In 1967-68 while serving as a flight surgeon at Marine Air Group 13 (MAG-13) at Chu Lai, Vietnam, Lt. Bruce Mallin took numerous photographs to document his activities. In addition to the usual military duties, his group carried out informal medical “clinics” for several adjacent rural communities. These excursions were known as “MED-CAPS” (Medical Civil Action Projects) for families in the area.
Bruce often took photos of the kids and their families as they awaited medical treatment. Those photographs were stored away, until he and his wife, Risa, started thinking about traveling to Vietnam. At that time, Bruce was pleasantly surprised to find that even after many years of storage, the slides were mostly intact. They made copies of several of the pictures with the wildly improbable thought that someone would recognize one of the faces in a photograph.
Last spring Bruce and Risa visited Chu Lai with hopes of being able to connect with any of the people he had photographed 47 years previously. “It was a long shot,” says Bruce. They hired a guide/translator who took them to a coffee shop on the main highway in Chu Lai, where they encountered a man in his early 60s. The elderly man didn’t recognize any of the people in the photographs, but he sent them down an alley where he knew an 82-year-old man who had worked at the base during that time. That gentleman recognized one woman, but said she had moved to another area of Vietnam many years before. Taking the photograph to another neighbor, who didn’t recognize anyone in the photos, he sent the Mallins to the other side of town, closer to where the base had been.
Once again the photographs were circulated, discussed and shared. One photo – of a mother holding an infant – caught the eye of a resident. She thought one of the women in a photo looked like a neighbor. At the neighbor’s house, she said the woman indeed might be her older sister who had been a vendor near the gate of the base. Cell phones came out, a photo of the photograph was taken, and it was texted to the sister in Chicago. The search was a wonderful adventure, and being in the homes of the residents of Chu Lai was fascinating, but the Mallins felt the search was over without any real connections.
Then, two weeks after their return, Bruce received a phone call. The woman on the phone said the photograph had made its way to Texas, and her mother was thrilled to receive it, for she was the infant in the photo – a memory of difficult times almost 50 years ago. And the circle was complete!
Bruce and Risa are long-time Phoenix residents. Bruce grew up in the Prescott area, but his family came to Phoenix in the 1950s and was integral to the development of Beth el Congregation. risa is a former director of the arizona Jewish historical society.
