Lily Adams was born and raised in New York City. Her mother, who died when Lily was 8 months old, was Italian. Her father is Chinese.
In 1966 she enrolled in a three-year nursing program at Mount Vernon Hospital. ”One day–this was 1967–an Army Nurse Corps recruiter came and showed us this wonderful new movie about being an Army nurse. Well, that was the answer to a lot of my needs. Financial, for one. And for another, I could fill the needs that I wanted to fill for John F. Kennedy. He really inspired me at an early age–I remember staying home on that snowy day when he was inaugurated, remember hearing him say, ”Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” And I thought, ”My God, who is this man?”
In 1969 she received orders for Vietnam. From October of 1969 to October of 1970 she was stationed at the 12th Evacuation Hospital at Cu Chi.
My first day a group of wounded comes in, and I just stand there, frozen. What I see is a typical patient: a double amp (amputee). No legs, the bones and muscles and everything showing, like a piece of meat in a butcher shop. So I watch. Ten people are doing 10,000 things I can`t keep up with–really, they were doing too many things too fast for me to understand.
Basically, they were cutting the uniform off, looking to see where the wounds were, making the assessment, getting the IV in, trying to find out if the guy is allergic to tetanus so they can give him a shot right away and also asking him to give his name, rank and serial number in case he goes unconscious. The majority of men did not wear dog tags because they made noise. Sometimes they`d wear them in their boots–only if you get your leg blown off, you ain`t going to have a boot. And most of the time they didn`t come in with the parts. They just came in with what was left over.
So I`m on the other side of the triage room, trying to compose myself so I don`t have a shocked look on my face. And I`m thinking, ”This is crazy. They didn`t tell me it would be like this.” Then I start thinking, ”I want my mother.” So the second batch comes in and I`m feeling awful because I`m not doing anything. I`m frozen. Paralyzed.
So the third group comes in. Now as each group comes in you lose more and more staff, because more doctors and nurses are going to the OR (operating room), to pre-op, to X-ray and so on. When we`re down to about a skeleton staff, one doctor yells, ”I need someone to hold this guy`s head!” I think, ”Hold head. . . Hold head. . . I can do that; I can hold a head.” So I run over and hold the guy`s head while they stick a tube down his throat. Finally the doctor says, ”Good,” and after that I`m able to get the idea of what needed to be done.
It was overwhelming–the sights, smells, yelling, moaning. . . It was like a zoo. After I realized I could function, though, I was better.
In the recovery room my first assignment was a POW. When this male nurse told me, I told him to shove it–I was not going to take care of any North Vietnamese. But this nurse said, ”Let me tell you some things. First, I know how you feel–none of us wants to take care of the enemy. Second, these people have a lot of information. We know they`re upper rank. You may end up saving 100 GIs–so just think of it that way.” And I said, ”Okay, you`re on.”
So I take care of this guy and I find myself wanting to treat him like a regular patient. A few times I caught myself holding his hand and squeezing it, trying to get him to concentrate–you know, when you work with badly injured people you try eye contact, you verbalize stuff that they`re okay because that`s what keeps them going. You`ve got to push them on so they don`t give up and die. And doing this involves a lot of touch and a lot of energy.
I was thinking, ”Do I want to keep this guy alive to save 100 GIs? Or do I want him to die because he`s a damned gook and he`s killed 100 GIs?” Then I find myself giving my regular good nursing care. And eventually I come to feel like this guy is really a human being and my patient–I`m happy when his blood pressure is good, worried when it starts going down.
Well, when MI (Military Intelligence) comes to interrogate him, I get very protective. I stand in front of my patient and say, ”What are you going to do?” I had thoughts of them slapping him around and doing all kinds of things.
The guy laughs and says, ”We`re just going to ask him a few questions.” I go, ”Okay–but I`m staying here.”
So I stay, and they ask him questions and he readily gives answers. When it`s over, I ask the guy, ”Can I ask him some questions?” And MI says,
”Sure. What do you want to know?”
”Well, how old is he?”
”He`s 19.”
”Well, what does he think about the war, I want to know that. Only tell him he doesn`t have to answer me if he doesn`t want to.” I was afraid the POW would think that if he said anything negative, I may not treat him well. But he says something to the interpreter and the interpreter comes back to me:
”The patient said that if he could demonstrate in Hanoi like you`re demonstrating in Washington, he would be doing it.” And I thought, ”This really is a human being. He`s no different than my guys.”
