Bringing It All Back Home

by Philip F. Napoli

  There was the matter of American domestic politics.

  It was really the peak of the war, and all these college students were demonstrating. I was very angry about all that. I guess all those kinds of events came together at one point for me, and then I just thought, “I should … I need to do this. I have a responsibility. I’m a nurse. I can help these people who are being injured.”

  She also felt the impact of the political climate of the time. She recalls the anti-Communist sentiment that seemed to be in the air. Communism appeared “on the march,” threatening to take over the world, with Vietnam as one component of that larger struggle. And a part of her motivation was deeply personal.

  There were questions about myself that I needed to have answered. I felt an obligation as a nurse and as a citizen, but also there was this other part of me that really needed to strike out on my own, to find out something about myself, to put myself to some sort of test. That was certainly a big part of it—that was for sure.

  This combination of factors led her to a decision. On the way home from work one day she stopped by the Army recruiter’s office in Patchogue. She remembers saying something like, “I’m a nurse, and I want to go to Vietnam.” They said, “Sign here.” Obviously, it was not quite that simple, but she remembers it happening very quickly. Naturally, the next step was to go home and tell her parents. She walked in and announced: “I joined the Army, and I’m going to Vietnam.”

  There had been no discussion. Her parents were stunned.

  Meanwhile, her friend Lorraine, who had joined the Army right after graduating from nursing school, was back from Vietnam. Joan recalls people talking about her strange behavior. In fact, when Furey tried talking with her, Lorraine would not speak about Vietnam. Furey didn’t understand her attitude. In time, she would understand all too well.

  Furey entered the military at Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn in June 1968 and reported for basic training in July. After her basic training, the Army sent Furey to San Francisco for advanced nursing training. Furey remembers being fascinated with the 1960s counterculture. She remembers fondly the nightclubs, the music scene, and the dancing. It opened her up to a world that she had never known before, but she didn’t falter in her commitment to the U.S. military and its servicemen.

  I was one of these people who believed in the war. I believed that if our government was sending us to war, it was good. We needed to be there, and we were fighting for freedom and democracy. I bought it hook and line. I was brought up to buy it hook, line, and sinker. No question about it.

  The hospital where she was assigned, Letterman General Hospital, at the Presidio, was a tertiary-care hospital. They received casualties who had been evacuated from Vietnam to Japan and then on to the United States. This was Furey’s first exposure to war casualties. She worked first in the emergency room. The wounded came in from Japan in the middle of the night and would be triaged into the various units for the kind of care that they needed. She was then transferred to a post in the intensive care unit (ICU), which was where she really wanted to be. It was here that Furey began to see the reality of what combat could do to a human body. The hospital did a lot of reconstructive surgery. Furey cannot escape the memory of the youth of the patients, all of them amputees. She recalls the pain, both hers and theirs, and it is still apparent when she speaks about it.

  Of course, these were young men, still kids in many ways, and they sometimes played that way. Furey recalls how the soldiers would race down the long halls in their wheelchairs, up and down ramps, knocking people over, riotous, upbeat, and full of laughter.

  One memory stands out as she recalls seeing a handsome young soldier.

  I was twenty-one. He was standing sideways, just kind of staring out. The hospital was right near the ocean, right underneath the bridge. I was staring at him when he turned around and looked in my direction, and I saw that the whole right side of his face was just scarred. And gone away. Literally, the right side of his face had been blown away.

  Ultimately, Furey would take care of this man in the intensive care unit as doctors tried to graft skin and attempted to rebuild his face. Furey estimates that he may have had as many as seventeen or eighteen operations.

  In seeing the guys with amputations and the other kinds of injuries, it only made me want to go more. I wanted to take care of them, I wanted to help them. I got to Letterman in August of ’68, and by November ’68 I went and volunteered to go to Vietnam. I just wanted to go. That’s why I joined the Army. I didn’t join the Army for any other reason. I joined the Army to go to Vietnam … I really wanted to go to the war zone, very honestly. I wanted to help take care of these soldiers. I wanted to do my part. By virtue of my own family history, with my father having been in World War II, I felt I had some kind of obligation to serve in a war. I wasn’t in the Army to make it a career. Then I was afraid, when they started sending people to Korea from our hospital, that if I waited, I could end up in Korea, and that’s not what I was there for.

  She came home for Christmas in 1968 and told her parents that she had orders for Vietnam with a January departure. Her mother cried. She dreaded worrying about a loved one away at war again. Furey’s father became a little teary-eyed but was very proud. Of course, they both feared for her safety. But Furey had set her course. She returned to Letterman, packed her belongings, and took the long flight to Vietnam. She remembers the trip clearly. Traveling on Flying Tiger Line, a contractor taking American passengers to Vietnam, she recalls being the only woman on the aircraft filled with 140 men on a trip into the unknown.

