In the 1980s women veterans of Vietnam began to publish. Thirteen years after her Vietnam tour, Army nurse Lynda Van Devanter published a memoir of her service. She also edited a collection of poems from other military nurses, civilian women who volunteered in Vietnam or worked there with international relief agencies, and Vietnamese women. Former nurse Elizabeth Ann Scarborough’s novel The Healer’s War, set in Vietnam, won the 1989 Nebula Award. In 2015 Vietnam veteran Donna Lowery published a collection of reminiscences from women who served in the line in Vietnam.
Lynda Van Devanter
(1947–2002)
U.S. Army Nurse Corps
Lynda Van Devanter (Buckley), from Arlington, Virginia, joined the Army in 1969 and served a year in Vietnam as a surgical nurse. After returning from Vietnam, she continued her nursing career despite suffering from post-traumatic stress. She eventually founded the Women’s Project of the Vietnam Veterans of America, served as its executive director from 1979 to 1984, and testified before Congress and other agencies on behalf of women Vietnam veterans. Her 1983 memoir inspired the 1988–91 television series China Beach and ignited a backlash from military nurses who refused to corroborate her experiences. Van Devanter died in 2002 at the age of fifty-five from a systemic collagen vascular disease that was attributed to chemical exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam. The following are excerpts from her 1983 memoir Home before Morning: The Story of an Army Nurse in Vietnam.
It was a few days before my hump day, the exact middle of my tour. . . . I was lost in a heavy sleep under my bed when the phone started ringing. The sound was more impossible to ignore than the rockets that had driven me there a couple of hours before. Still half asleep, I listened to the words: “More casualties, Van. We need you in surgery.” . . .
I . . . reported to the head nurse for my assignment. Her short red hair was wild, the front of her scrub dress blood-stained. A mask dangled from her neck. “There’s a bad one in the neuro room,” she said. “I need you to pump blood in there.”
The neuro room was one of the places I usually tried to avoid. Head wounds were so messy and this one would undoubtedly be bad. But even knowing that, I was totally unprepared for the sight that awaited me when I stepped through the entrance.
Leading to the operating table was the largest trail of blood I had ever seen. I tried to walk quickly through it but slipped. When I regained my balance, my eyes were drawn to the gurney, where several people were transferring the wounded soldier from the green litter to the table. Three intravenous lines ran from bags of blood to his body, one in his jugular vein and one in each arm. The lower portion of his jaw, teeth exposed, dangled from what was left of his face. It dragged along the canvas litter and then swung in the air as he was moved from the gurney to the table. His tongue hung hideously to the side with the rest of the bloody meat and exposed bone. When he was on the table, Mack Shaffner, the facial surgeon, dropped the lower jaw back into place. . . .
[Van Devanter assists in an emergency tracheotomy, then helps the facial surgeon clamp off bleeding arteries. She hangs a fourth bag of blood, and then begins circling the wounded soldier, replacing bags of blood and handing the surgeon instruments and supplies.]
In the middle of the confusion, the neurosurgeon . . . came into the room. He looked at the soldier on the table and shook his head. His face was red. “Who the fuck woke me up for this gork?”
“The brain doesn’t look too damaged,” Mack answered.
“You’re wasting your time.”
“We can fix him,” Mack insisted. “Just give me a chance.”
“Bullshit,” the neuro guy answered. “That sucker’s going to die and there’s not a fucking thing you can do.” . . .
When the circulating nurse arrived, my sole job became pumping blood, while Mack fought against the odds. After a while, I turned it into a routine: Start at the neck, take down the empty bag of blood, slip a new one into the pressure cuff, pump up the cuff, rehang it, and check the temperature in the blood warmer. Then go to the left arm and repeat the process. Next the left leg and finally the right arm. Then start back at the neck and repeat the entire sequence. It took about five minutes to complete the steps at each site, about twenty minutes to make a round of him.
As Mack and the scrub tech clamped and cauterized the blood vessels, little puffs of smoke rose from what was once the soldier’s face. The smell of burning flesh filled the room.
