Lieutenant Commander Lou Ellen Bell.
Mary Cannon was the chief nurse that was leaving. Helen Brooks came after her. Mary Cannon was an Army nurse for several years. She had gotten out of the Army and come into the Navy. She was the first chief nurse in Vietnam with a large contingency of nurses. They opened the hospital there.
The accommodations there were pretty decent. They had taken Quonset huts and divided each into eight units. You walked through the front door into a narrow hallway with four small rooms on each side. My bed was five feet long. In order to turn it across the room I had to disassemble it and reassemble it. I think the room was about six feet wide and about eight feet long. It had a sink in it. Bathrooms were out of the hut and down a covered sidewalk which was our hallway. There were four showers, but the Seabees had made a stainless steel tub out of one of them. They made the tub six feet long and four feet wide. We were on water rations and so nobody could use it. If you put an inch of water in it, you would have used all the water you would have used for a shower. I used it one time and I was embarrassed I had used that much water. The room with the four showers in it and the adjacent room had a deep sink and a washer and dryer. After I got there I managed to persuade the chief nurse to get a refrigerator in there so we could have a beer mess. In the little room there was a bank of sinks. There were four or five commodes, each one partitioned off with a door. Each of the huts, except the bathroom, was air conditioned. The shower was ventilated but not air conditioned. Our only phone, a hospital phone, was in the passageway.
There were four huts for the females. These were all on the four corners if you can imagine an H. Off the middle of the H on the one side was the shower in the bathroom-type facility. In the opposite direction was the third hut and that was our little community gathering space plus the chief nurse and the assistant chief nurse’s room. There were three rooms there but the big one was supposed to be the chief nurse’s room. She elected to move to the side and saved the big one for a small living room we used for guests whenever they came. The director of the Navy Nurse Corps, Captain Bulshefski, used that room when she visited. Usually they had a three-room apartment there with their own bath in it.
When I was on nights sometimes, Helen Brooks would ask me to come over and wake her up. I’d step into that area just to wake her up. When Captain Bulshefski was leaving, I brought over some sweet rolls by Helen’s request and woke Helen up to tell her the admiral was leaving. The other nurses would join them in the lounge and say their goodbyes.
When I first got there, we had Vietnamese girls clean our quarters. They did a so-so job. One day I went in and one of them was washing somebody else’s shoes under running water. I persuaded Helen to request a steward to be assigned to our quarters. I had done a little homework figuring out how many people were giving up their housing allowance to live there. Other than the people who had dependents, which most of us didn’t, there was a lot of money there. Since the military was saving money and providing minimal quarters I thought they could provide a steward to make sure the quarters were maintained. She looked at that and thought it was a good idea. She took it to the commanding officer and we ended up with a steward.
There was the idea a man couldn’t be assigned to women’s quarters. That was her first objection. I said, “Why not? There are workmen in here all the time. None of us come out without being dressed, at least with a robe on.” We never knew if we were going to find a guy in our little hut’s passageway changing a light bulb or painting. I said, “So that’s not the problem. They can be out here and they can knock on somebody’s door before going into a room. If somebody was in their room sleeping, the door will be closed with a sign on it to not disturb.”
Before having a steward, a nurse was left in our quarters during the day to supervise the Vietnamese women. We weren’t worried about them stealing anything. We had lockers in our rooms. They just needed education on how to take care of things. Their standards of what to do were not the same as ours. It was a constant struggle to get them to sweep, mop, and clean the sinks and bathtub. The steward was a Filipino first class petty officer. The doctors had all kinds of stewards over at their place. I thought they could spare one. We deserved some of that care. Then the steward could have on his resume that he supervised five Vietnamese nationals. He was very nice and a little embarrassed when he first came but then he took charge. If there was maintenance work to be done, he would be there when the maintenance guy came rather than somebody on our staff having to be there.
We had about six or eight nurse anesthetists. Their quarters were separate though they connected with ours. The space in between contained a few beds. It was where they had put us when we first got there. We actually had just bed space. We had to come into the main quarters to go to the bathroom. Unless there was a vacant room because somebody had gone or somebody was out on leave, that’s where nurses stayed overnight waiting for the hospital ships. It was not air conditioned. It was air cooled when the wind blew.
Margaret Higgins, one of our nurses, had decided to get garbage cans and put them underneath each of the air conditioning units to collect the water. Then she used the water to raise her farm. We called it Higgie’s Farm. It was a small area of sand between two of the huts. She had someone send her seeds and she planted vegetables.
The Seabees built us a charcoal grill. They made it so tall we ultimately ended up digging a hole to put it down lower to the ground so we could reach it. Initially, we had to pull a stool up so we could reach the grill. If you want anything done by the Seabees, just know it’s going to be grandiose. We had picnic tables there and that is where we could entertain. We couldn’t entertain in the building. We also had a banana tree, which could have been there compliments of Higgins. That was our social gathering place. Individual dating was usually done at the officer’s club.
