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Lucky Man, Self-Made and Selfless

Comfortable and happy are not the same things. Rich Vinroot ’92 developed a fondness for running toward trouble — and there he found a unique happiness.

 Adapted from an article by Zach Read for Vital Signs, the newsletter of the School of Medicine

 

An 800-square-foot apartment in New Orleans would be pretty spare living to a lot of us. Such as, those of us who aren’t making the move up from a shipping container on the airfield of a Navy base on the Horn of Africa.

Rich Vinroot ’92 has developed a rather broad comfort zone. Sitting at a portfolio manager’s desk or in the boardroom in his native Charlotte after graduation is what made him feel boxed in, and when he broke out, he didn’t leave a thing in one piece.

“I woke up at 26. I was not very happy.”

He wanted to go to medical school. First there were the prerequisite courses.  After he took his medical degree and a master’s of public health in 2004, he found himself an unsupervised resident in a crippled hospital in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. He joined Doctors Without Borders and spent a year in Kenya as a tuberculosis/HIV field doctor. He treated Haitians after the devastating 2010 earthquake.

Then, then — he joined the Navy Reserve. He had a chance to go to Afghanistan in 2014, and he would not pass that up.

You could say he’d earned his shipping container.

“All of us live in them,” he said in a Skype call this spring. “They’re stacked on top of each other and stretched out on a concrete slab on the southwest side of Djibouti-Ambouli International Airport, in the desert — mine is right on the airfield, overlooking the Special Operations compound.” He got a window and door cut into his box, and a bathroom tacked on the back.

By April, he was back doing emergency room shifts in the Big Easy. Not for long. On May 10, Vinroot was off to Saudi Arabia.

He’s not had time for a family.  A pet, even. “I really rarely have girlfriends — they usually break up with me because I’m usually doing things that are not compatible with having a girlfriend.

“I’ve become very good at being the person I wanted to be.”

Map

A summer in Ghana as an undergraduate convinced Vinroot he wanted to travel and serve in underdeveloped areas, “and it crept in to my mind that one day I might want to become a doctor.” (Map by Jason D. Smith ’94)

Where the fire is hottest

Richard  Vinroot ’63 (’66 LLB), successful lawyer, former mayor of Charlotte, once a candidate for governor, never shared much about his experiences in Vietnam with his son. But when he did speak about those he knew who had served, he spoke fondly of them, and his words had impact.

“As I was growing up, I recall hearing that a couple friends of his who had been drafted were killed in Vietnam, which led him to join the National Guard,” Rich Vinroot said. “He felt that he should also be willing to serve his country if so many others he knew had been drafted. He lasted one Reserves meeting, though, before deciding he wanted greater involvement in the war than the Reserves allowed, so he volunteered and signed up for the Army.”

The elder Vinroot’s interest in service skirted around draft protocols of the time; at 6-foot-8, the former Tar Heel basketball player, married and starting a career, could have stayed out.

“If he’d had a draft number, it would not have been at the front of the line. In fact, because he was a lawyer, the Army encouraged him to go to Officer Candidate School — this might have kept him from seeing combat — but he refused. He wanted to go to Vietnam and serve, like other draftees, so before long, against the advice of so many and despite his medical waiver, he was a grunt with a law degree serving on the ground in  Vietnam. … In the back of my mind, because I’ve always looked up to my father, military service 
has been something I’ve wanted to do. I felt that because I was privileged, that shouldn’t separate me from others. I learned that from him and wish more people would think that way.”

At the urging of his parents, while an undergraduate at Carolina, Rich Vinroot spent the summer after his sophomore year in West Africa, in Ghana. That summer he picked corn, worked in a brick factory and helped build schools. He lived by himself for half his time in Ghana; the other half he lived with a family.

“The experience opened my eyes to service and the diverse needs of the rest of the world. I realized then that I wanted to travel throughout my life and to possibly provide aid in underdeveloped areas, and it crept into my mind that one day I might want to become a doctor.”

After he had spent a few years in the portfolio management firm, the economy was improving and  Vinroot’s career looked promising. But he couldn’t shake the feeling that something was missing.

