Thomas Anthony Dooley III

Thomas Anthony Dooley III
Thomas A. Dooley, M.D.
Born	(1927-01-17)January 17, 1927 St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.
Died	January 18, 1961(1961-01-18) (aged 34)
Nationality	American
Occupation	Physician
Known for	Humanitarianism

Thomas Anthony Dooley III (January 17, 1927 – January 18, 1961) was an American who, while serving as a physician in the United States Navy and afterwards, became famous for his humanitarian and anti-communist political activities in South East Asia and the United States until his early death from cancer. He authored three popular books that described his activities in Vietnam and Laos: Deliver Us From Evil, The Edge of Tomorrow, and The Night They Burned the Mountain. These three were later collected into a single volume and published as "Dr. Tom Dooley's Three Great Books." The book jacket of "The Edge of Tomorrow" states that Dooley traveled "to a remote part of the world in order to combat the two greatest evils afflicting it: disease and Communism.

Thomas Anthony Dooley III was born January 17, 1927, in St. Louis, Missouri, and raised in a prominent Roman Catholic Irish-American household. He attended St. Roch Catholic School and St. Louis University High School, where he was a classmate (class of 1944) of Michael Harrington. He then went to college at the University of Notre Dame in 1944 and enlisted in the United States Navy's corpsman program, serving in a naval hospital in New York. In 1946, he returned to Notre Dame leaving without receiving a degree. In 1948, Dooley entered the Saint Louis University School of Medicine. When he graduated in 1953, after repeating his final year of medical school, he reenlisted in the navy. He completed his residency at Camp Pendleton, California, and then at Yokosuka Japan. In 1954, he was assigned to the USS Montague which was traveling to Vietnam to evacuate refugees and transport them from communist-controlled North Vietnam to non-communist South Vietnam.