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Dr. William Chin:        He was an interesting person.  When I had first met him and was talking with the various colleagues, I was told that he was a very stern disciplinarian.  There was one method of disciplining officers that received notoriety at the time.  If he was really displeased with you, he would transfer you to work as a medical officer on board a Coast Guard cutter in the Artic Arctic Ocean, accompanying the Geodetic Survey people, so the stories go.  It was essentially a six-month cruise in the Artic Arctic Ocean, so he would exile you to that assignment.  But to my knowledge, after knowing him I don’t think he ever carried out this dire reassignment of his personnel.  The closest he came was when one of my officers made a breach of etiquette in government protocol.  He was in one of these two-year draftee positions, and he felt that I was derelict in my duty as commanding officer and was not telling the volunteers the whole story about the risk they might face.  Instead of writing a letter of complaint, showing it to me, and having me to send it to Dr. Coatney -- which is the usual way you handle these complaints -- he addressed it to the Surgeon General of the United States Public Health Service.  I got a phone call from Dr. Coatney, “What’s this about?  I get this letter from the Surgeon General written by,” well I won’t give his name but his initials are H.K., “written by H.K.  complaining about you.”  I told Dr. Coatney that it was not true because when we explained the procedure to the volunteers, we had a cardboard with the information printed on it in front of us.  It was almost like the police pulling out their Miranda card and reading the same thing over again.  The volunteers all knew that one of the risks was death.  You can die of malaria. 

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Dr. Coatney was infuriated, he said, “I’m going send him to the Artic Arctic Patrol….”  I said, “Calm down, Dr. Coatney.  This guy has a family with two children, and while this might please you to send him up there, his family’s going to suffer….”  So he relented and reassigned H.K.  to an assignment almost as bad, as medical officer to one of the Federal mental institutions.  He was exiled to a mental institution for the rest of his service.

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