of the Virgin Mary still stood in the center of one garden.

But it no longer operated as a hospital. Instead it served as the residence for a Vietnamese Catholic bishop and home for a handful of seminarians.

Vietnam's population is young, and most Vietnamese have no firsthand memories of the long war that convulsed their country for 30 years. During their brief visit, the Paceks didn't find anyone who remembered the young, tall, thin doctor who had worked with children and other civilians during his free time. But they did find evidence of residual good feeling toward Americans.

Joyce Pacek recalled an older woman who came up to her husband during their visit to Qui Nhon. "She put her arms around him and said, 'American GI, we love you.' "