Dr.Tom Dooley and the Forces of Evil

I was a student at North High School in Denver when I read, Deliver Us From Evil, by Dr. Thomas Anthony Dooley.   I went on to read The Edge of Tomorrow and The Night They Burned the Mountain.  Dr. Dooley is one of the people whose life story has made an impact on my life.  It also made me a hawk on the misbegotten war that Viet Nam became. 

            Dr. Tom Dooley was born in St. Louis, Missouri, which, in one of life’s coincidences, became my home for most of my adult life.  As you might guess, given his intensely Irish name, Dooley was raised Catholic in a Catholic city.  He acquired a Jesuit education at St. Louis University High School, Notre Dame and St. Louis University School of Medicine.  He joined the U. S. Navy and found himself on the U. S. S. Montague, heading to Viet Nam to evacuate refugees.  This was 1954, long before this country’s involvement, but well into the turmoil that has marked this part of Southeast Asia for centuries. 

            While working in refugee camps in Viet Nam he rapidly established a reputation as a fierce humanitarian and foe to communism.  There is also strong indication that he provided the CIA with information about communist infiltration into the country.  Good for him!  Gathering and sharing information about the enemy is one way to practice patriotism.  He also left the military under a cloud of concern over his undisguised homosexuality.  The 1950’s were not a sexually enlightened era and the military lost a good man.

Dooley promptly began setting up refugee facilities in Laos.  He wanted to work near the Chinese border because, as he said, “…there were sick people there and furthermore people who had been flooded with potent draughts of anti-Western propaganda…” (emphasis added).  He was a relentless recruiter of personnel and supplies, begging, brow-beating and shaming American pharmaceutical companies into giving him medicine and material.  His work became the model for President John Kennedy’s conception of the Peace Corps.  

            He also kept writing and speaking the truth about what militant radicalism looks like when it runs rampant among helpless populations.  [If you think I am hinting at some modern day comparisons you are correct.]

            Dooley returned to the United States in 1959 for treatment of cancer, and died of a malignant melanoma in 1961 at the age of just 34.  He is buried in Calvary Cemetery in St. Louis, his home town, though clearly he was a citizen of the world.  

            Dr. Tom Dooley became part of a conversation that I and my family were having about the current storm clouds mounting over Syria. 

My husband fought in Viet Nam.  We have all seen the loss of life and limb, crumbled families, hearts and minds in the Mideast wars.  No one needs to tell me about the horrors of America’s tampering in other people’s civil strife.  I’ve lived through too damn much of it.   But then there are the lessons of people like Dr. Dooley.  There are the endless parade of children, women and the elderly who become, “object lessons” for Bashar al-Assad and his fellow minions of Satan.   How much is too much?  Is there a better remedy than war?  Do we surgically remove these evil men the minute they show their true colors? 

Right now I know just two things, both of which unsettle me to my bones.  One: I do not know what the right answer is.  Two: I simply do not trust my President to make the right decision for me. 

God bless Tom Dooley, who kept the faith.