  I was sitting in a row with a pilot. Of course, you understand, the only other time in my life I had flown was when I flew back to New York from San Francisco on R&R. Back then, people didn’t fly like they fly today. I had been on a plane once in my life. Now I was on a plane. I was going to be on this plane for twenty-four hours. And the last people you want to be on a plane with is a bunch of pilots because they tell you all these stories about flying. Oh my God. I was very scared, anxious, and a nervous wreck.

  Furey recalls writing a letter home to her mother on that plane ride, in an attempt to explain her decision. She told her mother that the antiwar demonstrations upset her and that she felt, as an American citizen and as a nurse, that she had to take some sort of stand. To her, she could best demonstrate her patriotism by going to Vietnam, though she says: I’m sure I didn’t use that word.

  She also recalls telling her mother that the journey to Vietnam represented an experience that would help me learn things about myself that I needed to learn. I thought it would be a personal challenge. I felt it was important that I put myself in a situation where I don’t have all the so-called luxuries that surround us in this country.

  At the remove of forty years she views this as a typical twenty-one-year-old statement.

  She went with a noble intention but found herself unprepared for the reality of Vietnam. One of her first realizations that Vietnam would be far different from what she had imagined was the bus ride from the airport.

  I remember getting on this bus. And all the windows were wired. They had screens and wires on them. This is Vietnam. It’s hot, you know. I’m thinking, “Why is everything so weird?” So I’m writing, and again I’m the only woman on the bus, so I said to one of the guys, whispering, “Why do the windows have wires on them?” and he said, also whispering, “That’s so when they throw grenades, they bounce off.” I went, “Oh, shit! I would have never thought of that!” It’s like you start to realize what this really is. Until you’ve actually been there, I’m not sure anybody really gets what war is. It’s a whole other experience.

  And then began a series of events that would slowly chip away at her naive patriotism. She remembers spending several days at the replacement center at Long Binh where all new arrivals took a class intended to teach the American mission in Vietnam. She recalls some of what they were told.

  They spent a lot of time on the fact that one of our jobs was t
o “win the hearts and minds of the people.” This is, believe it or not, the first time that I heard this. I remember thinking that was kind of odd. I’m still stuck in the World War II mentality. These were our allies. We were there to help them. They want us here, so why are we trying to win hearts and minds? I remember being just so totally confused.

  Furey confesses readily that at the time she was not a deeply politically aware person. All I saw was what was on TV: people were getting injured and hurt, and we were fighting Communism, and that was enough for me.

  Entering the war zone was undoubtedly exciting, although it produced anxiety as well. Furey remembers her first night in a trailer at Long Binh, before she received her assignment. As she listened to the rockets go off, she couldn’t sleep. She asked a friend what was going on, and her friend reassured her that the rockets were probably outgoing rather than incoming.

  On the advice of a friend who was an Army captain, Furey requested to be stationed at the Seventy-First Evacuation Hospital in Pleiku, in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. The captain explained how hot Vietnam was and told her that being stationed at Pleiku, located at the base of the mountains in the Central Highlands, would be cooler. Furey didn’t know that Pleiku was an evacuation hospital in the middle of one of the most active combat zones in Vietnam.

  For Furey, as with so many veterans, the trip to her new unit in the field remains an indelible experience. She recalls that rather than taking a scheduled flight, you went to the airfield and announced your destination. You would be placed on a list and then begin the wait for an aircraft going in your direction. At least that’s the way it worked most of the time. But Furey was traveling with her friend the Army captain, whose first name was Barbie. Barbie’s brother was a helicopter pilot, a distinction that enabled her to move among the helicopter pilots at the airbase and ask if anyone was headed to Pleiku. Apparently, someone was, and Barbie asked for a ride.

  Because one of the things is if you were a nurse in Vietnam, you were golden. What they wouldn’t do for you … People were just incredible. They treated you with the utmost respect. You [could] have anything you wanted.

  One of her lighter moments in Vietnam, Furey recalls, was her arrival at the hospital. As the helicopter landed, the hospital staff charged out toward it with stretchers, prepared for what they thought were wounded soldiers. Instead, two nurses climbed out—with an enormous footlocker.

  It took us a while to live that one down.

  Nursing staff lived in hooches, temporary huts usually built out of plywood. Divided into cubbyholes or rooms, each hooch housed at least six individuals. The United States did not expect to need more permanent facilities, based on the premise that the American presence in Vietnam would be short-lived.

  Furey requested an assignment to the postoperative intensive care unit. Ordinarily, this position went to nurses with more experience in-country. Generally, new staff worked in regular units for six months before transferring to the ICU. However, the hospital was short of nurses at the time and Furey had previous experience, so she rotated into the ICU rather quickly. Despite her training, she found herself unprepared. For one thing, she saw many young children and infants injured by the war.

  I was stunned that we had a number of Vietnamese children and babies. Some of them had diseases, but some of them had been injured in the war. We took care of them. You know, you didn’t expect this. You’re expecting American GIs. You weren’t really prepared for the fact that you’re going to have to care for children.

  Little could have prepared her for her first such experience, which was caring for a Montagnard baby who had been badly burned. The Montagnard, or Degar, are a tribal people indigenous to the Central Highlands of Vietnam. Some Montagnards worked closely with the American military.

