All year I had a picture of Golden Gate Bridge on my wall because once I saw it, I knew that I was home. On my return trip I had a military hop to Hawaii and then a military hop from Hawaii to the States. I ended up on a cargo plane with no windows, so I never saw the bridge.
When we got to the base in Oakland, we were instructed to take our uniforms off and throw them in the trash can because protesters were outside and would throw stones and tomatoes. They did anyway because those coming out that door were from overseas. My friend refused to take hers off and was spit on by drivers as she hitchhiked. Also, we had no debriefing. I was lucky enough to have friends who lived there and they picked me up. I stayed with them a week or so and they helped me reintegrate before I went home.
I saw enough death and dying to last me the rest of my life. I came home in 1970 and worked in the Walter Reed Neonatal Intensive Care Unit for four months. I found a civilian job at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. I worked on the general medical/surgical unit from November until May. I got a job in a surgical position and stayed there until 1974, when I was finally able to get back into obstetrics.
I had trouble dealing with some experiences while working in the States because of my experiences in Vietnam. One of the first cases I did when I was back in the States was done on a lung case. The longer the patient is under anesthetics the harder it was for them. The doctor asked for an instrument and the circulator ran out to get it. She returned and stated that someone had not autoclaved it. He proceeded to throw a temper tantrum. He folded his arms and said, “I’m not doing anything until I have my instrument.” It would take about 30 minutes to autoclave it. It was very hard because in Vietnam we did major cases with a minor instrument set. We didn’t have all the fancy instruments. The doctors did amazing things with a basic instrument set. But yet this doctor couldn’t deal at all without one instrument. My thought was, “Send the sucker to Vietnam.” Getting back to the States we were not allowed to start IVs until we took the IV class. While in Vietnam we often had to start IVs on our knees holding a flashlight in the dark!
There are lifetime consequences of war. The type of wounds incurred by veterans coming home will be present all their life. Statistics show that one in three returning veterans have PTSD. I don’t think that there’s anything important enough to go to war. America will not be great for the amount of wars that it has fought but will be great when it learns how to establish peace and teaches that to other nations. Never forget the high price of freedom, a price every veteran and their family has paid!!!
Mitchel A. McDonald
Though the actual account of Mitchel A. McDonald’s experience in Vietnam is short, so much of his professional life following that experience was influenced by his experience in Vietnam. Mitchel makes observations on the status of the enlisted man at the time of Vietnam, on the experience of a young officer and on the kindness and insight of his senior officer.
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In 1965 I was given the tremendous opportunity to give up my $1.75 per hour job at a car wash to go to work at a hospital as an orderly. I was about 20 years old and still partying, studying and working full-time. With the Vietnam War going on I felt that if I joined the Navy that there would be tremendous educational opportunities and it would help me figure out what I really wanted to do with my life. I didn’t have a draft number because I was in college at the time.
I signed up for the Navy. The stipulation on the contract was that I would go to San Diego because they had hospital corps school there. Somehow I was able to look at my orders before I took my oath and I found out that they were going to ship me to the Great Lakes, Illinois. I talked with the chief and told him that since the Navy wasn’t keeping the promise for me to go to San Diego, they probably would not keep their promise on a lot of things. I left and when I was about six blocks from the recruiting center the chief caught up to me and said, “It’s been a horrible mistake but it’s been corrected. We found that you were indeed signed up for San Diego and you are guaranteed. Now you’re going to San Diego.” I ended up in San Diego later in the summer.
I went to work in the San Diego Naval Hospital. I worked up on the SOQ (Senior Officer Quarters) wards for a while and then went down to the emergency room. While in the ER, we had one really tough night. We had a couple of gunshots come in and a couple of cardiac patients arrested. It was a hellish night but everyone lived through it and we had them all tucked in. It was about three in the morning and one of my colleagues in the ER was giving me a neck rub when the chief nurse of the hospital walked through. She was tremendously impressed with the fact that a female corpsman was giving a guy a neck rub in the center of the ER. The next morning we both had to show up in her office and we were chewed out. We were in trouble and we couldn’t work together so she was shipped off to another department in the hospital. There were still things pending up in the air because it was frowned upon from a disciplinary standpoint. Within two weeks I was in Vietnam and she was in Italy.
During my time in San Diego I went up to Long Beach for a long weekend to visit old friends from Wisconsin. While we were gone, a set of orders came in with my name on them. It was unheard of then for the enlisted to receive named orders. They were usually blanket orders for example, “send twelve people.” Once they received the name orders they couldn’t find me and so they sent the notice to my sister’s address even though she had moved three or four times. By the time I returned, the rest of the group had been on 15-minute notice for three days. Ultimately the decision was that if I got on the plane, I was going to an exotic place in the east, my former and present master chief would make sure that 19 charges made against me would be dropped. They were dropped and I ended up in Da Nang in August 1967 until late August 1968. My back rub in the ER seemed to have gotten attention beyond my wildest expectations.
