Jim was physically challenged but he wasn’t handicapped. He rode horses, played golf, and built cars. He was an amazing guy and over the years that I came to know him after Unsolved Mysteries aired, things mellowed out somewhat. I think he felt better about himself but he still had demons left over from Vietnam. Unfortunately, those demons got the best of him and he died in 1998. His son called to tell me and while it wasn’t a shock, it was nevertheless very sad. When I traveled for my job, I often went to Colorado and took a day or two of vacation to visit them. Jim’s wife and I still keep in touch via email and we’re forever linked by that special experience we shared.
Before I came home from Vietnam, I extended my tour of duty by a month. I was due to come home the early part of November but if I’d done that, I would have been starting my next assignment right before Christmas and I wanted to spend it with my family. During my last month in Vietnam, I took a five-day leave and went to Bangkok. I’d taken my R&R in Hong Kong in June so it was good to get away again for some “retail therapy.” I still wear the jewelry I bought there.
I left Vietnam December 7, 1968, on an Air Force C–141 flight from Cam Rahn Bay, bound for Travis AFB in California. I wanted to go to San Francisco and see my friends from college before going home to Las Vegas, but if you left Vietnam on a commercial flight from Saigon or Da Nang, you went into the Seattle/Tacoma (SEATAC) airport. I had to wait several days in Cam Rahn Bay to get a flight but finally I got the message that the flight was leaving the next morning at 0700 hrs. I wore my fatigues and boots because I knew it was going to be a military plane and not the cushy commercial flight that would have necessitated my Class A uniform. As I entered the aircraft with about six or seven GIs, we saw that the back of the plane was filled from floor to ceiling with caskets. Years later, I was watching an episode of the TV show, China Beach, and that same situation was repeated. It was definitely a case of art imitating life.
When we landed in Japan to refuel, I was asked if I’d give up my seat for a GI going home on emergency leave. I did that and spent the next eight hours in the terminal waiting for another flight, which turned out to be a commercial aircraft. Not only was I the only woman on a planeload of GIs in their nice khaki uniforms, I was wearing my fatigues and combat boots. As the plane touched down at Travis, everyone cheered and clapped. I called a friend to come and pick me up. There were no cell phones in those days, of course, so I couldn’t call ahead. When I walked into the terminal, there was nobody there to meet us. Conversely, there wasn’t anybody throwing tomatoes at us either, calling us “baby killers.” It was very low key. You were expected to get back to things the way they were. There was no decompression, no debriefing.
As for the recruiting job, I received a letter from the Army Nurse Corps headquarters in October while I was still in Vietnam with an offer to be the recruiter in Los Angeles. That appealed to me as my family was in Las Vegas and I’d be able to see them occasionally. Shortly thereafter I got another letter saying that the Los Angeles recruiter had decided to extend her tour and I was offered either Fort Benjamin Harrison in Indianapolis or Fort Des Moines in Iowa. After thinking about it for a nanosecond, I decided to decline the offer and asked to be assigned to Letterman Army Medical Center in San Francisco. Fortunately, I got what I asked for.
I worked in ICU at Letterman for a short time until someone saw that I had a neurosurgery background so I was made head nurse of male neurosurgery. In March 1969, we opened the new, beautiful multi-story hospital which has since been torn down. There was a beautiful view of the Golden Gate Bridge from the day room but unfortunately, most of the patients couldn’t enjoy it as they weren’t ambulatory.
I got out of the Army in August 1969, which seemed like a good idea at the time. In retrospect, I’ve often wished that I’d stayed in and made a career of the Army. But I was tired of the military and wanted to work in a civilian hospital and wear my nursing school cap and different uniforms. Subconsciously, I think I was also tired of caring for all the young men with horrific injuries and wanted to see some “happier” aspects of nursing.
