Vietnam War Nurses

by Patricia Rushton

  A couple of interesting things happened while I was on Guam. President Nixon stopped overnight when he was going to China for his first meeting. They have a VIP suite that was military owned, and he stayed there. They had helicopters flying all over the place when he came in. They flew his bulletproof limousine on a C–5 and dropped it off so it would be available for him on arrival and departure. The other interesting thing was a Japanese soldier was captured. He had been there since World War II. They caught him stealing shrimp from a trap and they caught him and determined that he was a soldier hiding there all those years. They sent him back to Japan. I think he knew the war was over. He had been living there all those years in caves on the island.

  We had a typhoon while I was there. For typhoons all of the nurses went in the hospital and stayed until it was over. All the women seven months pregnant or more would come and stay at the hospital. We would put tape in the windows to keep them from breaking and scattering glass everywhere. Women go into labor earlier in typhoon weather because of changes in air pressure. I happened to work the night of the typhoon. It was howling. An area with mattresses on the floor in offices was set up where we could sleep in case we needed to work. There wasn’t much damage, so we were pretty lucky.

  From Guam I went to Great Lakes Hospital. At that point I wasn’t sure I was going to stay in the Navy so I wanted to take orders in a place that was close to home. When I got there, I worked again on the orthopedic ward and I worked between orthopedics and general surgery. I made lieutenant. Once you’re a lieutenant you usually get your own ward, and I became charge nurse of an orthopedic ward. That was the way it was in the States. Overseas sometimes they would have somebody junior be a charge nurse, but mostly it was when you were a lieutenant. While I was still a lieutenant junior grade, I got pulled into the nursery periodically when they had a lot of bad babies, but mostly I just worked surgical areas.

  At this point in my career, I decided that I liked the Navy a lot and I was going to stay in, so I did my application for regular Navy. It wasn’t a very long process. It was just a formality to put my paperwork in. Back then they would ask people to go regular, or be recommended from someone higher. Sometimes people decided they wanted to go regular and they had to put their paper work in and have to be chosen, but I just had to put my paperwork in.

  When the POWs came back in 1974, the sick officers’ quarters (SOQ) was set up for their admission. Staff was chosen to work there. We had special classes about the dos and don’ts of taking care of them. You had to have a special badge to enter the SOQ, so they were pretty well protected. It was on the top floor, and all the exits guarded so nobody could get up there that didn’t belong there. We had about fourteen POWs that went through the hospital. When they first got there, they had debriefing and then all the medical workups. If a spouse was visiting a husband and they had a “Do Not Disturb” sign on the door, no matter who called or what was happening, no one could go in, even if the United States president called. None of them stayed very long, maybe a week or ten days. Some of the guys came back to the hospital after being discharged. We had one guy that had breast cancer when he came back. He had known the lump was there for six months. He got treated for that, but he didn’t last very long. I think he died within two years from his cancer because it had been there for so long.

  Maria received orders to Bremerton Naval Hospital. While at that duty station she went on to get her bachelor’s degree from Seattle University in 1981. She then served at Camp Pendleton, Oakland Naval Hospital and on the USNS Mercy during its maiden voyage on a humanitarian mission to the Philippines. She talks of that important mission.

  We had a really good group of people and all the services were there—Army, Navy, Air Force, and public health. We worked well together. The charge nurses were assigned from the Navy and then the shore facilities.

  There were some preparations required for the Mercy’s Philippine mission. First, a bunch of us got qualified with a 45. We also went to firefighting school. On Treasure Island they had this firefighting school and you would go there and they would show you everything—how to check the doors and how to use the hoses. We actually went into buildings that were on fire and put them out. We used the OBAs, the breathing apparatus. From Oakland almost every person that went on this ship went to this firefighting school.