The first person to meet us at the hospital was the executive officer (XO) from the hospital and corps school. He said to me, “You’re exactly what I wanted. I hand chose you.” Again we were blessed children. I spent three months working on the medicine wards. Then they needed some help in the shock trauma research unit. The surgeons in the unit were studying the effectiveness of resuscitative agents. We were able to develop some classic research that was the basis for many resuscitative measures that stood for over 20 years. We would resuscitate patients, most of whom were triple amputees or severely hypotensive with blood volume expanders. As a result we had good research data on each patient. Some of the agents were really saving lives.
One of the patients had both legs blown off at the hip. He only had one kidney left. It had kind of an egg shell fracture. One of the OR techs spent a little over an hour working on putting it back together. We then put the kidney back into the patient and hooked it up and it worked. We had to keep track of these patients that lived through this whole process. It was about four months later that the patient left us and after a series of setbacks he was sent back to Japan or the Philippines and ultimately sent back to the States.
The hospital had some of the only air conditioning available, which could be affected by the attacks on the hospital. But we had one area that never lost its air conditioning because it was a self-contained unit. One day I was sitting there typing and I was crying my eyes out. There was just so much work to be done. I was a bit discouraged. Many patients didn’t survive because of the severity of the injuries and a lot of the resuscitative measures were still in their infancy. I dropped the letters in the mail and picked up the new mail that had just arrived that day. There was a picture of a guy skiing in Colorado, one of our previous patients. That was when I really had a true faith experience that miracles were happening every single day.
At the same time we had a patient who had been star baseball pitcher. He had been engaged to a beautiful beauty contest contestant. He had an ankle fracture which led to some problems and he figured that he would never be the same. Eventually he was infected, septic and ended up dying. It was a stark contrast between the patient w
ith the ankle fracture, which was not too bad on the relative scale, compared to the patient with both legs blown off. Part of the significance of the ankle fracture patient was that he felt that he could no longer be a pitcher. When he was no longer a winner for his team and they didn’t need him anymore, he became cannon fodder for the draft. He went to Vietnam less than a year later. He went from world class baseball hero to Joe Schmuck and ended up dying. Essentially he felt his life was over and that he could no longer be the man for his beauty. That experience really fostered a lot of spirituality and growth for me.
Upon getting ready to leave Vietnam the doctors tried to get me to go to Bethesda with them. They were heading up a neophyte transplant team back at Bethesda working on transplantation of kidneys. It was in its early days of research in that area. I declined the opportunity. I got orders to go to the Naval Air Station in Albany, GA in September 1968. After settling there for a couple of weeks I was promoted from a third to a second class petty officer.
I was discharged out of the Navy in February 1970 as an enlisted person. I was working at Johns Hopkins Hospital and enrolled in their RN training program. While I was working, I went to school full-time and they gave me extra pennies along the way. I was enrolled as a student at the University of Maryland but was in the process of transferring over to Hopkins because they were going to pick up the bill.
The doctors were teaching some of us how to do surgery in the hyperbaric chambers. I was gullible enough to think that it was such a cool job. Then one night as I was taking the bus home I started to get some of the nitrous reaction from being in the chamber for too long. I had to go back to the chamber to decompress. While I was sitting in there for another four and a half hours decompressing, it finally dawned on me the reason why they had someone like me in here instead of them was because it was a dangerous environment. The reality hit me square between the eyes and I didn’t want to do it anymore. By that time the other guys were willing to do it and I didn’t have to.
One day we had a businessman who had been hit by a drunk driver, medevaced out and admitted into the hospital. We resuscitated him for 12 hours. After about three days the hospital administrator called his wife and three kids and he was going to meet them at the bedside. The patient (husband and father) was on a ventilator and was going to be on it for about another three weeks. The hospital administrator had just found out there was no insurance. The hospital administrator wanted his money. I remember vividly the wife saying, “Where am I supposed to get one hundred thousand dollars?” That was a lot of money back then. The hospital administrator looked at her coldly and said, “You have a beautiful home that is nearly paid for and you have three kids in college, and you’re not working and neither are they and we need our money.” That day I decided that the military health-care system, where privates get the same care as admirals and generals and everybody in between, had some merit to it.
I went back down to talk to my recruiter while the war was still going on. I was still going to school full-time and working on more credits. The Navy Nurse Corps Candidate Program picked me up. I was able to go to school for a couple of years drawing E5 over 6 pay by that time. My wife and I were both working full-time so life was good. We did not have any kids.
I graduated from University of Maryland in 1973 and afterward went down to Portsmouth, VA. I was supposed to go to OIS (Officer Indoctrination School) in late June or July but something was screwed up so it was pushed back to August. We had already bought a house and we had invested all of our savings in this house because I thought that I was going to be the shining new ensign making lots of money. Well it didn’t happen until the end of September. Back then commission officers couldn’t have a part-time job so I couldn’t get a job. We used up all of our money. We were literally collecting pop bottles for gas and for food. I was an ensign. I couldn’t work until I was through with OIS.
