Veterans Day: Letters home from Vietnam War connect husband and wife even decades later

Just out of USC’s medical school and with only three months of on-the-job training in anesthesiology, a young doctor was assigned to a MASH unit in one of the deadliest spots during one of the deadliest times of the Vietnam War.

The then 26-year-old Capt. Jonathan Benumof worked day and night — sometimes 72 hours straight — to save the lives of soldiers and even women and children caught in the crossfire brought into the mobile hospital.

The year was 1969, which saw some of the most brutal fighting as the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong launched their Tet offensive. Combat was most heavy along the demilitarized zone near where Benumof’s 18th Mobile Army Surgical Unit was set up at firebase Camp Evans.

“I was standing there, watching soldiers go to fight,” now Dr. Benumof, 79, said. “I prayed for them knowing we’d be operating on them later that night, and I knew many would not return. I would work to exhaustion for them.”

Thousands of miles away in her Los Angeles apartment, Benumof’s new bride, Sherrie, then 24, got a front-row seat to his bloody year of war through the hundreds of letters he had promised to send.

In “Letters From the Heart,” recently published and co-written with Sherrie, Jonathan Benumof details his non-stop work while in Vietnam from January 1969 to January 1970, his despair over the loss of life, his love for Sherrie and his desire to get back home.

It is a war story many Vietnam War veterans will find familiar, Benumof said. And a reminder, as Veterans Day is celebrated today, of the loved ones back home who provide comfort and connection when times are at their darkest.

On the job training

Benumof said he was the only anesthesiologist for the MASH unit and while usually there were several general surgeons assigned to the field hospital, for two months he also served as a surgeon while providing his own anesthesia. Benumof earned a Bronze Star for his life-saving efforts.

He and other medical staff often worked, he said, as incoming rockets and attacks hit the perimeter of the firebase, and even his operating room would take fire. A head injury from one blast earned him a Purple Heart.

The 421-page book comprises nearly 300 letters Benumof wrote to his young bride; the couple was married in July 1968, just six months before he shipped off to Vietnam.

When Benumof joined the Army in 1968 — to satisfy his draft obligation — and headed off to basic training at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas, he agreed to be an on-the-job trainee in anesthesiology.

“I figured I’d be exposed to a lot of specialties and get a look at what I liked,” Benumof said. “I wasn’t smart enough to realize that what was needed there was anesthesiology and orthopedics. I had no idea that was an automatic ticket to Vietnam.”

Benumof said he was scared to death when he got to his unit, knowing he lacked training — typically, a doctor has 24 months of internship just to work on a hernia surgery, he said. In Vietnam, he was treating extreme traumas in extreme environments.

In a letter dated April 13, 1969, Benumof describes for his wife a scene where he worked 48 hours straight, including delivering a baby born not breathing.

“Well, I grabbed the infant and intubated it immediately and breathed for it for an hour,” he wrote. “The baby came through like a champ, pink and crying. I went to bed about 5 a.m. That lasted about 50 minutes when I was called to the emergency room. Twenty-five Americans were brought in.

“Well, then the circus began (chest tubes, cutdowns, amputations, 8-hour surgeries). We got every single one of them off the table alive.”

Benumof was terrified and reading medical books ferociously, learning as much as he could in the first few months, he said. “Often, I’d have a book in my hand and a needle in the other.”

“I wanted to do the right thing by the soldiers,” he said, adding he gained confidence after the first three months. “My feeling slowly evolved and I took pride in difficult cases.”

Over time and with more deaths, Benumof became angry at the war’s toll. There’s one scene he said he still can’t shake 51 years later.

“I was called to the ER and had to run through a battle to get there,” he said. “They were offloading the injured — there were a lot of people who were dead. There was shooting all over the place.

“I had to go outside and cry because of the magnitude of the tragedy,” he said. “It’s all so sad, these young kids at 18 didn’t know what was happening to them. I was a 26-year-old captain and I had no idea what the war was about. I got myself together and went back to work.”

Pact of daily letters

Before Benumof left Los Angeles, he and Sherrie promised to write each day. The letters were his relief after long hours caring for the wounded, a quiet time where he could, though far apart, connect with his wife.

“She was my beacon of light that I was starving to get to,” he said. “That’s what I was going to get through all of this.”

And, when he didn’t hear from her, it was devastating,

“For the second day in a row, I didn’t get any mail; I’m dying,” Benumof wrote in one letter. “My life depends solely on your letters.”

Meanwhile, Sherrie Benumof was going through her own sort of quiet trauma.

At 24, she worked in a kidney dialysis unit at the Los Angeles County General Hospital. She did her best to stay busy, always up for taking an additional shift and even working as a private nurse.

“Not knowing is he going to make it back, will he be the same person?” Sherrie Benumof, now 77,  said of what would run through her head. “It was the uncertainty and I tried to keep busy.”

Unlike now, when news is covered in real time, Sherrie Benumof, along with so many worried families back at home, only learned what was happening a world away if she watched the 6 p.m. newscast. There she’d see bomb blasts and soldiers being rushed to help on a gurney.

Through her husband’s detailed descriptions of his day, Sherrie Benumof said she learned the stories behind those television images, while connecting more deeply with the man she had just married. They even developed shared interests through their letters though separated by an ocean. When her husband took up running as something to pass time, Sherrie Benumof took to the neighborhood at home, getting written encouragement from her husband.

Re-discovering the letters

Though she had good friends, they were busy with their own lives, she said.

“My friends couldn’t feel what I was feeling,” she said. “I wasn’t carrying it around like a badge. I wasn’t crying on the job.”

It would be nearly 50 years before her friends and the Benumof’s two children and grandchildren would get window into the couple’s experiences during the war.

In 2020, the Benumofs, now living in Rancho Mission Viejo, had friends over just before the coronavirus quarantine. One asked about the small, painted wooden box in a guest room.

Sherrie Benumof cherished the hundreds of letters from her overseas husband it held. They were the enduring details of her husband’s service, a diary of a very significant year in his life.

The box had traveled with her to Fort Rucker in Alabama where her husband had finished off his two-year Army contract and then to Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York City where he finished his anesthesia training. It moved with the couple to San Diego where Dr. Benumof would become a successful clinician-scientist-professor at the UC San Diego Medical Center for the next 47 years.

Though tucked away in the ever-present wooden box, the couple never read the letters. Jonathan Benumof also never spoke about his experiences in Vietnam.

But, their friend’s interest in the letters prompted Jonathan Benumof to look into the box. He pulled out one letter and read the first two sentences aloud: “Today started with a bang. We were attacked.”

After that, the couple decided to return to the letters. Jonathan Benumof would read them aloud to Sherrie.

“There were times where he just started sobbing and he couldn’t read,” Sherrie Benumof said. “Some days we would skip because it was just too heavy.”

After Vietnam, Jonathan Benumof said he’d been able to compartmentalize the horrific images and sadness over the soldiers lost or forever changed, and reading the letters was bringing all that back.

“Only when confronted with something like the Vietnam memorial in Washington or somebody would say to me, ‘Welcome Home’ and ‘Thank you for your service,’ did I have to face these feelings again and it was overwhelming,” he said. “Reading the letters, writing the book made me confront everything again.”

But returning to that year of exchanging letter has brought husband and wife even closer, Jonathan Benumof said. Looking back, they said they realize they made it through that difficult year because of their tremendous love for each other. They cherish the letters and what they stand for.

“They are a testament to our deep, strong love and abiding love for one another,” Sherrie Benumof said, “the power that love can help one survive the worst of times and how that same love helped sustain us over the past 52 years through the ups and downs of life.”

Source: Orange County Register