Incoming rockets.
Incoming rockets were usually not too bad. One night I was at MAG 16, our Marine Air Group across the street from where we were. There were several of us there and we got incoming hitting the sergeant’s club. I called the chief nurse as soon as I got a chance to let her know I could see the area where the nurses were and I knew that area was not hit. She told me to get them together and bring them back as soon as possible. I said, “I’m sorry. I can’t do that right now. This base is on lockdown and we can’t get off of it at the present time, but as soon as we can, we’ll come home.”
When we first got there, we were working eight-hour shifts. I was in orthopedics. A lot of the American military would come in at night and would leave by noon the next day on their way home. When they were first in Vietnam, they were bringing them directly back to stateside hospitals. Then, they found out it was not good for the patients to travel so far and so long, so they slowed the process down. Most of our patients were going to Japan and other areas. The Air Force was doing the transport. Most of the patients were sent to the Air Force facility to stay overnight and fly out the next morning. The flight nurse would come to the hospital and get a direct report from the night nurse. The patients would be loaded and taken directly to the plane. They were called “Arrive and Fly.” They arrived at the airport and flew out immediately.
The other end of the orthopedic ward was other nationals, including POWs that were too sick to be over on the POW ward. They would be on whatever ward they required for care. They would require a Marine guard to sit with them for their protection. Usually they would be too sick to be a threat to anybody else but it was a two-way thing. The Marine was there for the protection of the prisoner. I had one North Vietnamese woman wake up to find she had no leg on one side. She probably blamed all of us. Our communications were between “nil and none.” She reached out and grabbed my arm and just about pinched a hunk out of it. I was trying to do something to help her. We also had Korean nationals, Vietnamese and Montagnards. The Montagnards were an organized fighting force. I heard they were very good fighters.
When there was a military person i
njured in the field, his unit would call for a helicopter. They would say the nature of the injuries. They could be directed to the Army, Navy, or one of the hospital ships; wherever they felt they could best get care. For example, if the patient had an eye injury and our ophthalmologist was gone for some reason, then they would redirect the helicopter to the hospital ship. The easiest thing for us to do was to work with the hospital ship. There is something to be said for coordination.
Normally there would be only one hospital ship close to us at a time. They would alternate. One would go north while the other one went south. One would go up closer to the DMZ and then they would come down to our area. When an injured patient arrived at our place, they went into receiving. They had “Receiving 1” and “Receiving 2.” Generally, the injured came by helicopter. When the helicopters would call in ahead of time, the stretcher bearers ran out to meet them with folded stretchers. For each patient received on a stretcher, they would give a folded stretcher to the helicopter crews to use for the next patient. The stretcher bearers were primarily nonrated enlisted men, not corpsmen. People that were not corpsmen were sent to the hospital to work. They would assign them to push food carts up to the ward for about three months to build up their muscles.
On ship they might chip paint but here they were pushing chow carts to the wards. The stretcher bearers came from that pool. You’d have to be strong to carry those patients. They had to run from where the plane landed to the receiving area. Most of the patients went to “Receiving 1,” which was an open-bay area. There were sawhorses already set up where stretchers could be placed.
IVs were also set up with the IV sets attached and ready to place. I don’t know how long they were kept before being broken down. These IV’s hung all over the place. There were poles attached to the length of the wall or overhead and the IV’s were hung by “S” hooks to the poles. We still had glass bottles in Vietnam. They started IV fluids in plastic bags but I think they went to the field corpsmen. Glass bottles would be dangerous and hard to carry in the field. The advantage of the plastic was you could start it and then stick it underneath the patient’s shoulders. The pressure from their shoulder would push the fluids in.
“Receiving 1” saw the bulk of the patients. There was a cover but the outside temperature was the room temperature. “Receiving 2” is where the worst injured patients were treated. The capacity was eight patients. The patients were seen and immediate care was given in an air conditioned, cleaner environment with considerable emergency equipment. From the receiving areas, patients were assessed, stabilized and identified, and decisions made as to the surgery required.
The first piece of identification the patient received was the blood number. The blood number was written with a felt-tipped pen on their chest. Blood was drawn and sent to the lab. That number was matched to whatever their blood number ID was. In an emergency sometimes you are treating a patient before you know who they are. One senior corpsman had the job, in the receiving area, to go through patient clothes and secure valuables. He determined the person’s identity and put everything in a bag. They would put armbands on the patients as soon as they were able to and then get them admitted. In the meantime that blood number was the way of identifying each of them, their records, personal belongings and lab samples.
From there the most immediate adjacent facility was up the sidewalk. On the left was the x-ray department and on the right was the pre-op for the OR. Before the patient left our receiving they would usually slip them onto what they called hardboard. This is a piece of plywood on stretcher rails with a sheet over it. The wooden hardboard could be put directly onto the x-ray table and eliminated the need to move the patient on and off the x-ray table as x-rays could be done through the patient and the board.