Following every second or third time around the soldier, I changed the IV tubing because the blood filters were getting thick with clots. Since we only had two blood warmers, I had to run the other lines through buckets of warm water to raise the temperature. When the buckets started to cool, I changed the water. It was all just another simple job where I could turn off my mind and try to forget that we were working on a person.
But this one was different. The young soldier wasn’t about to let me forget.
During one of my circuits around the table, I accidentally kicked his clothes to the side. A snapshot fell from the torn pocket of his fatigue shirt. The picture was of a young couple—him and his girlfriend, I guessed—standing on the lawn in front of a two-story house, perhaps belonging to her parents. Straight, blond, and tall, he wore the tuxedo with a mixture of pride and discomfort, the look of a boy who was going to finish the night with his black tie in his pocket, his shirt open at the neck, and his cummerbund lying on the floor next to the seat. She, too, was tall, and her long brown hair was mostly on top of her head, with a few well-placed curls hanging down in front of her ears. A corsage of gardenias was on her wrist. Her long pastel gown looked like something she had already worn as a bridesmaid in a cousin’s wedding, and it fit her in a way that showed she was quickly developing from a girl into a woman. But the thing that made the picture special was how they were looking at each other.
I could see, in their faces, the love he felt for her, and she for him, a first love that had evolved from hours of walking together and talking about dreams, from passing notes to each other in history class, from riding together in his car with her sitting in the middle of the front seat so they could be closer.
On the back of the picture was writing, the ink partly blurred from sweat: “Gene and Katie, May 1968.”
I had to fight the tears as I looked from the picture to the helpless boy on the table, now a mass of blood vessels and skin, so macerated that nothing could hold them together. Gene and Katie, May 1968. I had always held the notion that, given enough time, anything could be stopped from bleeding. If you kept at it, eventually you would get every last vessel. I was about to learn a hard lesson.
I pumped 120 units of blood into that young man, yet as fast as I pumped it in, he pumped it out. After hours of work, Mack realized that it was futile. The boy had received so much bank blood that it would no longer clot. Now, he was oozing from everywhere. Slowly, Mack wrapped the boy’s head in layers of pressure dressings and sent him to post-op ICU to die.
Gene and Katie, May 1968. While I cleaned up the room I kept telling myself that a miracle could happen. He could stop bleeding. He could be all right. Please, God, help him. I moved through the room as if in a daze, picking up blood-soaked linens, putting them into a hamper, trying to keep myself busy. Then I saw the photograph again. It was still on top of the torn, bloody fatigue shirt. A few drops of blood were beaded on the edge of the print. I wiped them off and stared.
This wasn’t merely another casualty, another piece of meat to throw on the table and try to sew back together again. He had been real. Gene. Someone who had gone to the prom in 1968 with his girlfriend, Katie. He was a person who could love and think and plan and dream. Now he was lost to himself, to her, and to their future.
[After she finishes cleanup, she goes to post-op to see Gene.]
His bandages had become saturated with blood several times over and the nurses had reinforced them with more rolls of gauze, mostly to cover the mess. Now, his head seemed grotesquely large under the swath of white. The r
ed stains were again seeping through. I held his hand and asked if he was in pain. In answer he squeezed my hand weakly. I asked him if he wanted some pain medication, and he squeezed my hand again. All the ICU patients had morphine ordered for pain, and I asked one of the nurses to give Gene ten milligrams intravenously, knowing that, while it would relieve his pain, it would also make him die faster. I didn’t care at that point; I just wanted him to slip away quickly and easily.
The drug went to work immediately. As his respiration slowed and his grip became weaker, I imagined how it would be back in his hometown. Some nameless sergeant would drive an Army-green sedan to the house where Gene’s parents lived. The sergeant would stand erect in his dress uniform, with his gold buttons glinting in the morning sun and bright ribbons over his left breast pocket. Perhaps a neighbor would see him walking past a tree in the front yard, one that Gene used to climb before the war; perhaps a little boy would ride his bicycle along the sidewalk and stop near the house to watch the impressive stranger stride confidently up the stairs and to the door. And when the mother and father answered the knock, no one would have to say a word. They would both know what had happened from the look on the sergeant’s face.
