As far as I can tell, I never experienced post-traumatic stress, probably because I stayed in the military, wrote about my experiences and did a tremendous amount of public speaking while on recruiting duty. All of this allowed me to vent about all of my experiences and how difficult it had been. Interestingly, every time I spoke, I was asked, “Wasn’t it depressing?” I would always respond, “No, it really wasn’t. These fellows would get their prosthesis. They could get up and walk and do everything and anything that you and I can do. Compare that to a pediatric ward with little ones with leukemia or a Wilms’ tumor or visit the neurosurgery ward with the paraplegics and quadriplegics, as well as the ones with severe brain damage. To me caring for them would be awfully depressing. Being with the amputees wasn’t depressing. It was and honor and a privilege to work with them. They were my heroes. I received as much if not more from them as they received from me in terms of growth. Not only did I learn tough love, but also that there is always somebody in worse shape than you are. Life is good.
Sandra Kirkpatrick Holmes, 2012.
Sandy continued her Naval career until retiring as a captain in June 1990 with a total of 26 years of active duty service. She described her experiences with amputees in two articles. “Battle Casualty: Amputee” was published in the American Journal of Nursing in May 1968 followed by “Hey, Hero!” in the Reader’s Digest in September 1970.
Her story doesn’t end here. In 1993 the nurses who were stationed in Guam with her decided to have a 25th reunion. The planners chose Washington, D.C., and the November weekend coinciding with the dedication of the Vietnam Women’s Memorial.
I had been stationed in Washington for five years and did not plan to attend the reunion. But a friend wrote a note encouraging me to come and be her roommate. Reluctantly I agreed. Little did I know that it would be another serendipitous event in my life. Saturday late afternoon, following the parade and dedication ceremony, my friend and I met up again in our hotel room. We hadn’t seen each other all day because she was one of the state co-chairs for Virginia and was in VIP seating. She asked me as we were watching the news and coverage of the ceremony, “Do you remember a patient named Tim Davis or a Bill Goslin from Guam?” “I cared for three amputees named Davis,” I replied. Tim somehow saw my friend’s name badge with “Guam 1968” on it and had asked her if she knew a nurse named “Miss K.” Long story short, we met the next day on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Tim had been looking for me since he read my article in the Reader’s Digest. According to him, the incident with the wheelchair, “Saved my life. It turned my life around. I was ready to give up. I thought that without legs my life was over.” With a twinkle in his eye he insisted on showing me how he can now get back into his wheelchair in only 5 seconds. “When I help as a counselor at the wheelchair camp for kids, this is one of the drills I make the kids do every day,” he said triumphantly.
Bill appreciated being pushed to go to PT because he was always full of excuses. He gave me his Purple Heart. “I was going to leave this at the Wall. But you deserve to have it,” he said. I felt so humbled when he gave it to me. I was just doing my job and I know that must sound mundane, but I loved what I was doing. I was hoping and praying I’d make a difference ... something a little better out of the horror of Vietnam. There aren’t words to describe the feeling that I had knowing that I had made an impact. Most folks live out their lives and never know if they have had a positive effect on another human being. For years I had wondered “Why me? Why amputees?” On the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1993 those questions were finally answered.
Lynn Calmes Kohl
Lynn Calmes Kohl’s story is one struggle, of real concerns about the situations she found herself in and the consequences of her experiences. She gives details of recruitment and service that were not common to many other nurses, but were very real.
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I enrolled in nursing school immediately after high school in 1965. I lived in Appleton, Wisconsin, and attended Mount Sinai Hospital School of Nursing in Milwaukee. It was a three-year program. In the spring of 1968, during my senior year, I heard about the opportunities connected with being in military service. The recruiter told us because we were graduates we would become officers. We could also get our choice of duty stations. He proceeded to tell us about Fort Ord and how it was right by the California beach. I later found out the hard way that Fort Ord was the staging area for nurses to be sent to Vietnam.
I had friends, both males and females, who had just come back from Vietnam. They advised me not to go to Vietnam. So I had these reservations and talked to the recruiter about it and he told me that there was no way a female could be sent to Vietnam unless she volunteered. If a female volunteered she would be sent there in a week because there was a shortage of nurses. I then went back and thought about it. Everyone else was excited about it. Fort Ord at the beach sounded really good. None of us had any other commitments. The recruiter called to tell us that a group of Army men were going on maneuvers down to Florida the next weekend and asked if we wanted to come along. That sounded great to us, thinking that we were going to be with a plane full of guys.
They wined and dined us. We thought that was pretty neat and that we should try it out for a while. The other girls signed up right away. I still had reservations so I talked to the recruiter again and he again insisted that there was no way that the Army would send a female to Vietnam unless she signed up to go. For about a month or so I was indecisive. I went back to talk to him a couple more times and every time he said the same thing. Finally I joined.