From there the patients went to pre-op. The patients were held in pre-op until they could go into the OR. We had two major operating rooms. They were in a framed building with linoleum on the walls so the walls could be washed. The floor was covered with small tiles. I noticed the OR table had managed to chew up a couple of tiles. I looked at the walls to see how much of it was washable. There was linoleum up about four or five feet. They had hanging overhead lights and metal cabinets. It was pretty neat for a war zone.
I saw the other ORs were Quonset huts. The two operating rooms in the Quonset huts were back to back with a dividing half wall in between the operating tables. The rooms were open on the sides so you could walk from one operating room to the other.
They also had a mash unit which was the back of a truck. Something they could just set off and set down, a metal box type thing. One was a dental OR. It was prefabricated out of metal and could be loaded onto the back of a plane.
When the female nurses first arrived they found urinals in the operating rooms for the medical staff to use in between surgeries. I never saw them. I only heard about it. It speaks to the massive numbers of surgeries the staff were handling in those operating rooms prior to the construction of the new operating rooms. These units continued to be used as needed on a daily basis.
Most of our wards were Quonset huts. At one time I had a Vietnamese female that was diagnosed with typhoid. We had a couple of individual rooms in some of the Quonset hut wards and she was put in one of those on isolation.
When you think about being out there in that kind of heat and wet and bacteria with the rashes and then you get infection, you’ve got a mess. Our chief nurse, Helen Brooks, had been in Korea and was very smart about this. She had shipped this huge box of socks to herself in Vietnam. Anytime one of the corpsmen who had worked with her came by to say “hi,” she always gave them a few pair of socks to take back to the field with them. When she was in Korea, she found that the men in that theater of war never had enough socks.
Prior to leaving for Vietnam, I talked to someone who had been there. They told me to have extra soles put on the bottom of my shoes because of the unevenness and the rocks. I took brand new shoes and put new soles over the existing sole. It made all the difference in the world in terms of comfort. The other thing that she suggested was I buy cotton underwear because cotton absorbs perspiration.
After the patients had their surgery and went through recovery, they’d go to ICU if they were critical. When I say “critical,” I remember the night I stopped by there and heard somebody saying, “I don’t know why that patient is here? They only have this and this. I don’t know why they’re in ICU.” I said, “I know you guys are accustomed to all this, but may I just point out this person has a head wound, a chest wound, a belly wound and would be in ICU in any stateside hospital.” I had worked on the surgical unit, and I knew they had patients that were very sick in the surgical unit. They all just thought that was the biggest laugh. They had all been there so long and their patients were so critical that they had kind of gotten accustomed to a little less ill patients being considered not as critical and not sent to ICU.
ICU was staffed well with nurses because they needed a higher patient-nurse ratio. The rest of the place had one nurse covering more than one ward. Some of the younger nurses worked in ICU as well. The other place that some of the younger nurses worked was the surgical unit. One side was general surgery and the other side was neurosurgery.
One time I was on the night shift. I had a neurosurgery patient come back from the OR without an order for an antibiotic or a steroid. I called the doctor, and that’s something we didn’t do because they got precious little sleep. When he came to the phone, I told him what it was and he said, “I’ll be right there.” I said, “Well sir, you don’t really need to come over. I just wanted to know if you intentionally didn’t write for an antibiotic and a steroid.” He came over and wrote the order and said, “I just wanted to meet the nurse that knew there should be an order and had the guts to call me.” He also wanted to know why I wasn’t assigned to neurosurgery. I told him that I also had orthopedics experience and I usually worked there.
Another person I thought was wonderful was Walt Godfre
y, an MSC officer. He came over as our supply officer. One of his responsibilities was restocking all of our supplies. He set up automatic restocking almost as soon as he got there. It was a little bit of a hassle at first because we had to decide how much of each item we wanted on the shelf at all times. The items and number were put on the shelves and restocked daily. This was better than handwriting a stock order every week or two. Also, stocks of supplies didn’t pile up in one area needed in another area. From the time Walt came, supplies were not my problem. Maybe the general idea of an automatic stocking system came out of the war.
While I was in Vietnam, a patient came in with a live grenade in his eye. They brought him in with a flak jacket over his head. They wanted somebody to stabilize his head. The corpsman that did it later told me without even thinking, he had voluntarily held the man’s head. He was holding the patient’s head as they moved the patient to the OR. Then he realized that this grenade could go off at any moment and his hands were under the flak jacket. The only thing to do was to get it out as soon as possible. They called the explosives group to stand by. The OR staff were all volunteers. They took him into the OR and the doctor was able to get it out without it going off. They gave it to the bomb squad and they disposed of it. I know the whole crew got awards for bravery. Most importantly, the patient survived.
Vietnam War Nurses Page 4