  The other thing that was interesting was that when we went on this cruise we had our own security. Because we are a hospital ship, we weren’t armed, so we had eight Navy SEALS that roamed the decks 24/7 taking turns while we were in port. I don’t think anybody really knew about them. We believed they were armed, but no one could ever say because they always had a back pack with them. They had jump suits on. They were big one-piece, big-zipper jumpers and they had those on the whole time and they walked around in twos while we were in port. They were kind of like our protection. There was a ward on one of the lower decks that wasn’t used and that was where they stayed. They locked it up with a chain when they weren’t in there, but they were there and that was pretty nice.

  We had ten days in each city that we were at in the Philippines. Half the days, one group would go ashore. Then you would switch, and the other half would go ashore, so the nursing service was divided. In those ten days, in every one of those ports, we got one day off, one day that we could go on shore and do whatever. That worked pretty well. It was interesting. I really enjoyed that a lot.

  I rode the ship home as opposed to leaving the ship at the end of the Philippine mission. We went to Papua, New Guinea and Fiji. When we were coming back, the captain of the vessel asked permission if we could go 90 miles out of our way to cross the equator at the International Dateline. We had our “Shellback Initiation,” and because we crossed the International Date Line at the equator, we are all “Golden Shellbacks.” That was kind of interesting because you have all these Air Force and Army people who are now Golden Shellbacks.

  When we came into Hawaii, we manned the rails and rendered honor to the Arizona. We stayed in Hawaii for three days. The ship was divided up into three groups so everyone had to stay aboard one day and then the other two days you got off. Then we took off and came back to the States. We sailed into Oakland and there was a big celebration when we went under the Golden Gate Bridge. People threw flowers. All the firefighting ships had their hoses running, and the fire ships had the red, white, and blue water. Upon return we were granted leave. When I went back to work, I became the nursing service manpower advisor.

  Maria followed her Oakland mission with service in Iceland as the director of nursing service at the Navy clinic in Reykjavik, Iceland. She returned to Naval Hospital Bremerton, Washington, and subsequently retired from that duty station.

  Mary Ellen Warne

  Mary Ellen Warne’s story is one of being in a naval facility stateside during wartime. She was able to care for many different types of patients, including amputees and POWs, both less common experiences in any setting. She tells a wonderful love story, her own, and of knowing that family is the highest priority in her life.

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  My mother had been a nurse with the Veterans Administration and my aunt had been an Army nurse. My mother used to tell us stories from World War II. She was sent over on the Queen Elizabeth in a convoy to serve in England as a nurse for wounded soldiers there. All the ships guarded the nurses who were in the center of the convoy. It was her wartime stories that initially sparked my interest in military nursing.

  I graduated from high school in 1965 in Grayslake, Illinois. I decided to go into nursing because of my family history and my work with nursing clubs in high school. I wanted a four-year degree. However, I came from a large farming family of six children and I was the eldest. It would have been a financial burden to attend a four-year college. I made the decision to attend St. Therese School of Nursing to get my three-year diploma as my mother and aunt had done.

  While in school I lived in the dorm and worked on weekends as a nurse’s aide. I rememb
er back at nursing school sitting in the lounge and watching the war stories about Vietnam on the news at night. The first contact I had with the Navy was piling in a car on a Friday and Saturday evening to go dancing at the enlisted or officers’ clubs in Great Lakes; often, 20 or 30 of us went.

  I graduated from nursing in 1968 at age 20. After graduation I decided to get a year’s nursing experience. I stayed at the school and worked on the surgical unit. After a year I decided I wanted to do something that was exciting, where I could travel. I looked into the airlines and decided against it. I decided to look into the services and talked to all three recruiters. The Navy didn’t send a recruiter. Two nurses from Naval Hospital Great Lakes on active duty contacted me and invited me into their home to answer all my questions. It was the most memorable experience. These two young nurses loved what they were doing. The visit sold me on the Navy. I would be a direct appointee because the service had not paid for my education, and we had been out a year. They said I could have one of three picks of any naval station. Hickam air base in Hawaii was a very tempting choice for the Air Force. We ruled the Army out right away because we didn’t like the uniforms. There is something about a Navy uniform that just looks sharp. There is something even better about a Marine Corps uniform. When we heard the Navy took care of the Marines, that was the clincher to our decision. The Navy had nice big stations along the coast. We picked San Diego, Oakland, and Pensacola.

