Is fighting a pandemic like fighting a war?

image copyrightCourtesy Marsha Four/Tom Hall

Is fighting a pandemic like fighting a war? Two Vietnam veterans - Thomas Hall, in Kansas, and Marsha Four, in Philadelphia - talk about their wartime experience, the coronavirus, and the parallels they see between the two.

Marsha spent three years in Vietnam as a US army nurse, stationed on the front lines in a critical care unit.

It was, she recalls, "in many ways a very dark time" in her life.

War "embraces you - good or bad it becomes the only world that you live in. Nothing else exists but that war and your safety and the work you have to do inside of it", she says.

Tom was 20 years old when he stepped off a plane in Saigon.

"As Marsha said we were all very young. And I just looked at it kind of 'Oh, what's this.' I went through a myriad emotions I wasn't even aware of."

He served as a military police sentry and dog handler in 1969 and 1970, working mostly at night, alone, patrolling landing zones or large bases.

The emotion he felt on those first deployments "was abject fear", he recalls. "You kind of have to get over that and say what's going to happen will happen, and you just do it."

image copyrightCourtesy Tom Hall

He is now national chair of the post traumatic stress and substance abuse committee for Vietnam Veterans of America.

Numbing emotions, he says, "that's a good thing in a war zone. Not so good when you come back to your country and be in a civilian world".

Using war metaphors when referring to efforts to fight the pandemic is fair, he believes.

"It's an invisible enemy," he says. "It's killing people at random and if we don't marshal all our resources and get focused on that, then it will overrun us."

He adds: "Front-line workers, they're dying. Nurses and doctors have died fighting this, just like in a war. And they're putting their lives on the line, just like in a war. I think the parallels are innumerable. I don't think it's a stretch at