Valley Forge General Hospital

I just was drinking, drinking, drinking, drinking.

So in Colorado, so I was about two months late to Fort Carson because I was at Valley Forge General Hospital going through therapy to try to straighten my elbow out.

So but in Colorado, there was a huge group of physicians who had spent a year in Vietnam.

So we spoke the language.

I was drafted when I was 19, and, um, I didn't wanna go into combat, so I figured maybe if I join, I can get into something that's not combat related, and I'd got into medicine.

So I went and enlisted, and indeed, they let me be a medic, but I did well enough in basic medic training at Fort Sam that they sent me to Valley Forge General Hospital here in Pennsylvania for a 40-week course as a clinical specialist.

So when I finished that, I still ended up in Vietnam, and I still ended up in an infantry unit as a combat medic, but I was the assistant battalion surgeon.

So I was the supervisor of the rest of the line... one of the supervisors of the rest of the line medics.

after complaining of dizzy spells, headaches, nausea, blurred vision, and what would later be described as a nervous breakdown.

In October 1962, just six months after being posted to Germany, Heidnik was transferred back to the United States to a military hospital in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.

A neurologist there noted that Heidnik seemed to be exhibiting symptoms of a mental illness.

He was complaining of, quote, "Seeing things moving," which the doctor thought suggested a hallucinatory experience, possibly attributable to schizophrenia or a schizoid disorder.

After the hallucinogen defense was disallowed, Peruto had to abandon the LSD angle and pursue a more conventional insanity defense.

But how plausible were Peruto's claims? Well, Fort Sam Houston, the army base in Texas where Heidnik had undergone training, was a site for MKUltra research.

A project conducted there called Project White Coat lasted until 1973, but Peruto specifically claimed that Heidnik had been experimented on in a hospital, implying it must have occurred either during his stay at the army hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, or at Valley Forge Military Hospital in Pennsylvania.

Now, there is substantial evidence indicating that Project Artichoke, one of the CIA's MKUltra precursor programs, was implicated in the interrogation of returning Korean War POWs at Valley Forge Hospital in the early 1950s.