My Vietnam experience had an impact on my experience as a Naval officer. Tet, 1968, was tough time for everyone in Vietnam. The hospital in Da Nang frequently received mass casualties, 20 to 30 of them at a time, 24 hours a day. One thing that created consternation was when the media would report that the US forces had overwhelmingly defeated everybody that week and that there had only been 200 casualties through the entire I Corps area. When we counted them up, sometimes more than that had come just into our facility. So there was a little bit of contrast between what was reported in the media and the real hard facts. Even though the hospital could hold only 250 patients there was one 24-hour period that we admitted more than 250 patients.
One night during Tet, I must have fallen asleep. We were working 20 to 30 hours straight for weeks on end. I woke up and there was the chief nurse, Mary Cannon, taking care of my patients for me. She went about her business and asked me if I got a nice little snooze and I responded “Yes.” She then moved on to covering the rest of the house and I reassumed my duty. Several years later, after OIS, when I checked in at Portsmouth, she was the chief nurse there! I thought that I had it made and was a special blessed child. I checked in at Portsmouth and promptly sat down at the chief nurse’s office. I came to the realization that maybe a life as a baby ensign was going to be a little bit different when she asked me why I sat down without being offered a seat. I expected that I would be assigned to ICU because of my past experiences. When she told me that I was going to pediatrics and not ICU, it was heartbreaking. She then told me that if she had anything to do with it, I would never work in another ICU again. She felt I had seen more than my share of trauma and that I didn’t need any more of it. So I went up to pediatrics and after about a year or two she retired and went down to South Carolina to play golf for the rest of her life. She was wonderful, compassionate, insightful and tough as nails. I now realize her brilliance too, at her compassion for and protection of me.
I spent a couple of years at Portsmouth working a variety of areas. I helped set up a nurse orientation and hospital corpsmen orientation program which was brand new back then. I then went to Hospital Corps School and was an instructor for a few years. When I was getting ready to finish up my tour, my wife ended up getting pregnant. By that time we had a couple of pregnancies, some of which didn’t turn out real well. We had two little girls by then. She was due to deliver at the same time that I was supposed to go to Japan. Fortunately I was able to stick around for the baby to be born. It was going to be an obligation of a minimum of one year and a maximum of eighteen months unaccompanied. I wanted to do them, and the family was ready for that.
We ended up having an infant son with osteogenesis imperfecta and 89 fractures at birth because of the disease. Some of the fractures started to heal and other new fractures developed. He wasn’t supposed to be born or live an hour or even six hours. Meanwhile he was transferred from the Great Lakes to Chicago. When we arrived at the Chicago hospital, we were told that babies born with the disease usually never survive after birth. But our son survived and it was all in God’s hands. Ultimately he lived to three weeks old and we were getting ready to take him home the next day. The previous night, around 10 P.M. or 11 P.M., when we returned home, we received a phone call from the hospital. After we had left the hospital, he had gotten sick and by the time we got back to the hospital he had died. The beauty of it was that people from all over the world came together to support us in our moment of need. We were able to really see what the “Navy family” really meant. It was a very spiritual experience. It was tough for everyone, but we received a tremendous response from people we had met years before and others coming out of the woodwork, so to speak. It was a very heartwarming and endearing experience.
In preparation for the trip to Japan our middle daughter was in kindergarten and there she told all her buddies that her father was going to Japan and was going to send her kimonos and Japanese dolls. When fall arrived and everyone in the 1st grade did their show and tell, she never showed up with any of the kimonos or Japanese dolls, so her real close buddies called her a liar. My orders t
o Japan had been cancelled because the Navy didn’t want to send me halfway around the world because of the baby’s death. However, after Kellie’s experience of being called a liar, my wife and I decided it was time to move on with life. A week later I ended up going to Iceland. My family was supportive of it. (Kellie finally got her Japanese dolls after a short vacation there 25 years later).
Mitch served in Iceland. He returned to go to graduate school at Marquette University in Milwaukee, graduating in 1983 with a master’s in medical/surgical nursing and a certificate as a clinical specialist. He served at Camp Lejeune, a Marine Corps Base in North Carolina, and stayed there for about four years.
He was picked up as an advisor to the surgeon general, working on getting ready for the next war, though they didn’t know where or when it would occur. He had over 20 years of service in the Navy by then. He served in Portsmouth as a clinical specialist in orthopedics. He served on the USS Guam, an amphibious assault carrier, in the Mediterranean before retiring.
My experiences at Vietnam made me who I am today. In looking at my war experience, Mary Cannon was a tremendous leader, mentor and director during the experience in Vietnam. I arrived in Vietnam at the same time the first nurses got there. I remember patients dying of tetanus and ascaris. Their bodies were weakening due to other disease entities and they were choking because of the ascaris. I remember one night I was assigned to the “holding” tent and had six patients die on me one night. The holding tent was a triage system, depending on the wounds and the needs of all the patients and resources. Losing sick patients, even though they were “expectant,” was tough. I also felt that it was a healthy experience especially since I had good faith in God. Lots of people have different mechanisms to cope. But overall as a result of decent parental upbringing, some faith experiences along the way, good friends, lots of luck and faithful family members, things have turned out pretty well.
Vietnam War Nurses Page 16