From Dighton to Vietnam: Chatting with Dr. Andrew C. Carr about The 8th Field Hospital

by Eric B. Schultz

A 1953 graduate of Dighton High School, Andrew “Andy” C. Carr was drafted unexpectedly, at 31 years old, into the U.S. Army. It was 1966, the height of the Vietnam War. A graduate of BU Medical School, Dr. and (suddenly) Captain Carr was the second neurologist to be assigned to Vietnam.¹

Andy Carr standing with some of his Dighton High School class of 1953 classmates.

“I thought I was too old to be drafted,” Andy told me during a “Zoom” conversation we had in early September 2025. Now 90 years old, a long-time resident of California, Andy’s memories of his boyhood years in Dighton and school years leading up to Vietnam are still sharp, with an occasional gentle prompt from his wife, Roberta R. Carr.²

Together, Andy and Roberta, a successful novelist in her own right, captured Andy’s experiences in Vietnam in *The 8th Field Hospital (second edition, 2022), *a book that details the improbable, often wise, and sometimes laugh-out-loud stories of his time in Vietnam.

Andy with his co-author, romance novelist, and wife, Roberta, cruising about 2015.

“At 31, I thought my draft notice was some kind of mistake,” he laughed, “until I learned that physicians could be drafted up to age 35.”

Ripped from his two-year fellowship in Boston at the Tufts University School of Medicine, Dr. Carr reported for his pre-induction physical at the Boston Naval Shipyard, where he managed to fail both his eye and hearing tests. Nevertheless, he was given passing scores, being informed (with a wink) that physicians didn’t need the vision and hearing of a combat soldier.

He chose not to protest. Andy had another “out” he might have exercised, too. His equally talented older brother, James “Irvin” Carr, Jr., M.D. (Dighton High class of 1950), was an ophthalmologist who had served five years as a Surgeon Full Grade in the US Public Health Service, one of the nation’s eight uniformed services. Irvin died tragically of a blood disease in 1966 during Andy’s residency, about the time Andy was drafted. Under the military’s “surviving son” doctrine, Andy could have petitioned for exemption from the draft.³

Instead, just a few months after receiving his draft notice, Dr. Carr found himself in Nha Trang, working in a field hospital as part of the 98th Medical Detachment KO (knockout) Team. It was a role in which resourcefulness, a sense of humor, and a willingness to color outside the lines were critical to saving lives and protecting his own sanity.

Captain Andrew Carr, MD, in Nha Trang, Vietnam, 1966.

“He followed his brother,” Roberta told me. “He married the first girl that he met. He did everything he should do. Vietnam was everything he shouldn’t have done. But,” Roberta added, “Andy embraces a new opportunity, and I think he loved being pulled out of his routine.”

Andy’s goals in Nha Trang were to heal soldiers, navigate a new culture, and stay alive. But his primary role, as one of the first American neurologists in Vietnam, was to keep soldiers in the field. “My main purpose for being there was not necessarily to cure people,” he recalled, “but to keep them from being evacuated. When a soldier came in and a doctor examined them, the patient might say, ‘Well, I’ve got these terrible headaches.’ And the doctor would say, ‘Maybe you’ve got a brain tumor. We’d better get you back to Japan, where they can evaluate you better.’ And so, the Army was evacuating loads of soldiers who were delayed in returning to combat. So, I was put there to stop the evacuation.”

Above all, Andy was forced to make sense of a violent, war-torn land that was so different from his quiet upbringing in Dighton.

Dighton Days

Andrew C. Carr was born in May 1935 in Wilmington, Delaware, to James Irvin and Catherine (Carothers) Carr. The family moved to New Jersey when Andy was a baby and to Dighton in 1941 when he was six years old.

“We moved to Dighton because my father’s job was in South Dighton at the Anchor Color and Gum Works. They had a big factory that made dyes. He was a dye chemist.”⁴ The Carrs first lived in Segregansett, in a home a few doors down from Dighton High School (and later Dighton Junior High, a building that burned to the ground in January 1991 and is today the site of the Dighton Town offices).

“After about two years in Segregansett,” Andy continued, “we moved to South Dighton on Water Street. Our home was three houses down from the Yacht Club, and we were right across the street from the Taunton River. During hurricanes,” he remembered, “we got flooded.”

During WWII, Andy recalls dirigibles flying up and down the Taunton River in search of submarines.

Finally, “my parents moved to another house, almost at the end of Center Street, between South and North Dighton. There was a farm called ‘Hundred Acres.’ We rented the original house, which was built in the 1700s. There was a pond, and the farm’s owner had a dam built across it. He generated electricity and was, I think, the first person in the area to have electricity.”⁵

Andy Carr, skating near his home on Briggs Street in Dighton, circa 1943. An enthusiastic duck hunter and fisherman, Andy was displeased with the damage done to the Taunton River watershed by his father’s employer, the future ICI America.

Andy’s junior high years were spent attending the North Dighton School near Pearl and School Streets, later the VFW Hall, and now a private residence. Andy’s father eventually retired from ICI. His mother retired after 15 years of teaching in Barrington, Rhode Island. The Carrs moved to Florida but are still remembered fondly by Dighton residents.⁶ And, Andy writes nostalgically, “the scent of baking bread instantly transports me back to my mother’s kitchen in Dighton, Massachusetts.”

Andy and Roberta visited Dighton about 30 years ago. “Everything I remember has changed now,” Andy said. “The pond is gone because they knocked down the dam where electricity was being made.”

