Vietnam, Iraq, and Health Care Organizational Ethics

Vietnam was the shaping experience for my generation. In the later 1960s, all male physicians who were not conscientious objectors did some form of military service. I opposed the war in Vietnam and was active in anti-war demonstrations, but the law did not allow selective conscientious objection. To claim CO status one had to oppose all war, and the memory of World War II - which I regarded as a "just war" - was still fresh.

When I completed psychiatry training in 1968, I had the good luck of being an officer in the Public Health Service for two years at the National Institute of Mental Health. The "real" military who were stationed in the area dismissed us as "yellow berets." But notwithstanding the insult, I was proud of being an Public Health officer.

This past winter, when my wife and I were part of the faculty in the Semester at Sea program, we visited Vietnam for 6 days. That powerful experience led me to read six excellent books about our wars there and in Iraq:

• The Things They Carried (Tim O'Brien)
• Matterhorn and What it is Like to Go to War (Karl Marlantes)
• A Rumor of War (Philip Caputo)
• The Good Soldiers and Thank You for Your Service (David Finkel)

All six books were terrific. I recommend any and all to readers who want to know more about what the war experience was like for our military. But for this blog, I want to describe three "lessons" I took from the books about the ethics of health care organizations:

1. The culture of the unit (squad, platoon & company) has enormous influence on the ethics of the unit's behavior. The military has a deeply held commitment to taking care of its wounded and dead. Soldiers risked their lives to act on this value. And, in the opposite direction, Philip Caputo described a massacre-like event carried out by the unit he was leading when he, and his men, were engulfed by hatred for the opposing soldiers. Unit culture could lead ordinary men to become heroes or monsters.
   
   In health care organizations we should recruit staff who - whatever other skills and talents they have - are caring people. But we need to pay careful attention to building and sustaining a culture of care. Good people can do bad things when the culture they are in points in the wrong direction.
   
2. In all of the books it was strikingly clear that the behavior of leaders had a profound influence on the ethical performance of the individuals in the unit. When the leaders were models of admirable conduct, the soldiers were more ethically admirable in their own front-line conduct. When the leaders elicited cynicism, bad things ensued. In Matterhorn there's a scary incident in which a soldier actually tries to kill the commander.
   
3. Being in a war shapes soldiers, both for better and worse. Retired General Peter Chiarelli (described in David Finkel's books) was so moved by what he learned about traumatic brain injury, post-traumatic stress, and suicide among veterans, that in his retirement from the military he is devoting himself to suicide prevention. In health care we're not literally in combat, but there are "war-like" experiences in fighting for the health of individual patients. More of us need to emulate General Chiarelli and move from immersive front-line experience to advocacy for social justice and societal benefit. (See here and here for stories about General Chiarelli.)

I've been critical of the ubiquitous use of war metaphors as seen in obituaries that describe the deceased person's "heroic fight with cancer/heart disease...." When physicians feel that death is their mortal enemy they are at risk for overtreating patients. Over the years I've heard students use the term "flogging," as in "the oncologists are flogging the patient again with another treatment that will just make him sicker..." But there are other aspects of war that model what we should strive for in health care: ethical leadership, a culture of caring, and experience-based advocacy.