For three months during the summer I worked in post-operative nursing. When fall arrived, the four of us girls went to Fort Sam Houston for basic training. When we received orders for Fort Ord, we were very excited. We arrived there on January 1 and I was placed in pediatrics. Less than a month later I received orders for Vietnam. I explained to my commanding officer that I had been told that I would not get orders to Vietnam unless I signed up to go. She asked if I had that promise in writing. Within a month all the other girls had their orders for Vietnam, too. The girl who had talked us into joining the service went AWOL, got pregnant and was out of the service. The remaining three of us were sent to sunny Vietnam.
Lynn Calmes Kohl, 1968 graduate of Mt. Sinai Hospital School of Nursing.
On the flight over there was dead silence, nobody talked. Everyone was absorbed in their own thoughts. When we arrived in Vietnam, we flew into Nha Trang. It was kind of late in the day, so we spent the night there. All the nurses were placed in the female military barracks. As we stepped off the plane the heat and the smell were overwhelming. It was an unpleasant, unusual smell. It kind of hit me and caused me to stop for a second to absorb what was going on around me. All of a sudden I heard a pop. People were running toward us and pushing us down the steps telling us to run over to a building because we were under small arms attack. It became very apparent to us that we were under small arms fire and that this was for real!
We went to the nurses quarters in Nha Trang. The next morning a friend and I went to get our assignments, still thinking that we were going to be stationed together. We were sent to two separate places. She went north. I was sent to the 71st Evacuation Hospital, Pleiku, in the Central Highlands. She left earlier and there were two choppers that took off. The first one took off and we then followed. The chopper ahead of us was shot down. I watched it as it fell.
Lynn Calmes Kohl in dress blue uniform.
When we got to Pleiku, it was too late in the day to get our orders. They took me to my hooch and I met my hoochmates. We had a sidewalk outside our hooch on a big hill with a big red cross. We were all sitting outside during the evening and all of a sudden I heard a whistle and a thud. I then looked around and realized that I was by myself. There had been about six or seven people sitting around just a second ago and I didn’t know where they had gone. Suddenly one of my hoochmates appeared and pulled me inside. She told me to crawl under a bed and stay there u
ntil she came to get me. We were under a rocket attack!
We named Pleiku “Rocket City” because we were under rocket fire almost daily. I would wake up in the morning under my bed and realize that we had gotten hit again. After a short period of time I didn’t think I’d survive so I sent my will to a friend in Milwaukee. I came to that conclusion right after those rocket attacks. The corpsmen were upset that we didn’t have bunkers around our hootch so they brought sand bags and made an embankment around it. This provided something to at least block some of the incoming shrapnel. That was all we had.
We were under attack one night and the compound was overrun. The next morning I opened the door and there was a dead NVA (North Vietnamese Army). Had he survived and gone through the door, he would have killed me. I was in the first room through the door. The women didn’t get to carry guns. We didn’t even get combat pay. There were bunkers for the male officers and enlisted men, but not for the nurses. All the enlisted,
male nurses and doctors carried guns, but not the female nurses. When we went through the MOC village during our training for Vietnam, we only walked through the “jungle.” We sat down on the bleachers and we were handed a gun which we were only allowed to look at. We were not allowed to fire it because we were females.
The next morning I went to get my duty orders. My MOS was post-op nursing because I worked three whole months in that unit stateside. So I thought that I was going to post-op. They told me I had to go to surgery. That, in itself, was traumatic as I’d had a very bad experience in the OR in nursing school. The requirements to work in the OR in a combat zone included either completion of their one-year OR combat training program or three years civilian nursing experience in the OR. I had neither. But they needed somebody, so I was ordered there. When I arrived to the unit, the head nurse told me that they had many bad cases going on. She told me to mask and gown and she assigned me to a case and told me to stand there and observe. I was going to start as a circulating nurse and later proceed to scrubbing.
I was gowned and masked and assigned to a young man who had already received 100 units of blood. He had lost a leg and his one arm was hanging by a tendon. He had abdominal wounds. As I observed, one of the doctors looked up and became very angry because I wasn’t doing anything. He threw the scissors at me and yelled for me to cut off the arm. My first five minutes there I had to cut an arm off. After that it was downhill all the way!
There were big helicopters, Chinooks, that held a hundred or more patients. I may have just finished a shift and would be walking back to my hooch. On seeing one of those helicopters headed for our hospital, I would turn around and head back to the OR. I would be in the OR for days. We stayed until the last patient was gone. During those pushes there weren’t enough doctors and nurses, so the nurses and corpsmen had to do the minor surgeries like debridement. We all had to perform each other’s jobs. Because of this I was always concerned that someone wasn’t walking because of me. Maybe I could have cut a nerve or a tendon and because of that the patient couldn’t walk. I questioned if we did more harm than good. The doctors showed us what to do only once and then we were on our own. I wasn’t prepared to do that.