I met my husband and got married in 1971. He was an Air Force captain when we met and he’s also a Vietnam veteran. We’ve been married 40 years, have three beautiful daughters, a granddaughter, and another one on the way. I used my GI bill benefits to get my master’s degree in nursing at Rutgers University in 1980 and have worked in some aspect of nursing since then.
As far as lingering effects from my days in Vietnam, I’m very lucky. For the most part, my experiences were positive and I always say I’d do it again in a heartbeat. But I didn’t work in ICU or the ER and see the really tragic cases. Yes, I worked with soldiers who were badly injured, but for the most part we got them to a better place and they went on their way. I often wondered how they did once they got back to the States. My post-war experience with Jim reminded me that not all wounds were physical. Some of the nurses who worked in ICU suffered negative effects, my roommate being one of them. It was hard to turn off your feelings, especially when you worked a 12-hour shift, six days a week.
I had some tremendous experiences and learned a great deal about myself and nursing during my year in Vietnam. What did I learn? If anything, I think you learned to deal with a bad situation and make the best of it, be innovative and creative, think on your feet and assess situations quickly and efficiently. You learned to set priorities and organize. You learned to do without a lot of things. We didn’t have all the stateside amenities like pill cups and whatever. We would use the ends of syringes. The syringes in those days were encased in plastic with a cap that you twisted off. We used those as pill cups. Little stuff like that. You learn to conserve. You didn’t know when you were going to run out of stuff. You weren’t extravagant with things. It was just an awesome time ... a different kind of war. I think you could apply what you learned there into other areas of medicine. Every nursing experience you have you build on.
Alene B. Duerk
Alene B. Duerk became the first woman admiral in the United States Navy and the first admiral director of the United States Navy Nurse Corps. Her professional career crossed three wars. Her clinical experience involved every type of military health-care facility and every position of responsibility available to a woman during her time of service. Her early nursing experiences give much detail about the development of the profession of nursing and were essential to her preparation for her eventual position of leadership during the Vietnam War.
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After graduation from nursing school I worked labor and delivery at Toledo Hospital. I felt very fortunate because jobs were hard to come by in 1941 because of the depression. I worked there for about five months. December 7, 1941, was Pearl Harbor Day. As a result, four of us, school classmates, decided to join the Navy.
When the war started, interns, residents and nurses were going into the military. The shortage was really very pronounced on the civilian side. I also had some family concerns, but my family and I felt I should go. It was a patriotic thing, service to country. I just felt I could do a lot more good in the military.
At the time the Red Cross was doing all the recruiting. The military didn’t have recruiters. At graduation, our director of nurses had advised all of us to join the American Red Cross and most of us did. They called us many times, wanting to know which service and when we could go on active duty.
Finally, in the fall of 1942, I made application directly to the director of the United States Navy Nurse Corps. I wanted to become a Navy nurse. I got my commission in January 1943. As soon as I was commissioned in the United States Navy Nurse Corps Reserve, I got my orders for Portsmouth, Virginia.
I arrived at Bethesda in the morning about seven o’clock. I had been on the train all night. I was 23 years old. I had my physical and it was all over with by two o’clock. I can still see the chief nurse at Bethesda saying, “If we get her a cab now, we could still get her on a train to Portsmouth this afternoon.” I thought the war was go
ing to be over if I didn’t get there immediately.
They put me in a cab. I went down and boarded the train and started for Portsmouth, Virginia. It got dark and I was still on the train. The train stopped and everybody got up to get off. I asked, “Is this Portsmouth?” “No lady. This is Newport News and you have to get on a ferry to go to Portsmouth.” So, I trundled off with my two suitcases. I followed the crowd made up of all kinds of people going to Portsmouth. I got on this ferry. I had no idea what a ferry was. I had never been on a ferry. We went down the river and finally we came to Norfolk, Virginia. The pier was at Norfolk. It wasn’t a shipyard. It was just a pier. The shipyard was in Portsmouth.
