Sisterhood of War: Minnesota Women in Vietnam

2. "All Day and into the Night"

35 2 All Day and into the Night” Nursing in the War Zone LYNN (CALMES) KOHL arrived in Vietnam in June 1969, one year after graduating from nursing school in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She spent the next year working at the 71st Evacuation (Evac) Hospital, located in the dusty red clay of the U.S. base at Pleiku, in Vietnam’s central highlands. When she reported for work on her first day of duty, the chief nurse assigned her to the surgical ward, where she was to spend the day observing procedures. The first patient she encountered was a young G.I. with head wounds, abdominal wounds, a missing leg, and one arm “dangling by a tendon.” Several surgeons surrounded the patient, pumping blood into him as they tried to repair his broken body. One busy doctor noticed Kohl standing nearby , inexplicably doing nothing; he didn’t realize it was her first day on duty and that she was there only as an observer. In the heat of the moment, it didn’t matter. “He screamed at me,” Kohl recalled. “‘Don’t just stand there—do something! He’s going to lose his arm anyway—cut it off!’And he threw his scissors at me. That was my first five minutes there: I had to cut an arm off.” This incident imprinted itself on Lynn Kohl in significant ways and became a central element in her personal story of the war. That it has figured so prominently in the interviews Kohl has given—with journalists, oral historians, students—suggests not just that the war was traumatic for her but that trauma is the critical lens through which she sees and remembers her time in Vietnam. Indeed, memories of trauma—physical, psychological, political, their patients’, their own—are common in nurses’ war stories. But the nurses I in- “ 36 SISTERHOOD OF WAR terviewed hold such memories alongside recollections mundane, humorous, inspiring, and poignant as well. Indeed, their experiences in Vietnam are characterized by contradiction: between heartbreak and joy, hatred and humanity, loneliness and camaraderie, exhaustion and boredom. This chapter examines some of these contradictions as it describes what it was like to be a nurse in Vietnam, from daily routines and off-duty activities to the stresses of living in a war zone and caring for traumatically injured young patients. It also shows how their time in-country changed thesewomen.The twelve months they spent in the heat and humidity of a tropical war zone—far away from the familiar comforts of home, immersed in the destruction of war, consumed by their responsibilities as nurses—transformed these women from (sometimes) naive, often inexperienced, nurse-soldiers into extremely capable nurses and wise but weary war veterans. Although more than fifty-eight thousand Americans died in Vietnam during the war, 350,000 wounded soldiers survived; indeed, the survival rate for patients in military hospitals in Vietnam was an amazing 98 percent . Yet the same work that saved the lives of so many soldiers took an enormous emotional toll on nurses, who came home carrying the weight of having seen the human carnage of war.1 Half a World Away: Arrival and Assignment Kohl’s nerves were already on edge by the time she reported to the hospital forherfirstdayofwork.The unfamiliarscents and heavyheat of southern Vietnam’s rainy season enveloped her as she emerged from the plane, her Army nurse dress uniform rumpled from the twenty-four-hour journey from California to Vietnam. Within seconds , before she had descended all the stairs from the plane to the tarmac, she heard a popping sound. “All of a sudden people were running around and screaming and hollering and people were pushing us down and telling us to run over to this building,” she said. “We had no idea, but we were under attack, small arms fire.” Having survived her first war experience, Kohl spent the night at the 90th Replacement Center. The next morning, she was assigned to the 71st Evac in Pleiku. Reminders that she was in a war zone were unrelenting. During her helicopter flight to Pleiku, enemy fire “All Day and into the Night” 37 downed a second helicopter that was heading to the same destination . When she finally arrived at the hospital, it was too late for her to meet with the chief nurse, and so she made her way to her “hooch”— her living quarters for the nextyear—where she...