  I was due to report to Rhode Island in July 1969. My roommate and I got into my new car and drove from Grayslake, Illinois, up to Newport, Rhode Island, on my first big trip away from home. I remember going into Newport because it was the first time I had seen the ocean. There were big ships, and cobblestone streets, everything was military related. Our four weeks at Newport went by very fast. The main things we all learned were to salute, properly wear a uniform, and make a bed. We learned to stand a basic inspection and the marching was pretty much substandard. We had one weekend off from Navy indoctrination, so we went spent it in Boston.

  After training finished in Newport, we were given orders to report to Oakland Naval Hospital in California. The hospital was impressive because it was a brand new hospital sitting on a hill that had previously been a golf course. The hospital had a circular driveway that led to the entrance. There was an inconsistency which has forever been engraved in my mind. It would become a reminder to me of the reality I would experience over the next few years. The sight of this beautiful hospital setting was interrupted by the vision of a young officer in a wheelchair with bilateral hip disarticulations, holding his two children being pushed up the hill by his wife. Oakland was the main amputee center and neurologic-prosthetic research center for the West Coast. There were always wagon trains of young amputees wheeling around from surrounding buildings to the main hospital, going to physical therapy, and the prosthetic lab.

  The first year we rotated a month at a time and were oriented to all the different units. After that we could voice our preferred specialty. I had worked a year on a surgical unit after graduation and was grateful to be able to stay in that area. The hospital offered a mixture of general surgery, vascular, urology and plastic surgery. I secured a position as charge nurse. I rotated on evenings, covering three units with about 90 patients total. Fifty to 20 patients, on average, had surgery each day.

  We would get patients in from Vietnam through Travis Air Force Base every Thursday which brought in men and women from the hospitals overseas. Patients were transferred to Oak Knoll Naval Hospital in Oakland by ambulance or helicopter. We were provided a list by early afternoon detailing how many patients we were going to receive. Upon arrival, they would be sent to the ER for triage, then on to different units. On the surgical ward we admitted an average of 3 to 4 patients every Thursday. It was always a time-consuming process because each patient was evaluated by teams of physicians and was given routine testing, such as malaria treatment, parasite testing and psychological evaluations.

  There were a few patients that left me with lasting memories. There was one young Marine who was the center of many stories and tales that were circulated among his fellow Marine patients. He had suffered catastrophic wounds during a firefight in Vietnam. He had lower and upper limb amputations and most of his face had been destroyed. Supposedly, not finding any signs of life, he was placed in a body bag at the front. Eventually they figured out that he was still alive. He went through at least ten surgeries that I remember at our hospital. Prior to his arrival to us he had multiple major surgeries at Da Nang. Our hospital admitted him to the plastic surgery unit where he got a nose, an eye, and had jaw and neck surgery. His face regained some normalcy to those of us who were used to seeing him, but not to the general population.

  We had a lot of amputees admitted to the plastics unit because their stumps didn’t have enough tissue left on them to sustain prostheses. One of the popular procedures during that time was a “pedicle graft.” A flap of skin would be taken from a patient’s abdomen and sewn to their arm. When the flap established circulation from the arm, it would be severed from the arm. The last step would be to attach and cast the patient’s arm flap to their stump. Often, after a lot of time, procedures, and discomfort from being confined to uncomfortable positions, the flap would die.

  I remember all the amputees we got. They lived in the outside barracks, waiting to be medically discharged, while still receiving treatment in our hospital. I used to hear stories about the amputee Marines, and how they used to take care of one another. They kept their spirits up and always did so well in the hospital, but had problems when they were on the outside. Staff members and comrades in the hospital never made them feel uncomfortable because they were different. It was a protective environment that helped them feel secure. When they left for weekend leaves, you would hear stories of children in shopping centers pointing out their disfigurements, setting in reality for the soldiers who would soon have to leave and live in the real world. I remember one guy telling me that the hardest part for him was going to a shopping mall and walking by a mother and her children. The kids were so innocent and would ask, “Mommy, why doesn’t he have legs?” or “What’s wrong with him?”

