Women at War: The Story of Fifty Military Nurses Who Served in Vietnam

7. Different Experiences in the Army, Navy, and Air Force Nurse Corps

7 Different Experiences in the Army, Navy, and Air Force Nurse Corps All military nurses experienced certain strains and rewards in Vietnam. Every nurse knew the stress of caring for young patients freshly injured in combat. Every woman learned to adjust to the confinement of ships or military bases. Most nurses enjoyed the special camaraderie that developed among Americans overseas. Regardless of where or when they served in the war, the nurses felt that their skills were appreciated and theirjudgments about patient care were respected. There were two factors, however, that colored the nurses' experiences in the war and resulted in different wartime memories. The first factor was the branch of service in which the women served: air force nurses who worked on aircraft had different experiences in Vietnam from navy nurses who worked on hospital ships or army nurses who worked in hospitals throughout South Vietnam. The second factor involved the year 76 Women at War the nurse served in Vietnam. This factor is discussed in the next chapter. The army nurses were land based in Vietnam.1 The Army nurses in this study worked in three types of medical facilities. The smallest were surgical hospitals like the third Surgical Hospital in Dong Tarn, with twenty-fourbeds in the receiving ward and twenty-four in the main ward. Specialized cases, such as patients with severe kidney injuries or neurologic damage, could not be handled at these small units; these men were sent to larger army evacuation or field hospitals. Many of these patients went to the ninety-first Evacuation Hospital in Chu Lai, which had three hundred fifty beds. Nurses at evacuation hospitals worked with battle casualties, men with medical illnesses, and civilians. Patients did not usually stay long at the evacuation hospitals: within five days, most men were shipped back to their fighting units or transferred for further care to a rehabilitation hospital in Vietnam or to a hospital in Japan, Guam, Okinawa, the Philippines, Thailand, or the United States. Field hospitals and convalescent centers, the third type of army facility, were very similar to medical centers back home. Patients there could receive specialized treatment, such as kidney dialysis, and large numbers of patients could be treated. During the 1968 Tet Offensive, the sixth Convalescent Center at Cam Ranh Bay housed fifteen hundred patients in various stages of recuperation. Between four hundred and five hundred of these men were recuperating from hepatitis. Others were recovering from malaria, hookworm, and various tropical illnesses. Still others were surgical combat cases waiting to return to duty. A rehabilitation battalion at the sixth Convalescent helped recondition soldiers waiting to go back to their units. Every morning, the nurses watched dozens of men jogging around the compound with beautiful Cam Ranh Bay in the background and were reminded of hospitals back home. Only the patients' limps, slightly jaundiced facial color, and thin red suture lines on their arms, legs, and necks indicated they were not stateside. Living conditions for the army nurses varied. Quarters for the nurses at the ninety-fifth Evacuation Hospital in Da Nang Army, Navy, and Air Force Experiences 77 represented living standards at their most basic level. In 1968, sixteen women shared a large tent. The operating room nurses slept in bunks in the back of the tent; the nurses who worked on the wards lived in the front. Clothes were stored in boxes that the enlisted men had made for the nurses. Tentmates learned to be civil to each other at five A.M. and they also learned to sleep through anything—monsoon rain, battle noise, and calls at any hour. Most army nurses lived in Quonset huts or smallbuildings, referred to as the "hooches." In VungTau, an old resort town on the seacoast, the nurses lived in an old French villa, but any visions of gracious gardens and elegant European architecture this might conjure up would be inaccurate. "It really was an old house," said a nurse who lived at the villa and worked at the thirty-sixth Evacuation Hospital. Some army nurses had small private rooms. Others shared living quarters. No matter where they lived or in what type of hooch, they all tried to make their rooms comfortable. They used mirrors, stereos, and curtains. Pictures of these interiors showed rooms remarkably like college dormitories. Sometimes, however, the rooms were not safe. At the seventy-first Evacuation Hospital in Pleiku, flying shrapnel and glass...