“I had lots of friends who lived in the area. But I didn’t see myself staying there and continuing a career in business. It was too familiar. I needed to carve my own path — medical school was a way for me to break away and fulfill an interest of mine. So, I went into the office one day and put in my two weeks’ notice. I made the decision with my gut and asked for no advice from others.

“People thought I was out of my mind.”

During medical school he developed an interest in emergency medicine — the thrill of dealing with trauma, working under pressure and making quick decisions appealed to him. But so did a life of international travel.

Those pursuing emergency medicine didn’t often pursue the global public health master’s UNC had begun to offer.  Vinroot and his roommate were the first medical students to do it.

 Running from normal

Dr. Chip Grant ’94 recalls that his wife, Nolan ’94, was driving down St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans when somebody honked and yelled at her. Rich Vinroot had spotted the Carolina sticker on her car and was determined not to let an alumna get away. Not long afterward, a mutual friend got the Grants and Vinroot together for dinner, the beginning of a friendship.

Vinroot had bought a 125-year-old house in a border zone between a prosperous part of town and a bad one after his residency sent him to New Orleans. He became the kind of neighbor that people from both sides stopped in to see — to visit or for medical advice.

Ochsner Health System: New Orleans, ER doctor (Photo by Jonathan Bachman/AP Images for the Review)

Ochsner Health System: New Orleans, ER doctor (Photo by Jonathan Bachman/AP Images for the Review)

He moved among hospitals in the large nonprofit Ochsner Health System. He was at Touro Infirmary when Katrina hit.

People had started making plans to leave the city when they saw the storm coming. “Including us,” said Grant, who is a cardiologist. “[Vinroot] said, ‘I think I’m gonna stay.’

“When bad stuff happens, when there’s a lot of stress, when everybody else is turning away, he’s gonna move in. He’s one of those people who doesn’t talk a lot about what he’s up to. He sort of quietly goes about his business. Rich is the person who’s gonna take the extra shift, work on the holidays. Mardi Gras in the ER is a time that’s going to be very busy — he’s gonna be there.”

As those injured in the hurricane began coming in, Vinroot said, “I really became a doctor. We had no electricity. I was a resident and nobody to supervise me. I think we did some good. I kind of grew up real quick.”

In the storm’s protracted aftermath, he said, “I was also being flown around in helicopters by the Navy to treat others in the region affected by the storm.”  That’s probably what got him to thinking about serving in the Navy.

On the one-year anniversary of Katrina, Tommy Tomlinson, then a reporter for The Charlotte Observer, went to the city and looked Vinroot up.

“He was sort of my tour guide,”  Tomlinson said. “He took me to the Lower Ninth Ward where he had worked — places he had literally saved people’s lives. He was doing shifts for two or three hospitals at the time.”

The city eventually settled down, but “normal,”  Vinroot said, “didn’t seem like what I wanted to be.”

A conventional hospital setting wasn’t going to work for him. He volunteered and joined Doctors Without Borders. He served as a field physician in the Mathare slum of Nairobi for a year.  Then he was sent to Haiti. Arriving five days after the earthquake, he stayed a month and a half.

Three years ago, at age 43, Vinroot joined the Reserve with the understanding that he would serve only if he were sent to Afghanistan or Iraq. After completing officer school in Newport, R.I., he was traveling in South America when he received a call about a need for a trauma team physician in southern Afghanistan — whether he took that particular deployment was up to him.

“I said, ‘Say no more.’ ” He returned to New Orleans to prepare for deployment.

Navy Reserve: 2014, Kandahar, Afghanistan, trauma team physician

Navy Reserve: 2014, Kandahar, Afghanistan, trauma team physician

Vinroot covers his mouth, nose and eyes during a sandstorm in Afghanistan.

Vinroot covers his mouth, nose and eyes during a sandstorm in Afghanistan.

He spent eight months in Kandahar as part of a midsized unit that received wounded from around the country.  As an emergency room doctor in New Orleans, he had been used to dealing with gunshot wounds. Now it was blast injuries from IEDs.

“In Afghanistan, in the back of your mind you always worry about when something bad is going to happen — when certain injuries and how many of them are going to arrive.”