During battlefield simulation training at Fort Sam Houston, Andy found himself near first in his group to complete the course. “I attribute my agility to years of practice sneaking up on ducks in my youth,” he wrote. “I did my duck hunting on the Taunton River, and sometimes on freshwater lakes,” he told me during our recent conversation. “We sometimes hunted near where I was living for a time, near the Yacht Club.”

Humility and Common Sense

For all his accomplishments, Dr. Carr is remarkably humble. He doesn’t present himself as brilliant, nor as a hero, but only as a person who tried to serve his country and do his best under difficult circumstances. His stories are as likely to feature generosity, friendship, the beauty of Vietnam, and the absurdities of military rules, as they are heroic medical interventions — though there were some of those, too. In every instance, we get to see the “big history” of the Vietnam conflict through the “small history” stories of someone who lived it.

Captain Andrew Carr, MD, 1966.

For example, Carr writes, if a U.S. Army guard in Vietnam was caught sleeping on duty, he’d be arrested and court-martialed, with a chance of spending ten years in a federal prison. The JAG officers who represented the guards used narcolepsy as their primary defense. As the only neurologist at the 8th Field Hospital, and without the proper equipment for diagnosis, Dr. Carr could only rely on a patient’s oral history.

Strangely enough, every case he examined had identical, textbook symptoms of narcolepsy, “almost” as if the soldiers had been coached. In his wisdom, Dr. Carr decided that his obligation was to take a history, make a diagnosis, and propose a treatment plan. The possibility of manufactured symptoms was, he wrote, irrelevant.

“The phrase ‘pick your battles’ took on a whole new meaning,” Dr. Carr concluded. If shipping soldiers with headaches out of Vietnam to Japan was a bad idea, shipping them out to Leavenworth because of exhaustion was just as harmful. “Managing capable men to other assignments seemed like the best way to manage the sleeping-on-the-job problem.”

Andy’s reflections on the war and his time in Vietnam are especially poignant when he recalls his return to the country in 2004.

“When I returned to Vietnam, the people at the airport were all dressed in Army uniform,” Andy told me. “It made me a little nervous. But when I talked with my guide, who happened to be South Vietnamese and spent a long time going through rehabilitation and concentration camps, he said that ‘Bygones were bygones. The war was a long time ago. We’re happy to have you with us.’ That was true of everybody,” Andy said. “I’ve never met anybody who seemed to have any animosity towards me because I was an American.”

Dr. Carr brought home a bagful of souvenirs from Vietnam, including crossbows and a rifle. They still adorn his home office and guest room. Why show souvenirs after all these years? “I suppose for the same reason I wrote this book,” he explained. “I want people to know that I served my country. I want them to ask questions about Vietnam, and how living there changed me.”

To that end, Andy includes his email address at the end of the book: AndrewCarrMD@gmail.com. We at Old Colony History Museum invite you to purchase this entertaining and accessible book (on Amazon or in our bookshop at Church Green), enjoy and be inspired by its many stories, and reach out — at the author’s invitation — to one of Dighton’s living heroes.

After returning from Nah Trang, Andy was stationed at the Presidio in San Francisco for the remainder of his enlistment. In 1968, he began his career as a Neurologist for Kaiser Permanente in Southern California, where he spent his career.

Andy celebrating his 90th birthday at his home in California, 2025. After returning from Vietnam in 1967, Andy spent a year at the Presidio in San Francisco before returning to private practice at Kaiser Permanente in Southern California, where he spent his career.

Notes

¹ National Library of Medicine, web October 2, 2025, Neurology in the Vietnam War: CPT Carr’s patients — PubMed.

² Roberta and Andrew were married in 1985. All quotes not from The Eighth Field Hospital are from a September 8, 2025 conversation between the author and the Carrs.

³ The “surviving son doctrine” (sometimes called the sole surviving son policy) is a U.S. military policy designed to protect families from losing all their children in wartime service. If a family has lost one or more children in military service, the remaining sibling(s) can be exempted from combat duty or even from compulsory service. It is not automatic — it requires the family or the service member to request the protection, and the military must approve it.

⁴ Anchor Color and Gum Works was established around 1861 in Dighton. It initially produced furniture-related chemicals, oil paint, and watercolor products. Over time, the operation expanded into a full-fledged chemical manufacturing facility. According to the U.S. EPA, the plant operated from 1861 to 1994, manufacturing a broad spectrum of chemicals: pigments, paints, halothane (an anesthetic), firefighting chemicals, concrete superplasticizers, soap, cornstarch-based products, textile dyes, antioxidants, adhesives, and more US EPA. Throughout the 1950s to the 1970s, the plant discharged waste directly into Muddy Cove Brook, resulting in significant environmental contamination. In 1992, the owner at the time, ICI Americas, rebranded as Zeneca, Inc., and began phasing down operations at the Dighton facility by 1993 US EPA. The legacy disposal practices included the burial of drums contaminated with chemicals. The EPA intervened around 1999–2000 to supervise the excavation and safe disposal of these buried drums.

⁵ The Hundred Acre Farm, described in online reminiscences, was located on Center Street about where the Segreganset River crosses under it (between Williams Street and Elm Street). People recall the farm’s water-powered generator upstream from the Briggs mills, so this places it along the upper Segreganset River, north of Briggs Street. There are references to the Hundred Acres dam impounding part of the Segreganset River to power machinery and (later) a small hydroelectric setup for the farm. In state records of dams, you can still find “Briggs Pond Dam” and other small private dams on the Segreganset, which shows how common these structures were in Dighton. Oral history mentions that Hundred Acres Farm had a picturesque mill-style building at the dam.

⁶ Author’s conversation on September 14, 2025 with Gil Garnett, who knew the Carrs and helped teach a North Dighton author the highways and byways of Dighton proper.