I joined the Army in 1964 on a student program where I went through a special army student nurse program. We had to give back two years on active duty, so I went in 1966 and stayed from January through November, 1967.
I went in for the opportunities that the military had to offer-education, travel. There were no nurses in Vietnam then. They didn`t go until 1965. There was little information about the war. By the time I went to basic training it had heated up and that was what everybody talked about.
When I went over, the idea was that Vietnam was a small country trying to be a free country, that there was a country trying to take them over and that we were saving this poor little country for democracy. Having grown up in the `50s when the cold war was hot, you had this horrible fear of the communists. But when I got to Vietnam and started working in the villages, I realized they didn`t know what communism was. They didn`t know what democracy was. All they wanted was to take care of their rice fields, their families and children and live in peace. Our presence there certainly wasn`t contributing to them living in peace.
At the MASH unit in AnKhe we had a lot of wounded natives, a lot of sick. We did a lot of work with civilians. We had people with malaria, encephalitis, tuberculosis, tropical diseases, besides the gunshot wounds, amputations, war wounds.
We had incredible responsibilities, more than a nurse would, certainly more than what we expected.The important thing was saving lives.
I think we had a whole lot more responsibility, which in some ways caused problems later on. Because it put you in positions of responsibility, and then you would think later on, did I make the right decision? It was hard because you were holding people`s lives in your hand. That is why guilt is a big part of the feelings women Vietnam veterans have.
When we came back, it was to a country where people were saying, ”what you did was terrible.” So as soon as I got off the airplane in Columbus, I took off the uniform and I never wore it again.
While I was in Vietnam, I guess I kind of had a pioneering spirit about it. There were rats. Well, you learn how to handle rats. You just make sure the mosquito netting is tucked in.
There were a couple of soldiers I took care of who I realized later affected me very deeply. I realized this after I went to the VVA and started discussing my problems with the war. One of them lived and one died, and I guess I feel worst about the one who died. It took a lot of years to feel okay about that.
He was soldier who had been shot in the abdomen. And we thought he was doing pretty well. One night, he just went really bad, really fast, and we couldn`t save him. We probably resuscitated somebody on every shift, but we couldn`t save him. I worked among the most seriously ill. Usually, I thought, don`t get too close to this person. But I let down my guard about being involved and spent a lot of time talking with him, joking , knowing he was going to get out of there and be okay.
The night he died, the commander came in and told me that it was my fault, that I should have done a tracheotomy. For a number of years I felt it was my fault.
I guess the other patient who has stuck with me was a boy whose leg we had to amputate, after he had begged and begged them not to take his leg off. He had a big shrapnel wound to an artery, and we had put a graft in, and as I recall, it came detached a couple of times. One night I looked over and he looked kind of strange and I said, ”What`s the matter?” He said, ”I don`t know, I just don`t feel good.” I walked over and he was in a pool of blood.
We took the dressing off. The artery had just blown wide open. So I put my hand in and held on to the artery until the doctors came over. Each time before, when they`d had to repair the graft, he`d say, ”Don`t take my leg.” This time he said, ”just take it off, I don`t want to die.”
We had gotten close to him because we had him a bit longer than most patients, waiting for skin grafts to heal. After they amputated, when he finally came out of the anesthetic, he started asking us what we thought it was going to be like to live without a leg. He was trying to deal with that already, which is something we didn`t have to deal with.
Usually we had enough equipment. Sometimes, we had to improvise I became the expert on improvising. I had to make a breast pump once for a Vietnamese woman whose baby had been bayoneted. (The mother) had been bayoneted in one breast. We were trying to keep the milk going in the other breast, but about four days later the baby died. That`s one of the odd things: who would ever have a breast pump in Vietnam?
I haven`t done any nursing since returning.
I came to the veterans in mid-1981. As is typical with many veterans when normal stress is increased, their memories of Vietnam, their feelings about Vietnam, become very difficult to deal with. And that is what started happening to me. For some reason it became obvious to me that I needed to talk to some other Vietnam veterans.
I was real fortunate to find a local chapter of VVA in Columbus. Very quickly I found that a lot of people had gone through this kind of experience and were still dealing with it, that it`s something you can live with, you don`t really go crazy and it`s natural.
My symptoms included difficulty going to sleep and staying asleep. I`m not sure I had any nightmares, but I sure did a lot of waking up. And I had a lot of intrusive thoughts. I would be working on something, like paying the bills, and thinking about how to stretch the money, that kind of stress, and I`d begin thinking about Vietnam.
There had been some other things that happened over the years, but I would always say, ”I`m not going to deal with that.” But it got to the point where my psychological defenses no were longer strong enough to keep the thoughts and the memories down.
Other Vietnam veterans have other things, different kinds if experiences, flashbacks. I had a flashback a couple years after I got back from Vietnam, and it frightened me terribly because I didn`t know what was happening. A flashback is a sensory experience of being in a traumatic suituation. I mean you can hear it, see it, smell it and feel the same emotions that you felt. It was so horribly frightening. It happened while I was watching the movie
”Patton.” I would never see another war movie. I didn`t see ”M+A+S+H”
when it came out; I didn`t see ”Apocalypse Now;” I didn`t see
”Deerhunter;” I didn`t see ”Coming Home.” I didn`t see anything. Now I can see them.
Another nurse was really the first to help me to the first of the big breakthroughs. We were driving somewhere and talking about Vietnam, about rats and rain and sunsets, and then she said something about ”the one patient that I could never get over.” And I was driving and I actually pulled off the side of the road and said, ”Oh, you`ve got one, too.” That was the first time I had ever realized that that`s what it was. It was a breakthrough for me.
When I first realized what was going on, people at the VVA said, ”Just let go. Go ahead and scream about it if you feel like screaming, just feel the feeling.” And it was such an incredible experience to feel the depths of that emotion, to feel the rage, the grief, the anger, the guilt. But then on the other side to feel extraordinarily happy. I went through several weeks of great highs and great lows.
I think women in the military should be allowed to do anything they are capable of doing. The problem with not allowing women into combat is that we still have a male-dominated promotion system that says if you have not commanded combat arms you are not going to make it to the head of the military. You are not going to get the promotions.
If the men who are still running the military don`t want women in combat, they are going to need to find other ways to give them the promotions to give them opportunities so that they will be eligible without having served in combat arms.
Women are capable of leading, but it is much more difficult for women to get those assignments. There are women who are generals, but few and far between.
We now have 11 percent women in military. By 1993, the eligible pool of men to go into military is going to be so small that they are going to have to fill a lot more slots with women.
The question about whether women should be in the infantry: Well, they`d be out there slogging through the fields carrying an 85-pound pack and rifle, and I don`t think many women can build the muscle to fulfill that kind of workload. Women can`t build upper body strength the way men can. So there wouldn`t be many women physically able to carry out infantry assignments. But certainly in other types of combat arms they can do work.
George Patton said you can`t have women in armor, because you can`t put men and women together in tanks. Why not? Because where will they go to the bathroom? Well, do you think if there`s a war and there`s combat going on all around that everybody`s going to be too concerned about where they are going to go to the bathroom? But you get that from people like George Patton who grew up with that, you know, ”They`re sweet little girls, sweet little daughters and here`s the nice little wife.” We are in a different generation now where people are not quite so sensitive to the separation of the sexes. I think we`ve had a real change and a breakdown in roles and the military is going to come to that.
I served in a war and I don`t think I`ve been defeminized. I think there is certainly a place for women in the military, and the (femininity) of women adds a lot to the sense of what we should be doing. I`d like to see a whole lot more women involved in making the decisions about how we fight wars. I think we need that balance.
