By Colleen Cooper Russell

Some people aspire to become doctors or to travel the world. Paul H. Duray, MD, FASCP, MT(ASCP) – a clinical pathologist who’s treated patients and conducted research in laboratories around the world – aspires to be a servant.

Duray, 70, happily describes himself as “a servant to the country,” after a career that has included both the military and medicine, sometimes simultaneously.

“I enjoy pathology, but my heart really is with people who need help,” said Duray, who retired as a staff pathologist in 2007 from the New England Veterans Administration.

Duray will continue to serve his country and help people in need when he goes to Iraq in February for his third 90-day tour of duty there as a flight surgeon. (Doctors in the Army Reserve can serve a maximum of 90 days at a time, and then they must come home for a year before being redeployed.)

Isn’t it unusual for a man his age to be sent off to war?

“When you become a physician and you take a commission in the military, they consider that for life,” said Duray who retired from the Army Reserve in 1997, after nearly 20 years.

Despite his retirement, Duray has been activated for duty in Iraq in 2004 and 2006, as well as this year. “These are not normal times,” he said.

A flight surgeon, unlike the name implies, Duray explained, is a physician trained to take care of flight crews, whatever their needs are. Such needs can include urgent care, psychology, psychiatry, or ministering to crews’ families.

“You make sure that the flight crew can fly safely and adequately,” Duray said. “We don’t do surgery,”

As flight surgeon, Duray has the responsibility of maintaining the safety of the air field, ensuring there are no hidden dangers. For example, he’s made changes when an air field was located too close to a fuel tank and when a women’s latrine was set up next to dangerous concertina wire.

During his 2004 tour, Duray was stationed at a base that had only a makeshift space, devoid of privacy, in which doctors examined and counseled female soldiers. “Soldiers could hear each other crying,” he said. Duray had that changed, setting up a permanent clinic on the air base that houses 30,000 people.

When needed during his tours, he’s also volunteered for other types of duty, such as emergency medicine in combat support hospitals. “I’m a person who used to working 20 hours a day.”

While the idea of the war in Iraq saddens him, he says it’s been satisfying to aid the troops there, especially helping people maintain their own health, say, by quitting smoking, improving their diet or lowering their cholesterol. He says he still occasionally hears from troops who he helped stop smoking.

Military experience is deeply ingrained in Duray’s family – and his psyche. As a youngster, Duray and his family lived in Hawaii while his father, Charles, was stationed at Pearl Harbor. He witnessed the Japanese attack Dec. 7, 1941.

Four-year-old Paul was home with Dad that Sunday morning, after his mother had taken his older brother, Charles, who was less talkative in church, to Mass. After hearing planes, Duray recounts, “My father said ‘Let’s go outside. The Air Force are having maneuvers.’ All of a sudden one those flyers came down our street, and opened up with 50-caliber machine guns. Tore up our car. I don’t know how it didn’t hit us.”

Duray says his Pearl Harbor experience – “a goofy way to start out life” – explains a lot about him. “There was always this light lit somewhere for uniform services.”

The Duray family lived in Hawaii until 1950, when they returned to Albuquerque, Paul’s birthplace. After a brief, unsuccessful attempt at college and some gigs as a jazz drummer, Duray enlisted in the Army in 1958 and served on active duty until 1961.

After his discharge, he returned to college, the University of New Mexico, where this time he earned straight A’s, a bachelor’s degree in biology, and minors in English and theater. He credits his stint in the Army for his academic improvement and maturation.

“When you serve like that you learn self-discipline,” he said. “You learn you’re not the only one on the planet.”

But while he is naturally a “people person,” Duray was also drawn to research. Studying biology and chemistry in college, he said, “was the bug that started me in clinical labs.”

“I loved using the microscope to find out what was wrong with patients.”

So, after graduation he moved with his wife, Esther, to California to train as a medical technologist at Mercy Hospital, Bakersfield, which offered the added bonus of paying him to work while he attended school. Medical technology provided him with a wide range of expertise that he calls invaluable.

“You get into everything as a med tech,” noting his experience drawing blood and performing EKGs, amid myriad other clinical contact. “You’re not just stocking the lab.”

After three years as a medical technologist, and much encouragement from his superiors, he enrolled in medical school at the University of Nebraska, from which he graduated in 1971.

Thus began an illustrious career in pathology that has included research in Lyme disease and melanoma, and teaching appointments at Yale, Harvard, Tufts and Boston universities. He’s worked at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Md., and hospitals in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, and Philadelphia.

Duray as a military doctor in the Army Reserve has also treated indigenous rural patients in Paraguay and Guatemala, and American Army dependents in Japan. During the Cold War era, he and an Army Reserve Medical Laboratory panel reviewed the proposed site in England for a U.S. Army Reserve Field Hospital to be used in the case of a military conflict in Europe.

Duray the soldier has passed along his penchant for military service to his children. His son Paul graduated from Virginia Military Institute and served in the first Iraq war, in 1991. He is a colonel in the Army, stationed at the Bethesda Naval Medical Center in the Washington, DC area. Duray’s other son, Charles, graduated from West Point and is a lieutenant colonel stationed in Colorado.

In his retirement, aside from the occasional stint of active military duty, Duray spends much of his time in his 1.7- acre landscape garden at his home outside Boston. “It’s kind of like an arboretum now.”

Duray’s wife, Esther, a registered nurse whom he describes as “an awesome human being,” continues to work in the Boston College nursing library. She’s worked there since the early 1980s supplementing the family income after realizing her husband, focused on serving others, was not going to be one of those wealthy doctors.

Duray continues to be a researcher even as he putters among his evergreens, rhododendrons and azaleas, performing controlled experiments on how to improve his homemade compost and fertilizer.

“I just adore it as a time frame hobby,” he says of gardening. “I can’t do enough of it.”

He also writes short stories and is writing a novel about homeland security. And he’s a regular speaker at ASCP educational meetings.

While Duray enjoys quiet pursuits such as gardening and writing, his urge to help others has never diminished. The fact that he enjoys the company of his beloved wife is what keeps him home.

“I would be in Doctors Without Borders now if I could,” says the man who can’t help but be a servant.

Colleen Cooper Russell is a freelance writer based in Indianapolis, IN.