This paper explores the experiences of Vietnamese medical doctors trained during the First Indochina War. This generation, called Y50, studied at the Hanoi Medical University from 1950 to 1957, then located in Tuyên Quang province. Education included field surgery, malaria prevention, and other activities useful for the war effort, as shown by materials held at the Center for the Heritage of Vietnamese Scientists and Intellectuals in Hanoi. Despite the hardships of war, the Y50 generation benefitted from a sense of camaraderie that was essential in the trying circumstances of war. This paper also builds on recent work in medicine and nationalism such as Ming-Cheng Lo's Doctors within borders by showing that a nuanced approach to different generations is necessary to understand how individual Vietnamese medical doctors responded to the question of nationalism. Professors of Y50 such as Ho Dac Di, Dang Van Ngu, and Ton That Tung were trained by the French (and Japanese) and had access to resources necessary to conduct basic research and to earn an international reputation. This did not prevent these medical doctors from choosing to travel to the maquis to fight with the Viet Minh. By contrast, Y50 medical doctors such as Lê Văn Tiến, are less well-known outside of Vietnam as they had little opportunity to publish in international journals. Their lack of fame did not, however, shield this generation from having to negotiate the tension between politics and science and Y50 played an important role in the transmission of knowledge for later medical doctors and researchers in Vietnam.