And Katie? She would probably find out over the phone.
I ran my finger along the edge of the picture before putting it into the envelope with his other possessions. Then I walked outside, sat on the grassy hill next to post-op, and put my head in my hands.
I wouldn’t cry, I told myself. I had to be tough.
But I knew a profound change had already come over me. With the death of Gene, and with the deaths of so many others, I had lost an important part of myself. The Lynda I had known before the war was gone forever.
Angel Pilato
(1942–)
U.S. Air Force
Angel Pilato, the first woman Air Force officer assigned to manage an officers’ club, served more than five years on active duty in the United States, Europe, and Thailand. After her tour in Southeast Asia, she transitioned to the Air Force Reserves as a training specialist. She retired as a lieutenant colonel and earned a doctorate degree from Oregon State University. She has held management positions at a Fortune 500 company, a Top Ten university, and a nonprofit organization. A Rotarian, private pilot, Paul Harris Fellow, and member of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, she serves on the Boots to Shoes Board. She lives in Oregon. The following is taken from her memoir, Angel’s Truck Stop: A Woman’s Love, Laughter, and Loss during the Vietnam War.
[On the first day of her assignment to Udorn Air Force Base in Thailand, in 1971, the outgoing officer, Captain Hightower, gives Pilato a tour of the Officers’ Club, where a topless Thai dancer is performing in the bar.]
As we walked through the lobby to the main dining room, Hightower stopped and pointed to the plaque on the wall. “This is our Honor Roll plaque. Anytime someone gets shot down, we add a brass name plate with the guy’s name, rank, the date he was shot down, and whether or not he’s KIA or MIA. Pip [a Thai club employee] knows where to get them made,” he said in a detached tone, like it was just another mundane part of his job. It struck me that all a guy got for losing his life was a small bronze nameplate on a plaque in the lobby of an Officers’ Club, outside a bar with a topless go-go dancer.
We sat down to lunch, and the waitress hurried over to take the boss’ order. Our conversation continued. “We’ve got about eight hundred and fifty club members, and only about three dozen of them are American women. Most of them are nurses, a few teachers from the Air America compound, some civilian secretaries, and the rest are support officers. It’s going to be interesting having a woman running the Officers’ Club.”
“Oh, why’s that?” I said, trying to be nonchalant and not wanting to show I was annoyed.
“The guys are worried you’ll try to change things,” Hightower replied.
“What things?” I wondered why he was bringing this up.
“They’re afraid you’ll cut out all their fun stuff. You know how these fighter jocks like their amusement, and they want a place to let off steam. After all, there’s a war on. They just don’t want anyone messing things up.”
“They needn’t worry,” I retorted. “I won’t plant any flowers in the urinals.”
Before I ever set foot on the base, rumors had spread that a woman was replacing Captain Hightower, the wunderkind club officer. I found out later that the Base Commander had extended Hightower’s tour and tried to get me reassigned to another base. Maybe that was why Colonel Sifford had met me and asked me to come to Udorn. These guys probably thought I’d be a prudish, stiff-faced, unreasonable moralist who was ugly to boot. They were conjuring up tales that I’d make the bar waitresses wear long skirts, put a stop to the topless go-go girls, or cringe at them saying the “F” word.
Hightower laughed, “Well, the Air Force sure is changing. It hasn’t been the same since they lifted the ban on women officers being allowed in the O-Club stag bars.”
“Yeah, who knows what they’ll do next? They’ll be letting women in the Academies and allowing them to fly airplanes,” I said sarcastically.
Hightower replied, “Don’t know if we’ll see it in our time.” Then quickly added, “Frankly, I think women should be allowed to do any job they’re qualified for.”