We got off the ferry. I walked to a drug store. I had a number to call which was for the nurses’ quarters at Portsmouth. It was for a girl who had been my classmate in Toledo, Ohio. I told her I was in Norfolk and asked how to get to Portsmouth. She told me walk another two miles and get on the ferry, another ferry. I was still carrying my suitcases. So, I walked down there and got on the ferry. It was a nickel ferry at the time. We went across to Portsmouth.
We pulled into the ferry landing and I got into this huge cab. I said, “I want to go to the Naval hospital.” He takes me to the old Naval hospital with the big steps and the pillars. I drag my suitcases up there and the officer of the day was there. I said, “I’m reporting in for duty.” “At this hour?” It was about ten o’clock at night. He called the night nurse who took me over to the barracks. We lived in barracks and there were 20 people in this big open room with all these beds lined up. We had a bed, bedside locker, half a dresser drawer we shared with someone else, and half a pasteboard closet to hang our clothes in. You could not have anything on your bedside stand. You couldn’t have any pictures. Every day you had to tuck everything away so there was nothing showing.
I hadn’t had anything to eat so my friend took me to the kitchen in the dining room in the nurses’ quarters. She got me something to eat and then she took me back to my room in the barracks. She and the others in the barracks gave me a Navy Nurse Corps cap. They put it on my head and said, “Now, you are a Navy nurse.”
I went to work the next morning in my civilian uniform with my Navy cap. Sometime during that next two weeks I was measured and fitted for ward uniforms. At that time we wore the long stiff uniforms with the long sleeves and the wide belt and I had a cape. I was very tall, so my cape just billowed out there. There was a civilian lady in Virginia who made these uniforms. She would get the material, a twill, at small stores. She would have bolts and bolts of this. She would lay it all out and she would make sixteen uniforms at a time. Within two weeks I had the Navy uniforms.
The first morning I reported to the chief nurse who assigned me to a ward. The nurse I worked with on the ward was maybe two or three weeks my senior. She had her own ward. It was a ward where they had upper respiratory infections, called “Cat Fever.” I had come from a civilian hospital where if the patient had pneumonia, they were isolated. If they had to have oxygen tents, they were put in a special room. We were with at least 60 patients in a huge, big old room. There was a fireplace at one end of the room. This was a Civil War hospital. The patients were on either side of the room and there was a row down the middle. They had oxygen tents and those people who needed close attention were brought closer to the nurse’s station. The morning I got there was “field day.” The beds were all moved to one side of the room and the corpsmen scrubbed the floor. Then, all the beds were moved back to the other side of the room. It was my first inspection. All I remember were those beds going back and forth.
I didn’t know one patient from another, but I charted whether they had eaten their meals and vital signs. I think I was taking blood pressures by this time, a task which had originally belonged only to physicians. They brought in the food cart at noon. It had wells with food. One was potatoes and one was vegetables and one was soup. They had a tray with meat. Everybody came with their trays and filed along, and we stood back behind the cart and served the food. For the patients who couldn’t, the hospital corpsmen or the nurses would dish up for those patients and see that they got their food. After they had eaten, trays were rinsed on the ward. Some of our wards had their own machine dishwashers and you had to wash your own dishes. The machines were very commercial. They had these big trays, wooden boxes, and all these trays were set in there and they would go through this steam.
It was assumed you knew how to take care of patients. I did. It was hands-on care; giving baths, feeding the patient, giving medications, changing dressings and doing procedures were just natural. They were things I had learned in nursing school. The most important thing, as far as the Navy was concerned, was that I learn how to fill out all the right forms. That hasn’t changed. I was a quick learner. Within a few weeks I had my own ward and I was orienting the next nurse. It was a med-surg ward.
The ward staffing had one senior nurse and two or three junior nurses. The hospital corpsmen saw to it that patients got their showers and baths. At that time, patients had to stay at the hospital until fit for duty or medically retired. We had patients who were around for a long time. So, you put them to work. They had to sweep, dust, help with the food and help with the dishes. You were supposed to have somebody who was senior act as master-at-arms. In the civilian world you didn’t have that. I had never worked with corpsmen. As far as supervising the corpsmen, I didn’t realize how much they knew or how much education they had, but they seemed to be able to do anything.
