Every May, the country thanks its veterans. It seldom recognizes the physicians who experienced war.
You know the drill every May. Flags go up. Stores knock a few dollars off for anyone with a military ID. For four weeks, the country makes a real effort to thank its veterans. Then Memorial Day hits on May 25, and once the long weekend ends, so does most of the conversation.
Dr. Salvatore Forcina has spent most of his life on the other side of the story that receives little attention each May. It’s the one about doctors who learned to work under pressure long before they ever entered a hospital. He spent four decades as a general and vascular surgeon, eventually running surgery departments at two New Jersey hospitals. Much of what he learned about staying steady amid chaos didn’t come from a textbook. It came from a child who had been hiding from bombs.
Walk into an American hospital, and you’ll rarely hear that story. A lot of what happens in a trauma bay or an operating room has its roots in the battlefield, not in a classroom; like triage, fast vascular repair, blood transfusion done at scale, and tourniquet protocols that work. Doctors are trained to stay steady when everything around them is falling apart, and many of those lessons were learned on the battlefield before making their way into civilian care.
It’s one piece of military history that’s easy to overlook. It shouldn’t be, and Dr. Forcina’s own life is a pretty good place to begin in understanding why.
The Untold Side of Military Medicine
When people picture military medicine, they picture the medic crouched next to a soldier, or the Army surgeon working out of a tent somewhere overseas. That’s fair. Those people earn the recognition they get. But there’s another group that remains in the background. They are the civilian doctors who were formed by war long before they ever owned a white coat or set foot in a residency program.
Some of them were kids when war reached their communities. Many spent nights without shelter. School, if it existed at all, stopped and started as the fighting moved closer. They watched adults make life-or-death calls with none of the right equipment and no guarantee that help was coming. Decades later, running hospitals in New Jersey, Texas, or Florida, they still carried that early education with them, even on the days they didn’t stop to notice it.
About one in four physicians practicing in the U.S. today were born outside the country, according to the American Immigration Council. Some of them grew up in countries affected by conflict, warfare, or displacement. That’s not a footnote in American medicine. That’s an important part of the physician workforce, and one that seldom appears in most hospital newsletters or award banquets.
The War That Built a Surgeon
Dr. Forcina was born in 1941 in Scauri, a small town in southern Italy, during World War II. His family didn’t have a home for stretches of the war. They slept in shelters carved into the mountainside to protect themselves from bombs falling nearby. He was a small child, and to him, that was how life worked. He didn’t know another version of childhood to compare it to.
When he turned eight, his parents packed up what little they had and moved the family to Argentina, hoping for a stable life. He spent seven years at a boarding school run by Redemptorist priests, with almost no social contact. But he studied hard. He worked. And somewhere in those seven years, he decided he was going to become a doctor, no matter what it cost him or how long it took.
He graduated from the Universidad Nacional de La Plata in 1968. Still, Argentina wasn’t where he wanted to build his life, so he left for the United States with very little money. His Argentine medical degree meant nothing once he arrived. He had to sit for the ECFMG equivalency exams, failed the first attempt, studied harder, then passed the second. He slept on a pull-out couch for a while and taught himself English from flashcards under a flashlight, because he knew no one would make it easy for him.
Forty years on, he’s built a full career as a general and vascular surgeon. He became chief of surgery at Holy Name Hospital in Teaneck, New Jersey, and later at Meadowlands Hospital in Secaucus. He didn’t earn those positions through connection or good fortune. Instead, Dr. Forcina earned everything because he showed up and did the work, day after day, for decades.
The Lessons Battlefield Medicine Still Teaches
Ask a surgeon like Dr. Forcina what war actually taught him, and you won’t get a dramatic answer. You’ll get a practical one, the kind that sounds almost too simple until you sit with it for a minute.
Decisiveness is one. Battlefield surgeons don’t get unlimited tests or long consultations with three other specialists. They read the situation in front of them and act because waiting costs lives in a way it usually doesn’t in any well-staffed American hospital. Modern medicine, with layer upon layer of protocols, can lose that instinct if nobody makes a point of protecting it. Teaching younger physicians to trust their own judgment rather than hide behind a checklist is still one of the harder things a mentor can pass down.
Teamwork under high-stakes situations is another. On a battlefield, the surgeon, the nurse, and the person carrying the stretcher all want the same outcome. Rank stops mattering the second lives are on the line. American emergency rooms work best when everyone in the room drops their title and does the next necessary thing. The moment hierarchy slows down a decision, minutes get wasted that a patient doesn’t have to spare.
Just as important is remembering the person behind the injury. Wartime medicine forces a doctor to remember that whoever is on the table had a name and a family before they got hurt, and will still have one after. In a busy American hospital, running on tight schedules and staff shortages, it’s easy for a patient to become a number on a chart. Dr. Forcina highlights this issue often, almost more than anything else. He considers it one of medicine’s problems, the kind that often goes unnoticed.
Mental trauma is another example. Long before anyone called it post-traumatic stress disorder, military doctors were treating it under names like shell-shock and combat fatigue, working with almost no formal understanding of what they were looking at. That part of war never really stopped, and doctors who grew up around it tend to notice it in patients faster than most.
The Book and Documentary That Tell His Story
Dr. Forcina wrote about all of it in The American Doctor, published by Histria Books. Rather than presenting itself as a traditional memoir, the book recounts his experiences in a straightforward, conversational style. It reads more like a guy sitting across the table from you, telling you exactly what happened during the war, the loneliness of that boarding school, the failed exam, the pull-out couch, the slow climb toward something stable, without smoothing over any of it for the reader’s comfort.
He also sat down for an episode of Legacy Makers TV, an original series on the Inside Success Network. The episode, “A Doctor Forged by War,” is available to watch online at no cost. In it, Dr. Forcina talks about what actually kept him moving through all those years when quitting would have been the easier, more forgivable choice. His career is easy to summarize: perseverance and a plain refusal to quit, even when nobody would have blamed him for stopping.
A Case for Expanding the Circle of Gratitude
Military Appreciation Month is a fitting time to ask who else belongs on the thank-you list. Thank the veterans, obviously. Thank the medics and the Army surgeons too, without question. But also thank the immigrant physicians who grew up inside conflict zones and brought that hard-won steadiness into American hospitals. Many physicians reading charts at 3:00 a.m. or leading a trauma team first learned what sustained crisis feels like long before they attended medical school.
That’s not just a nice sentiment to close out a newsletter. It’s a staffing question, a leadership question, and a patient safety question, all at once, and it deserves to be treated that way. American hospitals are losing senior leaders to retirement faster than they can replace them, and the shortage only grows harder to fix each year. As hospitals prepare for a changing generation of leadership, the experiences immigrant physicians bring, including those shaped by war and displacement, may receive more attention than they have in the past.
This May, that’s worth remembering, long after the flags come down and the discounts expire.
