Book excerpt: Dr. James V. Donadio Jr. was fresh out of his medical residency training in 1966 when he was drafted into the United States Army Medical Corps and sent to Vietnam to supervise a renal (kidney) unit at the 3rd Field Hospital near Saigon. In From the Military Draft to Vietnam: Memoirs of a Physician Serving in the War, Dr. Donadio looks back at his year of treating American soldiers wounded on the battlefield. During his service there, he also cared for Vietnamese civilians in outpatient clinics and Vietnamese children in nearby orphanages. Dr. Donadio found the unique medical practice in the war zone to be both challenging and rewarding, but leaving behind his wife and four children for a year was painful and required extra mental effort on his part to push ahead and attend to his medical responsibilities. His faith also helped him during his time there, and he was honored to serve as Francis Joseph Cardinal Spellman's attending physician during the Cardinal's Christmas 1966 tour of the combat zone. Dr. Donadio's memoirs included both his recollections of these experiences backed by a vast assembly of documentary sources.