Next was the forward deployment in Djibouti. Camp Lemonnier, a base of roughly 4,000 U.S. military personnel and coalition forces, is a station for counterterrorism, antipiracy and humanitarian work. There are fewer injuries to treat — most of the medical issues involve tropical diseases and heat injuries.

“Here, we’re not as worried about when something bad is going to happen,” he said. “The problem is more that there are a lot fewer of us to take care of injuries. So, if something bad does happen, there aren’t very many of us, unfortunately. That’s the added pressure.”

The base, across the Gulf of Aden from Yemen, is not far north of the Equator. It is the hottest year-round inhabited place on earth. During cyclone season, severe storms roll in from the Indian Ocean, overwhelming the sunbaked earth, causing flooding — all of which contributes to the adventure of life in home-sweet-shipping container.

Doctors Without Borders: 2010, Haiti, arriving five days after the earthquake

Doctors Without Borders: 2010, Haiti, arriving five days after the earthquake

On the road again

Vinroot in La Victoire, Haiti

Vinroot in La Victoire, Haiti, where he runs a program with Ochsner Health Systems. Vinroot is an emergency medicine physician at Ochsner Medical Center, the flagship hospital in Louisiana’s largest, nonprofit academic health system. In 2010, he provided relief work in Haiti beginning five days after the earthquake and continuing for a month and a half.

Life, Rich Vinroot said just before returning from Djibouti, could not be better.

“I truly believe I’m the luckiest man alive. I’m a 46-year-old man who’s doing exactly what he wants to do.”

He recalls an email his father sent to him when he was in Afghanistan in 2014.

“He never said much to me about my decision to serve, but in this email, he wrote me that not a day would go by that I wouldn’t be proud of myself for doing this. He was right. I was able to serve my country and serve soldiers who needed my help, and since I joined, I’ve met people I would never have otherwise met — some of the greatest people you could know.”

Tomlinson, who was on the list for Vinroot’s voluminous emails from Nairobi, Kandahar and Djibouti, believes Vinroot is motivated not only by the needs of the less fortunate but by all his father accomplished.

“He has tried really, really hard to live up to his dad’s legacy. He put himself in the middle of suffering, lack of medicine, lack of resources. He over and over again placed himself where most of us are not willing to go.”

Jim Shuford ’88 (’92 MBA) travels the world on business, and he has roamed some with  Vinroot, a friend from family beach trips. Shuford saw what he said was a remarkable thing when the two were on a long layover in Nairobi. It was years after Vinroot’s time there with Doctors Without Borders, and he used the layover to go back into the slums and check on some of the people he’d served there.

“He wasn’t just there to get the work done and move on,” Shuford said. “He’s so curious about people and where they’ve come from — even learning their languages.”

Vinroot has maintained close connections in Chapel Hill, serving on the Board of   Visitors and the alumni board of the Gillings School of Global Public Health. Today he’s on the board of the Medical Foundation of North Carolina and, having majored in history, the Center for the Study of the American South. He walks partly in his parents’ footsteps — Judy ’65 and Richard Vinroot have served on the GAA Board of Directors, and their gifts have supported faculty and students in the School of Government.

“I was able to have my cake and eat it while there, enjoying a fun undergraduate career and following that with medical and public health education. One of my hopes in sharing what I’ve been doing overseas is that it helps younger students think about ways they might serve throughout their careers, whether through medicine and organizations like Doctors Without Borders or in the military.”

His post-Africa itinerary included a stop in Chapel Hill. He was to share his medical experiences with the medical school’s alumni association — where, he jokes, most of those doctors “feel as if I might have a screw loose.”

In early May, he was preparing to close his little house in New Orleans again, to work as an emergency doc in Saudi Arabia with an oil company that’s affiliated with Johns Hopkins University.

Soon afterward he was promoted to commander in the Reserve. He re-upped for another three years.

“We will see,” he said. “Things can change fast.”

Go to Iraq or Syria? “I’d be glad to do that.”

Zach Read is a communications specialist for UNC Health Care.

 ONLINE: See more photos of Vinroot at work around the world.
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