  Montagnard people carry their babies on their backs in what are really like shawls. They cook outside in big pots. This woman had been bending over a pot, and a baby fell into it and was burned on one side of its body.

  Periodically, a medical team from the Seventy-First Evacuation Hospital would go out to the Montagnard villages in the Pleiku area on MEDCAP (Medical Civic Action Program) missions to provide basic health care. Occasionally, the medical personnel brought people from the villages to the hospital for treatment. Personnel from one MEDCAP mission had found the baby and brought it back to the hospital for treatment. The baby was admitted to Furey’s unit, and Furey cared for her. The mother stayed with the child, at times sleeping just outside the hospital area.

  In fact, we put up mattresses out there for them to sleep on, because when they had a family member in the hospital, they wanted to be there.

  The American medical staff found that they could not save the child’s arm. An interpreter explained to the family that the baby’s arm needed amputation.

  They were there the day of the surgery. The baby went in and had the surgery, came back without the arm. It had been removed at the shoulder. The mother and father came in to see the baby postoperatively, then they left [without the baby], and we never saw them again. They never came back.

  I was stunned because they had been there. Someone had always been near, around the clock. What they told me was, in their villages, if you lose an arm, you are useless to the village, because everyone has to do their share of the work. For them it’s easier to walk away and just leave the baby with us than to have to take the baby back and have to figure out how to deal with it in the village. Literally, we had the baby, and we ended up having to send the baby to an orphanage. This was like, one of those things that is like, “Whoa.” It’s a culture shock, because you don’t even … because they seemed like caring … I think they were caring parents, but it was just not something that they were capable of dealing with.

  It was my first week there.

  Furey remembers hearing about the Communist treatment of the Montagnards and how it helped form her perception of America’s objectives in Vietnam.

  They were often attacked by the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese, because they were considered sympathetic to the Americans. They were often targeted. The villages were ransacked, shelled. They were shot. The villages were overrun. We had a lot of Montagnard casualties. We took care of them. I just love[d] them to death. They were a very simple people. But they had terrible diseases. Their hygiene was awful. I went out with the MEDCAP teams occasionally to their villages. You always have somebody with some kind of disease or illness. We found people with plague and tetanus.

  The most difficult cases often involved children.

  I had one kid. It was just devastating to me. He picked up a white phosphorus bomb, which is something that they shoot off at night that lights up the sky. I guess this thing hadn’t gone off. This kid picked it up off the ground, and it exploded. The thing about white phosphorus is it just burns and burns and burns until it gets neutralized by a specific chemical compound. It wasn’t a compound that was readily available out in the field. One of the infantry units found him and rushed him into the hospital. This kid, this eleven-year-old kid … just, third-degree burns … it was awful … on his entire body. He died. He died … to see that, an eleven-year-old kid burned to a crisp. It was really awful. You are expecting to take care of soldiers. I never really thought about civilian casualties, or what happened to them, or who took care of them. I never really thought about kids. All of that was totally unexpected.

  She went to Vietnam, however, to care for American servicemen.

  The first patient I was assigned to care for was a young guy who had multiple injuries, like most of them did, and he had a spinal cord injury, a cervical spine fracture. So he was placed on a Stryker frame … But this patient, he had a crushing injury to his body—broke his spine, his lungs collapsed, he had all kinds of internal injuries, so he had all kinds of tubes attached to him. Chest tubes on either side, gastric tube. He had a Foley catheter, I don’t know how many IVs, and then he had Crutchfield tongs attached to his skull. These are tongs that are screwe
d into the skull on which you can hang weights to provide traction to the spine. He had a cervical neck fracture, so the tongs were keeping his spine in the proper position. So I was charged to take care of him. So the nurse orienting me to the unit is going over everything, and she tells me, “You’re going to have to turn him every two hours.” And I remember thinking, “Turn him? I don’t even want to touch him.” I had never seen anything like this in my life.

  So there you are. You’ve got Crutchfield tongs [screwed to his head]; you’ve got chest tubes coming out. You’ve got IVs. You’ve got a Foley catheter. And you’ve gotta flip this guy 180 degrees, in one movement, and I’m thinking, “You cannot do this, because how does all this stuff move and not get pulled out?”

  I just remember thinking, “I can’t do this.” I was overwhelmed. At that point in time, I wanted to run out of the room. But obviously that wasn’t an option. But I was assigned to another nurse, and she walked me through this whole thing. She taught me how to do it all. What to look for. How to position the tubes, all of it. You put this here, you put this here, you place [that] back here, and then you flip. Ta-da!

  Till this day, I’m always amazed that I actually learned how to do that and by the end of the week was able to do it by myself. I didn’t need any help.

  Furey says somehow she learned how to cope. Within two months she found herself teaching new nurses to do what she could not have done just months earlier. By the end of three or four months, Furey says, I was untouchable. I was like a crackerjack. There was nothing hidden or thrown at me I couldn’t handle.