From the recovery room I went to the regular intensive care unit, where there were a lot of belly wounds, and it smelled awful. There were maggots all over the place–to this day I have a passion against flies, I really do. In Vietnam I had my own body counts. During quiet times, I`d go for flies. Once I got 23, one right after another. The corpsmen used to tease me about my body counts, but I thought of it as saving lives. Also, it was an enemy that I could kill. I didn`t have an M16 out in the jungle, but I could kill flies. I still hate them.
The ICU I ended up in had just been opened. It was half amputations with complications and half severe burns. We had a lot of Vietnamese. I remember one Vietnamese woman who had 90 percent of her body burned. She had set herself on fire because her GI boyfriend had decided he was going home without her. And this was not an unusual story, either.
I saw things in that unit that you will never see in the United States. Like phosphorous burns that continue to burn through the body if you don`t put neutralizing solvents on them. The smell of flesh burning–it`s an awful smell. I remember two Vietnamese children who were so badly burned their kidneys shut down and their urine turned to wine-color. Yeah, a lot of things that here in the States you will never see.
After a while, I wanted to go someplace where I didn`t have to know all the stories. I just could not take one more story about a guy who was supposed to get married when he got home in May, only he had no legs and he couldn`t tell his girlfriend. No, I could not deal not with any more of that. So I put in for a transfer. I told them, ”Get me out of here–get me to triage.”
(Triage is the initial sorting and allocation of treatment to the wounded.)
And they said, ”Great. Get her to triage–she`s stupid enough to volunteer.” What I didn`t know till I got to triage was that you could nurse somebody for five minutes and still get very attached.
I liked triage. We got all kinds of stuff–Lambretta accidents, babies from the orphanages, GIs coming in drunk–the light stuff as well as the heavy. Setting aside the guys that weren`t going to make it to the OR–well, I had some very heavy experiences. I remember one guy who knew he was dying and kept thinking I was his wife. He was saying, ”Mary, Mary–hold my hand!”
So I held his hand. ”Mary, Mary–I just want to let you know I love you!” My instincts told me it would not be right to say. ”Hey, you`re dying in muddy fatigues and this is the war zone and I am not your wife.” I mean, it was his last time on Earth, and I did not want to screw up his fantasy, even though I felt guilty that, in a way, I was lying to him. Well, my response was, ”You`re going to be okay,” meaning either way–you`re going to live or you`re going to die, but you`re going to be okay.”
Another guy, I remember, lay there and told me he was dying for nothing. I was just about to talk about the domino theory and try to make him feel better, but something told me, ”He doesn`t want to listen to that.” So I said, ”Yeah, you`re right.” And he died peacefully. They all died peacefully.
Lily Adams is now a psychotherapist specializing in post-trauma stress disorder. She is on the national board of directors of the Vietnam Veterans of America and is chairperson for the Vietnam Veterans of America`s special committee on women veterans. She lives with her family in Roswell, Ga.
Cherie Rankin
Cherie Rankin grew up in West Palm Beach, Fla., graduated from high school in 1964, worked for two years, then went straight through college, graduating with a degree in social work and psychology. In her senior year she got involved with antiwar demonstrations.
Rankin was in Vietnam with the Red Cross`s Supplemental Recreational Activities Overseas (SRAO) program from September of 1970 to September of 1971. She was based in Danang, Cam Ranh and Phan Rang. Here she talks about coming home:
There are the bad memories and there are the good ones. There are also the ones that are some of each: Like once, at Cam Ranh, the perimeter got overrun with Viet Cong. This other girl and I were coming home in our jeep, and all of a sudden the place was crawling with Military Police and military guys. They pulled our jeep off the road, and this GI pulled me out, threw me down into the sand and jumped on top of me. A firefight was going on–I don`t know how long it lasted, but this GI was laying on top of my person the whole time, protecting me. Then, when the firefight was over, he picked me up, brushed me off and put me back in the jeep. I never knew who he was.