  Besides amputee surgeries we saw a lot of circumcisions, and then a lot of pilonidal cysts. It seemed we always had a steady stream of corpsmen packing pilonidal cysts every day. We did a lot of TURs, and a lot of urology surgery.

  The cure rate for young men with testicular cancer was almost nonexistent in the 1960s. I remember a young man off a ship who was diagnosed with testicular cancer. They had discovered it after he came back. Today they can treat it, but back then there was no treatment. I do remember him being on the unit for a long time and watching his condition deteriorate. He had a girlfriend. The day before he died he wanted to leave something for his fiancée. He was married by the hospital chaplain in his room, still awake and conscious, but the next day died with all the staff, family and his new wife at his side. He was able to leave her with military benefits and life insurance.

  After I had been there for six months, I had an appendicitis attack. Working on the surgical unit, and being a young new ensign, I had top care with the chief of surgery as my surgeon. Unfortunately, even though I had the best, they let me sit for two days until my appendix became gangrenous. After surgery, I was quite ill and actually ended up with pelvic abscesses. Over the next two years I had three additional surgeries related to bowel obstructions and I signed three times for possible hysterectomies. The chief of GYN was also involved in my care. He later retired to become the head doctor at the University of Arizona Medical School in Tuscon, Arizona. Because of innovative treatments at the time, I was able to have six pregnancies.

  I met my husband at the hospital; he was one of my patients. After I had my appendicitis attack and was doing my walking, I encountered two young Marine patients staring at me. My husband-to-be then waved at me, not realizing I was a new nurse. I gave him a dirty look. There was a strict fraternization policy and �
�problem nurses” were always given orders out to less popular duty stations. When I eventually recovered and returned to work, my husband, a patient on the plastics ward, was waiting to be boarded out of the Marine Corps. Since he lived locally, we established a relationship over the next three years after he was released to become a civilian. We eventually married on August 26, 1972.

  My husband was a patient at Oakland and remembers when he had sutures in his neck. This doctor had tied these with those little round things they use for fishing. He had those all in his neck. It was a new way of doing suturing to probably cut down on scarring. I have never seen that done anywhere else. My husband was over on the plastics unit after I came back to work. He was at Oakland to be boarded out of the Marine Corps because of his injuries.

  My husband’s story is miraculous. He was in an area which I think isn’t too far from Da Nang. His unit was camping through the night in a small village and planning to head back to their main unit in the morning. During the night, they began getting mortar coming in from the village. They called in their coordinates, hoping to get air support. Friendly fire came in and hit their company of ten dead on. My husband remembered the guys in his company going down in front of him from the mortar attack. As the mortar fire approached him, he put his rifle underneath his stomach, thinking, “If I make it through this, at least I will have my rifle (to take his own life).” He vaguely remembers being hit. Blood came up his throat and he passed out. Out of his ten comrades, three including him were evacuated out. Two of those didn’t make it. He was the only survivor of his company. All his doctors agree he should have never lived through that night and that he is a miracle.

  When my husband went down, there was a corpsman that had only been with them a week. Their previous corpsman had been killed. The corpsman came up to him and said, “Buddy, you are going to be okay. Where is your dog tag?” It was in his boot. People carried them different places, but the idea was to keep it in your boot in case your lower extremities were separated from the rest of your body, and to prevent noise. He tried to point to his boot when blood came up into his mouth. He doesn’t remember anything after that. That new corpsman did a tracheotomy on him during those crucial few minutes. My husband had a severed carotid artery, jugular, a hemo-pneumothorax, lacerated liver, and multiple shrapnel wounds. My husband arrived in Da Nang with a blood pressure of 60 over 0. I bring this up because, as far as I am concerned, the people in the field and in Da Nang had to be the best of the best in difficult circumstances. They saved his life.