South African doctors have a very good reputation. The excellence of their medical training is matched by the breadth of their clinical experience. For example, a young South African doctor in surgical training in Britain often has more practical experience of bullet wounds than the boss who is teaching him; or such, at any rate, would have been the case until quite recently, when inner-city surgeons started to treat the victims of drug and gang wars.
Jonathan Kaplan is a South African surgeon who has eschewed the conventional career that was clearly within his reach for that of a volunteer surgeon to the war zones of the world. He puts his life in danger to save the injured and maimed, who are often very poor into the bargain (the poor are easier to hit than the rich). His first memoir, The Dressing Station, was a brilliant evocation of his wandering life; his second book, Contact Wounds, is less good but still enthralling and mostly well written. Somewhat loosely constructed, it leaves the author an enigma to me, and perhaps to himself.
He is the grandson of a Lithuanian Jewish migrant to South Africa (the story of Lithuanian Jewish migration to the southern tip of the African continent is an astonishing one). His father was an orthopaedic surgeon who served in the second world war and also in the Israeli war of independence, before being appointed to a chair of orthopaedic surgery in New York. One might almost say, therefore, that war surgery is in the author’s blood.
His first brush with adventure was in Israel. He was sent by his father to a kibbutz at the age of 14. He learnt to bear arms while patrolling the perimeter of the kibbutz to protect it from attack; and it was in Israel that he revealed himself to be someone who preferred his independence of judgment to the comfort of belonging to a group. Far from turning him into an ardent Zionist, as intended, his experience of post-war triumphalism in Israel caused him discomfort, and he has never returned there.
He discovered the charms of the tropics when, as a medical student, he spent a few weeks in the Seychelles. It was not the expatriate existence as such that attracted him, with its intense if artificial social life, but the rawness of life in the tropics and the freedom from the ties of bourgeois home life that acted as balm to his restless soul. What exactly he was fleeing from, and what he was seeking, are questions that the author does not, perhaps cannot, answer.
At the very least, he was fleeing from boredom and from the routine of a normal career. Moreover, thrust into the violent and dangerous chaos of war in places such as Angola and Iraq, trying to save lives with very limited means and resources, he was spared the questions that haunt successful suburbanites, whose ranks he might otherwise have joined: what is it all for, and is this all that there is?
But a highly intelligent man could not delude himself for long that he was making much of a difference to the overall situation in a civil war. The restlessness that took him to war zones also impelled him into other activities, such as journalism and film-making. The book includes a dramatic description of his search in the Madagascan bush for the body of a British environmental activist with whom he was making a film to prevent a mining company from wrecking an eco-system and the way of life of fishing villages, and who died of dehydration while filming.
The penultimate chapter is an account of his experience in post-Saddam Iraq. It will not make comfortable reading for supporters of the war, since it charges the occupying forces with ignorance, arrogance, incompetence and corruption. According to Kaplan, Saddam’s regime, thoroughly odious as it was, did at least function, and even conferred some benefits such as the emancipation of women. The downfall of Saddam has liberated retrogression more than progress, and religious fanaticism is more likely to flourish under the new dispensation than under the old. If Kaplan is right, the result will be the exact opposite of what was intended, not because Saddam was loved by the population or was other than a monster, but because so little serious thought went into what would replace his regime.
The last chapter is a reflection on one of the ironies of the author’s haphazard and rackety career. As surgery becomes ever more specialised and refined, so the general skills of trauma surgery in difficult or challenging circumstances are lost. But there is every indication that they might be needed in the years to come. Inadvertently, the author has made himself indispensable.