I was luckier than some of the women I worked with. Nobody that I was buddy-buddy with got killed–that I know of. I did have a guy who used to write me with such regularity that when I didn`t hear from him, I went looking through all the hospitals till I found him. He had a severe case of malaria. That was scary. And my brother disappeared for a while, and that was very scary. But I didn`t lose anybody. My friend Joyce had lost her fiance before she`d come to Vietnam–he`d gotten killed, and she decided to come. And another women in the unit got engaged to a pilot while we were there. He got shot down and killed.
The hard part for me is that I met so many men and just don`t know what happened to them. Some would hang around the center regularly, month after month–but I can`t remember names, I can`t put names to the faces. The ones I was closest to I know came back okay, but there are all the others. . . .
Eight years after I got back I went to see the movie ”Coming Home.” I am not a hysterical person, but I became absolutely hysterical. I started to sob uncontrollably. I felt this incredible, intense pain, emotional pain, and I couldn`t handle it. That episode scared me so badly I decided I was never going to read about Vietnam or talk about Vietnam, ever. But whenever the subject of Vietnam would come up, in any situation, tears would come to my eyes–I knew I had a lot of stuff there.
Well, about two years ago, when thay started networking for the women who had been civilians in `Nam, I started reconnecting with other women. I started sharing some experiences. I started to get in touch with my feelings–with a lot of the fear, for one thing. I realize now that I must have been afraid many times over there. Also, in the last year or two my brother and I have started talking. I really think I`ve worked through a lot. Now I can read about Vietnam. I have gobs and gobs of Vietnam books on the shelf over there. And I`m able to talk pretty freely now, without a lot of crying or pain.
Now what I feel I need is recognition. There is a sense of wanting to be identified as having been in Vietnam. Not because I supported the war. No, I want to be identified because I feel that what I did over there was valuable. I want to be proud of that because for so long I was ashamed. For so long I was afraid people would think I supported the war.
Let me end by telling you what happened to me last May, at the reunion in New York (the dedication of the New York Vietnam veterans` memorial). I`d only been there a few hours when I started getting sick. It was horrendous: I couldn`t cry, but I had this terrible headache, and then I started throwing up. I threw up and threw up, and when that was over, I was okay. The headache went. The depression went. I just threw it all up out of me. Later I told my therapist what happened, and she said, ”That`s a normal response. Because your experience in Vietnam made you sick.”
Cherie Rankin now lives in Norwood, Mass. She is a clinical social worker specializing in the treatment of alcoholism.
Ruth Sidisin
Ruth Sidisin grew up in Roselle, N.J. Her father was director of traffic at the Jersey City railroad yard, ”where he could see Lady Liberty from his tower window.” His family had come over from Czechoslovakia.
Ruth`s mother, whose family came from Minsk, Russia, had been in the Red Cross during World War I. ”She had helped out in the hospitals and did private duty after the war. And I wanted to be a nurse from the time I was 3 or 4, when my brother cut his finger and I put a Band-Aid on it.”
In 1949, after completing two years at what was then New Jersey College for Women, Ruth entered the Johns Hopkins Hospital School of Nursing. In 1955, three years after graduating, she joined the Air Force Nurse Corps and stayed for 25 years.
A Vietnam volunteer, Ruth was stationed at Tan Son Nhut, at the 21st Casualty Staging Flight, from December of 1968 to December of 1969. She worked as a staff nurse and as charge nurse of the dispensary ward.
I was not a youngster when I went to Vietnam. I was 39 when I went over. I turned 40 while I was there. And when you`re 40, you feel a long way from being 19, which was the average age of the people who were over there.
Being older than them was some help. At least I`d been around. At least I`d seen a bit of life and so forth, unlike most of the nurses in the Army and the young ones in the Air Force. They were just kids of 21 or 22. Still, there was no way to prepare yourself for what went on in Vietnam. Lord knows, I wasn`t out in the boonies, but that didn`t stop me from seeing what happened. Because in Vietnam every day was disaster day.
So age was some help, but not much. Neither was experience. Not even working with earthquake victims or in the emergency room of a big hospital could equal what I saw in a single day in Vietnam.
There was a whole variety of just plain trauma. There were belly wounds, amputations, head injuries, burns. On top of that they all had infections and complications. They had things we`d never heard about in school–things some of the physicians had never even heard about–and diseases they told us people hardly ever got anymore: dengue fever, malaria, hepatitis, bubonic plague.
