Surgery: Disarming Mr. Chin

Even by battlefield standards, the op- erating room was bizarre. The patient lay on a bed in a storage shed, separated from a three-man team of doctors by a 10-ft. wall of sandbags. A 4-in.by 10-in. hole had been cut in the wall at bed level, and a slightly larger win dow above it was fitted with bulletproof glass. Behind the sandbags and peering through the window, Air Force Major General James Humphreys was all set to start a long-distance operation. With a scalpel attached to a 6-ft. pole, and a pair of pincers that looked like the gadget used to pluck a cereal box off the top shelf of a grocery store, Surgeon Humphreys was going to reach through the opening in the wall and remove an ostrich-egg-sized lump from the back of a Vietnamese farmer.

Ready for Home. The elaborate precautions were understandable. The lump below Nguyen Van Chin’s twelfth rib was a Viet Cong grenade, capable of spraying inch-long wire chunks in every direction at about 4,800 ft. per second. The problem began one night last week when Chin felt the call of nature. Soon after he stepped outside his hut near the village of My Tho, south of Saigon, a grenade launcher roared and sent its missile into his back from a distance that must have been less than 12 yds. The Viet Cong’s 40-mm. grenades need to travel that far before exploding.

Chin was rushed to Saigon. There, doctors discovered no broken bones, and their patient said he wanted to go home. But he could hardly be turned loose. U.S. medical authorities were called on, and General Humphreys, a chest surgeon and chief medical man at the U.S. Agency for International Development mission, volunteered to operate. Colonel Daniel Campbell, also a chest surgeon, and Dr. Tony Brown, a British anesthesiologist attached to AID, offered to assist.

A Live One. After rigging the new instruments, Dr. Humphreys stayed up most of the night teaching himself how to manipulate them. He cut into his patient gently, slicing ever so carefully down to and around the grenade. Then the pincers. Slowly the surgeon got a grip; tenderly he lifted the grenade and moved it toward a sand-filled container. Less than four minutes after he start ed, Dr. Humphreys sighed: “It’s in the box.” Mr. Chin sat up.

The grenade was hustled to the outskirts of Saigon, where demolition experts announced before they destroyed it that it was indeed a live one. Mr. Chin was, too, and sleeping comfortably, reported Surgeon Humphreys. Had this sort of thing ever been tackled by medical science before? “Are you kidding?” asked the still shaken doctor.