I never looked at names. I had to write them down but I didn’t want to remember them. Another hard part was that the men were sent to us directly from the battlefield. They went to surgery and post-op and when stabilized enough they were sent to Cam Ranh Bay or Saigon. From there they became more stable and went to Japan or Guam and then back to the States. We didn’t know who died or survived. There was no way to know. That was very hard, not knowing if all our hard work was in vain or not.
Lynn, gowning and masking for OR case.
I helped deliver a baby of a Vietnamese woman. We were able to treat her because her husband was an officer in the South Vietnamese Army. When she arrived, she was very stoic. She did not look like she was in any pain. She did not make any noises and was very quiet. So we thought that she was in the first stages of labor. I was told to sit with her for a while. All of a sudden she made the smallest noise. Something told me that I had better look and I took the sheet up and there was the baby crowning. So, I delivered it. The baby and mom turned out okay. That was one of the few positive moments over there.
Outside of the hospital there was a MARS unit, the Special Forces camp and an Air Force base. We were there for the 4th Infantry Division which was not very far from us either. I kept running into one of the men from the Special Forces who had a jeep and one evening he asked me to go out for a ride with him. I agreed only if my friend would come along. So we all went out. It was at night and we went out of the compound. It had just rained so we were hitting puddles and the mud was splashing up all over us. I was wearing a bright orange dress. We were drenched in mud and laughing. The next morning I woke up wondering why I went out the previous night. It was in the middle of the night and the NVA were out there and there were mines everywhere. I had on a bright orange dress. That was a perfect target. I never did anything like that again.
Since it was safer for us to stay in the compound, the swimming pool was a source of recreation. We could only go in the swimming pool if there was a life-guard present. The lifeguards were the corpsmen. They not only worked the same hours we did but also worked guard duty. There was an instance when we were under rocket attack while we were in the pool. There was a person who basically crossed the pool walking on water. I never saw anyone move so fast in my life!
Through all these experiences I built a wall to block my emotions and as a result I find myself expressing my emotions inappropriately. There is anger deep inside of me. I am angry at everything. Because of this I take counseling with a men’s group. They’re the same men that were in the group when I started it many years ago. They are still talking about the same things and they’ve not moved on. I spent three years in a women’s group in Minnesota and we moved on. We progressed. Unfortunately all my appointments had been cancelled due to budget cuts. The men’s counseling group can only meet once a month for an hour. That is not enough time to accomplish anything.
I was asked to give a Memorial Day speech. I focused on how people need to look at the consequences of war and that there’s more to war than going overseas and kicking butt. There are lifetime consequences. The day we left Vietnam we thought that the war was over but a few years ago we went back to Vietnam on a healing journey and people are still suffering from the consequences of the war. While we were there, we discovered that there are over 5,000 babies born with the aftereffects of Agent Orange. Each year people are still stepping on land mines and are either being killed or maimed. The Vietnam War ended in 1975 but for them the war continues. Most of them are Buddhists and they believe that the past is the past and they are living in the present. They recognize that those of us who were over there had to do it because it was our job. Now they welcome us. It was really healing to be accepted by them.
Lynn, with baby delivered in Vietnam in 1968.
Our tour group was the first one to return to Pleiku. From talking to the guide I found out that the hospital I had worked at became the largest and best hospital of the Central Highlands. I felt really good that people didn’t run off with everything and dismantle the hospital. Everything was left there. Usually the Vietnamese would strip a place once the Americans abandoned it. We went to the different camps where the men were and there we found bare land and some sand bag pieces sticking out of the dirt. That was all there was left.
My parents never had a vacation so for their wedding anniversary I sent some money to a friend in Milwaukee to get tickets for my parents to fly to Hawaii. Their anniversary was about the time I was ready to leave Vietnam. I got the delay en route to go there before I went home. So all year I saved my money. We were going to stay at the best hotels and we were going to island hop. It was going to be the best vacation they ever had.
When we got to Vietnam, we had to change our money into MPCs, which we called “funny money.” Two or three days before
we would leave we would get it changed back. All the money I saved I turned over to get back American money. I was still working a couple days and kept it in the pockets of my uniform. I even slept with the money in my pockets. The afternoon that I was leaving I still had to work in the morning. I changed my uniform from the one I had slept in to a clean uniform. I had just taken the pants off and the girl down the hall screamed, so I went running down to see what the problem was. Next thing I knew I saw our mamasan running out of the hooch really fast. I just knew what had happened. When I returned to my room, sure enough, all my money was gone. I quickly put on another pair of pants and went chasing after her. We screamed to the MPs to stop her but they didn’t understand what was going on. The girl ran right past them. I had told my dad earlier that day not to bring any money. But he brought a couple hundred dollars so we ended in a sleazy hotel and we couldn’t do the things that I had planned. My parents didn’t care. They were just happy that I was alive and coming home.
Vietnam War Nurses Page 15