military service and "Yellow Berets"

Many of the speakers in this conference mention trying to avoid the draft and compulsory service during the Vietnam War. During the Vietnam War one of the ways for physicians and medical school students to avoid the draft was to join the US Public Health Service and work as a clinician at the National Institutes of Health, sometimes despite having little to no clinical or laboratory experience. Many of these physicians—including Sam Broder, Jim Curran, Tony Fauci, Bob Gallo, Doug Richman, and Harold Varmus—were derided as "Yellow Berets," but as historian Raymond S. Greenberg has recently shown, the laboratory, clinical, and political training they received uniquely prepared this generation to confront the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. See Raymond S. Greenberg, Medal Winners: How the Vietnam War Launched Nobel Careers (University of Texas Press, 2020), and Raymond S. Greenberg, "Yellow Berets: How the Vietnam War led some physicians to Nobel Prizes," Vietnam Magazine, August 2020 (https://www.historynet.com/yellow-berets-how-the-vietnam-war-led-some-physicians-to-nobel-prizes.htm, accessed August 15, 2020).