A Good Soldier, a Devoted Doctor

The only doctor in this crossroads of a Shenandoah Valley village does not volunteer details of his years with an elite Army unit, or how he almost died in Somalia of mortar wounds. And his patients are too polite to probe.

But while waiting in the clinic to see Rob Marsh, many of them study the watercolor prints on the walls, depicting soldiers rappelling into battle and downed Black Hawk helicopters. How, they wonder, did this decorated combat physician come to treat the aches and pains of farmers and factory workers in the valley?

“They remind me every day where I came from, and why I’m here,” explains Marsh while driving over gravel roads and one-lane bridges in his pickup truck. He’s making house calls. And he won’t send a bill. It’s not very efficient, he allows, but this is what a good country doctor does.

They didn’t have a doctor before Marsh moved here six years ago with his wife, Barbara, and their children--now two boys and two girls, ages 3 to 9. “I feel that’s why I was saved, to come back here and do this,” he says. “This is my calling.”

Marsh practices medicine with a care and attention that seem lost to another era. How many doctors are left whose patients drop by just to leave a home-baked cake or to show off photographs of the animals they’ve raised in 4-H?

Marsh’s practice in a University of Virginia satellite clinic is all the more extraordinary when contrasted with the life he once led as a flight surgeon for Delta Force, the Army’s secretive Special Forces unit.

His office is filled with mementos of war zones where he mended wounds and lost friends. A bookshelf holds the iconic Delta Force dagger inside a triangular frame, along with the motto “Oppressors Beware.” In two examining rooms, drawings of Delta Force battles share wall space with osteoporosis posters. His Legion of Merit, two Bronze Stars and Purple Heart are stashed at home and in his truck.

What’s missing is anything that smacks of the Hollywood version of what happened to Delta Force and Ranger troops in Mogadishu, Somalia, in October 1993. Marsh has not seen the blockbuster film “Black Hawk Down.”

“I don’t have to go watch a re-enactment of seeing 18 of my friends die,” he says.

Nor did he consent when producers asked him to be a consultant. “I couldn’t leave my patients,” he explains.

Marsh, 46, had wanted to be a Green Beret since a third-grade visit to Fort Bragg with his father, John Marsh Jr., then a Democratic congressman from the Shenandoah Valley, who later became secretary of the Army under presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush. The son is John Marsh III, but everyone knows him as Rob.

The quickest route into the Green Berets was as a medic, so Marsh enlisted and eventually received a degree from Eastern Virginia Medical School.

He had his share of close calls. During the Persian Gulf War in 1991, a medic who replaced him on a helicopter flight into Iraq was killed when the chopper crashed.

But nothing compared to his experience in Somalia two years later. U.S. troops set out to capture two aides to a local warlord. Army Rangers and Delta Force operatives became pinned down during a night of pitched combat.

The casualties arrived at the airport base in waves. First a handful, then by the dozens--some 60 serious casualties in all. Marsh and two other physicians worked through the night and into the next day.

For Marsh, the worst was yet to come. Two days later, he was standing on the tarmac with other officers when a mortar hit. The man next to him was killed. Twelve soldiers were wounded, including Marsh. Here is what he remembers before losing consciousness: “A flash. Noise. I remember feeling pain.”

Shrapnel shredded his abdomen. A shard pierced an artery in his leg. Yet even as he lay bleeding, he ordered soldiers to carry the injured to his side so he could perform triage. “They were my people. I wanted to know who was hit.”

Even before his injury, Marsh had talked of returning to the valley, which he always considered home, though he was largely educated in Arlington, Va., public schools.

The university’s health system was looking to open a rural office in this area to show medical students the life of a country doctor--a breed that has largely vanished during the last 50 years as physicians have gravitated to specialties and urban areas.

“Rural areas can be hard on the family,” says Claudette Dalton, an anesthesiologist who heads the university’s community education program. “There are no cultural attractions. You have to drive 10 miles to the Piggly Wiggly to get groceries.”

Marsh saw it differently.

“He goes where the need is greatest,” says Dalton. “There aren’t many physicians who will take on all comers as patients.”

One day recently, Marsh spent the afternoon crisscrossing the back roads of this cattle-raising area. He made half a dozen house calls, most to elderly, housebound patients. Testing the memory of a stroke victim, he asked her how many chickens her daughter owns. At the home of a cancer patient struggling to pay for his arsenal of medicine, Marsh left a supply of salesman’s samples.

He would not ask for payment.

“If I sent them a bill for $150 for a house visit, they would pay,” he explains. “But I probably wouldn’t keep them as a patient.”

They are not just his patients, he says, but “my friends.”

That’s why he attends their funerals, serves on their volunteer fire and rescue unit, makes apple butter with the Ruritan Club, a community service group, and is an elder in his church. “You can become very close to everyone, very quickly,” he says of this hamlet of 200. “If you’re a good doctor, you treat people right and get involved in the community.”

It’s a philosophy he’s passing on to the coming generation of doctors. “He believes we should make sure we give more to our community than just medicine,” says Frank Petruzella, a University of Virginia medical student who spent a month working with Marsh. “He’s very involved in all aspects of people’s lives.”

Marsh has been involved in Carl Sprouse’s life for a decade. They were in Delta Force together, and Sprouse lives down the road. “When my father had complications after open-heart surgery, Doc Marsh would stop by at 11 or 12 at night to see him in the hospital,” recalls Sprouse. “He wasn’t his doctor. He just has compassion for people. He was a good soldier. He’s a great man.”

Marsh deflects such praise. In this small farming community he has rediscovered what he loved most about Delta Force. “It’s the same atmosphere,” he says. “Everybody takes care of each other, and we do our jobs.”