Bubonic plague they got from rats. Those rats were really something. I don`t want to gross you out, but I have to tell you about this one guy who forgot to wash his hands before he went to sleep. It was in an area where there were lots of rats. Anyhow, this guy had just had a peanut butter sandwich, and when he went to sleep and dangled his arm over the edge of his cot, a rat went for that peanut butter–and ate most of his finger.
Some days you felt you`d lived a lifetime in just a week. Because Vietnam was not John Wayne on the beach at Iwo Jima. It was not ketchup on make-believe wounds. It was more like a grotesque form of ”can you top this,”
because each time you thought you`d seen the ultimate, something else would come along.
I remember one young man with beautiful blond hair who came in blinded and missing one of his arms and both of his legs. He also had a belly wound. Well, thank God he couldn`t see my face when he said, ”Nurse, today`s my 21st birthday.” Because that was one of those times when you just couldn`t have let them see it. You smiled and smiled while you were there taking care of them so that afterward you could go home to your hootch and cry.
Most of us just sort of got by by sharing with one another. Friendships, talking–I met the most beautiful people of my life in Vietnam. Plus some of us either adopted people or were adopted. Like I became a mom to the Security Police.
It started when I first got there. When I was sick and in a fog–you know, when I thought the mold on the walls was green paint. Well, every evening I`d hear the rumbling of heavy artillery going by. I`d drag myself over to the door and wave at the guys. And every night they`d wave and yell and whistle at me, until one night when these sergeants came by in their jeep and stopped. ”Ma`am, we`re afraid the Security Police have sort of offended you.” I said, ”Oh, no, nothing like that.”
Then one of the sergeants said, ”They`ve sort of taken to calling you Mom.” And I thought, ”Good grief, if I`d gotten married right out of high school like all my girlfriends did, I`d have kids the age of those guys.” So I said, ”Well, look, I`m flattered. They can call me Mom if they want.” And every night after that, unless I was on R and R or something, they`d wave and shout and yell, ”Mom!” Sometimes in the mornings they`d invite me over for breakfast. And once a month, when they had their hail-and-farewell barbecues, they`d come get me in Ruthie the Screaming Mini–the mini-gun tank they`d named after me. They`d come get me, too, on my days off. I`d have my steel pot on my head, my flak jacket and cammies on, and we`d ride out to the perimeter and visit. After a while I really thought of them as my sons. They were beautiful boys.
The day I was due to leave, some of my Security Police boys picked up this other gal and I in Ruthie the Screaming Mini and drove us down to the plane. They kept apologizing, saying, ”Too bad the rest of the guys can`t make it–too bad they`re all asleep.” Well, I`d been sitting on the plane maybe five minutes when I heard this announcement: ”Major Sidisin, will you come to the front of the plane.” So I went and looked out and–what do you think I saw? Trucks. Jeeps. Mini-guns. Big guns. All kinds of vehicles filled with my sons–maybe 400–who had come to see me off. Well, I tell you, I dissolved. I got off the plane and cried and kissed and hugged every one of them.
For a long time I thought I`d put Vietnam behind me. But in the last two years I`ve cried more tears than I have in the previous quite a few. I think what it is, a lot of the stuff that I had bottled up because I was busy–I think it finally hit.
I`m so glad they`re finally recognizing that there were women over there and that the women saw as much as the guys did, but in a different way. This should finally end the idea that a woman is supposed to give and give and give and make everything nice-nice, and be an Earth Mother and console everyone all the time without receiving emotional support themselves. Because if you believe women don`t need to be replenished, you`re a fool.
Yeah, staying in the military made a whole lot of difference as far as attitude and adjustment. Because in the military there were other gals and guys to replenish and affirm you. The young ones that got out at old Travis
(Air Force Base), spent maybe a year Stateside, were processed out and sent home–they found that nobody gave a darn, they had no one to talk to. It was almost as if they had been on Mars and come back to reality. Or as if they`d been in reality and come back to Mars.
Retired as a lieutenant colonel, Ruth Sidisin now lives in Sumter, S.C., where she is active in church and civic affairs and as an organizer for Vietnam veterans. She frequently speaks to veterans` groups on the role of women in Vietnam.
