Michael Shackleton led a New Zealand surgical team in Vietnam in 1963, under the auspices of the Colombo Plan, before New Zealand’s military involvement and during the year that saw Kennedy’s assassination and the overthrow of the Diem regime. His wife Annabel and five children under six went with him. This book provides a different slant on New Zealand’s Vietnam experience: the problem of setting up a surgical unit for civilians in the Binh Dinh Province Hospital with very little assistance, dealings with the New Zealand bureaucracy, difficulties of treatment with few resources and cultural differences, and interactions with the British and the Americans. Extracts from Annabel Shackleton’s letters home tell the domestic side of the experience. Michael Shackleton was an energetic and determined medical pioneer and it is a tribute to him that the unit he established continued to operate until the very last days of war, in 1974, providing health care for the civilian sick and war wounded.