Hightower had put me to the test on the very first day. At that moment, I decided exactly how I’d handle this assignment. I wasn’t going to play into any of their preconceived notions of how a woman might run an Officers’ Club. I knew I could run the club as well as any guy, and I sure as hell was no prude. All those repressive rules I’d learned in my thirteen years of Catholic education were not going to stand in my way. No, that was not part of my life any more. I’d broken away from all that guilt and trauma. I was free to do as I pleased without anyone or anything tugging at my conscience. After all, a stripper was just a stripper. It was no big deal. Besides, my job was to be in charge of morale, not morals.
[Pilato, the first female club officer, is never well received by any commander at any assignment until she has proven herself more than capable of running an officers’ club. Her performance evaluations reflect a pattern of low-to-high ratings that will prevent her from being selected for promotion. Although she has decided to resign her commission after the Udorn assignment, she’s embarrassed when the poor ratings are brought to her attention by the newest commander, Lieutenant Colonel McHale, with whom she is romantically linked.]
I desperately tried to get rid of the lump in my throat, but I couldn’t seem to swallow. However, I did manage to hold it together. . . .
“How could that asinine boss of yours, Major Anastasio, ever give you an eight and a two? Good God, an eight and a two are the kiss of death for getting a promotion. Why didn’t you use your ace and tell us about this? You knew Gabriel and I would have never signed off on this OER [Officer Effectiveness Report].”
I was quickly getting the picture. . . . To get promoted, an officer needed to get all nines, or what they called a “firewall OER,” which meant Xs all the way down the right side of the page. Humiliated and embarrassed, I realized I was probably the only officer in the entire Air Force that didn’t know how the “real” system worked. McHale now knew how dumb I was.
Finally, I found my voice and said reluctantly, “I didn’t know how it worked. Besides, I didn’t wanna take advantage of you or ask for any special favors.” Why would a woman ask for what she wanted or speak up for herself? If she did, she would be labeled as aggressive and unfeminine, a braggart with a poor upbringing.
“For God’s sake, Angel, you wouldn’t be taking advantage of anybody, you’d be getting what you deserved, which is an outstanding OER. Well, damn it!”
Now, even if I wanted to withdraw my resignation papers, it would be impossible. The joke was on me. Instead of me deciding to leave the Air Force on my own, “X’s” on a sheet of paper had decided it for me. It was totally ludicrous. I couldn’t believe how naïve I’d been.
<
br /> The final zinger came when the Wing Commander entered the office. Any self-esteem I might have had left was about to evaporate like water spilled on hot pavement.
[McHale hands a sheet of paper with the ratings to Gabriel.]
“Charlie, what would you think of an officer who had OER ratings like these?”
“God, I sure hope this guy isn’t assigned to us!”
That did it—one last punch in the stomach—it was a TKO. I’d never be able to face these guys again.
“Well, these ratings are hers,” [McHale] said, as he looked right at me.
When Colonel Gabriel realized he’d just “stepped in it,” he winced and quickly searched for something to remedy his faux pas. “Angel, I can’t imagine anybody giving you OERs like these when you’ve got such great looking legs!” he quipped in his North Carolina drawl.
At the time, his statement didn’t offend me. Even today, after years of sensitivity training about comments that might be construed as sexist, I still don’t consider what he said offensive. He was doing his darnedest to say something to make it up to me, and as far as I was concerned, he did the best he could. Besides, I liked him.
LouAnne Johnson
(n.d.–)
U.S. Navy and Marine Corps
Pennsylvania native LouAnne Johnson enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1971 and served nine years on active duty, achieving the rank of petty officer first class in the Navy and, later, second lieutenant in the Marine Corps. She earned the Navy Commendation Medal and Air Force Achievement Award for her work as a journalist/radio-TV broadcaster. After leaving the service, she earned a doctorate in educational leadership and became a high school teacher. She has written ten books; Dangerous Minds, an account of her experience teaching at-risk teens in Palo Alto, California, became a New York Times bestseller and a 1995 film starring Michelle Pfeiffer. The excerpts below are taken from her 1986 memoir Making Waves: A Woman in This Man’s Navy.
It's My Country Too Page 22