We didn’t have anything like antibiotics. The first time I saw penicillin, we gave it to a patient IV and he got 5000 units. We sat there and counted the drops. It had to go very slowly because we really didn’t know what was going to happen. Of course, the patients reacted beautifully. They were well patients to begin with and then they had hernias or appendectomies or whatever. They just blossomed. They had no reason to be resistant or have an allergy. It was just a miracle drug, as far as we were concerned. We had sulfa before we had penicillin. We had sulfa when I was still in training. The first antibiotic we had was neoprontisil. That was a red pill. It caused the emesis to be blood red. Then, we had sulfa and people couldn’t believe how fast the patients would react to those. They used the sulfa drugs in powders for things like wounds out on the battlefield when they got injured. We gave the sulfa drugs by mouth. We gave the penicillin IM and some IV.
In January 1944, I was transferred to Bethesda. I was at Bethesda until April 1945. By that time, I had signed up to go on a hospital ship. The bulletin went up and I signed it. The USS Solace was one of the old ones. I was on the USS Benevolence. There was the USS Repose, Refuge, Sanctuary, and Bountiful. They were commissioned in March and April of 1945. They were built in New York at the Brooklyn Shipyard. They had been liberty ships, as far as the hulls went, but they had been rebuilt as hospital ships. The Solace, however, had been a passenger ship at one time. Down in the lower level the bunks were in four tiers. The ward I was on had racks for two patients.
I went aboard in April 1945. While we were on board, we had VE (Victory in Europe) Day in May. We left Brooklyn and came down to Norfolk, through the Panama Canal and over to Hawaii. We were enroute to Japan. We didn’t know it then, but we were being sent out there for the invasion of Japan. The invasion was supposed to come in October. We went as far as Hawaii, then Enewetak in the Marshall Islands. While we were in route from Enewetak to Tokyo in August 1945, the bombs were dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Our mission was changed and we went into Tokyo Bay and liberated the POWs. We didn’t understand about radiation and fallout, but I don’t think I was exposed to it. At least I have never had any side effects. I was in the Marshalls and out at sea when the bombs were dropped. They had dropped bombs before, so it didn’t really mean anything, as far as I was concerned. I didn’t really understand what an atomic bomb was or the devastation that it was going to cause.
We got into Yokosuka late in the afternoon of the day we arrived. A chief met me on P.M. duty and s
aid, “We are going to take on prisoners of war.” These were our people who had been prisoners of the Japanese, but when I talk about “ours” I mean Australians, British, Americans, Russians, all these different groups who had been in prisoner of war camps. Some of them were from the United States Army who had been on the Death March of Bataan and had been prisoners of war for four years. They had been moved from the Philippines to Japan. I was concerned about them coming because I didn’t know if we were taking on 15 or 15,000.
There were two prisoner of war camps and they were right outside Tokyo, Shinagawa and Omori. They had already been partially liberated because planes had dropped clothing and chocolate. This was the last of August. The bombs had been dropped early in August.
We took on 1,500 patients that night and the next day. The hospital ship had 750 beds. The prisoners of war came in, were examined, given new clothes and dusted for fleas and other kinds of vermin. They were transferred to other ships for the trip back to the United States. A few were flown out. Within 36 hours we had processed this large number of patients and we had a full load and the POW camp was empty. Those people who couldn’t be moved, who needed to be stabilized or fed, became patients. A lot of patients had berieri and had been starved and there was concern about tuberculosis. Our galley worked 24 hours a day.
We docked at Yokosuka and we kept our patients for about a week. Another hospital ship came along and took these patients aboard and took them back to the States. There were three hospital ships there. There was a Dutch hospital ship called the Titulinka, a United States Army Hospital ship called the Marigold, and the Benevolence.
Vietnam War Nurses Page 10