He spent almost a month in the intensive care unit in Da Nang. He was eventually stable and transported to our hospital. He keeps a pair of boots up in our room. He said the guy in the bed next to him in Da Nang was a double amputee. This young sergeant said to my husband, “I kept these boots for when I go home in two months. I will never wear them and they are spit polished for you to wear.” My husband still has his boots and they are still in the same spit-shine condition. He was also given some insignias from an officer who never made it back to the States.
Six years later, we returned to Oakland because the neurosurgeon in Arizona where we were living thought my husband was experiencing stroke symptoms. He wanted to know who had done my husband’s carotid surgery. Dr. Deaner was the vascular surgeon who originally cared for my husband in Oakland. The physician called to see if Dr. Deaner was still in Oakland. Come to find out, he was now commanding officer at Naval Hospital Oakland. Our physician conferred with him by phone and asked if he remembered my husband. Dr. Deaner remembered my husband and also remembered me. I had once been charge nurse on his thoracic unit. My husband painted a picture for Dr. Deaner of a young combat Marine. My husband was a cartoonist who used to keep his comrades entertained by drawing pictures for them. They used to tell him “We hope we don’t ever get caught in cross fire with you because all you have is pencils in your pocket.” Dr. Deaner told us to bypass all the red tape and come directly to Oakland and to come straight to his office. It was such an honor to be invited in by a commanding officer. After doing immediate thorough testing, he was told “You are not having a stroke. In fact, the anastomosis they did on you in Vietnam is so good we can barely tell there was an injury.”
You would expect my husband to have experienced some post-traumatic stress, but fortunately he is the most well-adjusted man. He never talks about his experiences. I have to drag things out of him to find out what happened. The only time I have ever seen him down is one time when he went to a movie that portrayed Marines in a negative way. It was one of those movies that had to do with the civilian killing in Vietnam. He came out of there and didn’t talk at all for two days.
I have so many fond memories from working at the naval hospital. We always had inspections on Fridays and we of course always tried to outdo every other unit. My husband remembers an incident when I stood up for my corpsman, and all their hard work. On Fridays, the corpsman spent many long hours polishing floors and dusting for captain’s white glove inspections. We tried to keep the patients in their rooms so they wouldn’t track up the shine on the floors before inspection. One day an entourage came up and started walking down the unit. I do remember saying something to them, and I remember the corpsmen looking at me aghast. I didn’t think anything of it. After this group continued on through the clean floors and left the unit one of the Corpsmen said, “Miss Meyer, do you know who that was?” I said “No.” They said, “That’s Vita Blue.” Vita Blue at that time was one of the Oakland A’s top pitchers and a media phenomenon. No one would stop me from protecting all their hard work.
I was charge nurse over 80 patients on the evening shift on the surgical units. I did this until the year the prisoners of war (POWs) came back, which was about 1971. It was an honor to be able to work with the POWs and I got picked to be one of the charge nurses.
We received 26 POWs back during Operation Homecoming. They came in two groups. The hospital closed down one of the 40-bed units and put up locked doors with Marine guards standing outside for the POWs. When we were on the unit, not only were we nurses, but we were there to listen to the POWs. We had units that were supplied with champagne, with food, with anything they wanted to eat. There was nothing too much for them. They went through the first two weeks of debriefing. Military people would come and take each of the POWs into a room. They would be tape recorded for days and days. We were trying to find out if there were other POWs or MIAs.
We ran them through all the physical and psychological testing. I think it was a real transition for a lot of them because some of these men came back to children that they had never seen, and to families that had gone on to function without them. I think there were a lot of adjustments made. I remember when the first group came back they made it a point of standing at attention when the second group came back. A lot of them didn’t want to meet their relatives at the airport, so their relatives were waiting for them back in their rooms. I remember one captain had his wife and five children waiting in the room when he came back. It was a momentous reunion.
Another POW that was interesting was a Marine Corps captain. He told how the POWs would collect little threads of material. With these little threads of material they fashioned a little American flag about the size of his hand. He told me when they went through Freedom Gate at the Hanoi Hilton, they raised their hands up with these little flags and the Vietnamese took them away as they boarded the plane. So when the second group came back, the first group got an American flag and they hung it from the end of the captain’s bed.
I remembered that none of them wanted soup because they had lived on soup. A lot of them had scars on their wrist and ankles where they had been bound. Some of them had to have further surgery for breaks that were never allowed to heal right. They had to go back to surgery and have bones rebroken and fixed.
They were only on the ward two months. We had a total of 26 POWs. We only had a couple of men that were enlisted. The enlisted sustained probably even more punishment. This one particular guy was a sergeant and he was in solitary the whole time. There were a lot of psych problems. Oakland had a big psych unit at the time.
My last year in Oakland, I made lieutenant. I had some great nurses that taught me. One of them was Sue Ann McCumber. She was on the Sanctuary or the Repose and she had seen it all. She was an incredible person. She probably made me the nurse I am. She made me so thorough and conscientious. She was a real stickler. If she didn’t think you were doing a good job, you might as well transfer out because she would just never let up on you. I actually established a good rapport with her. When I had my wedding shower, she came. I think it was the first time I had ever seen her show up to a junior nurse’s function.
After I left active duty Navy I stayed in the Naval Marine Corps Reserve unit where we drilled one weekend a month. We did a lot with the air national guard. We had a lot of really good experiences with the reserves. I was working at a hospital in Chandler, Arizona, from 1974 to 1979. I was a very busy person. I was working evenings at a hospital and doing mornings as a school nurse. I was the first school nurse for a little migrant town called Higley. Two to three nights a week I was going to school. In 1975 I had my first child. In ten years I had six pregnancies. So by 1979 I was expecting my fourth child. At that point I was trying to go to school, work two jobs, and raise three kids under five years old. In 1981 I lost my fourth child at five months and that’s when I took a step back and decided I was doing too much. I had spent 12, 13 years in the Navy and I hated to give it up. I knew that I had seven more years to go but my family became the priority. My husband used to say to me, “You know, I’m never going to have to go back into the military because I’m medically retired, but what if you get called and leave me with these three little kids.” As much as I hated to, I gave it up. The Navy had been the greatest experience of my life. I would have stayed in until I retired with 30 years, but I decided I had other priorities. My family was more important.
Harry A. Wesche
Harry A. Wesche, like so many military nurses, served during two conflicts, Korea and Vietnam. He describes many details of those two wars, of being an enlisted person moving to the role of officer and nurse and talks about being a male in the nursing profession.
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I went into the military right after high school graduation in Salt Lake City, Utah. I was in the enlisted ranks for about ten years. At the beginning I was sent to the United States Air Force Corpsmen School at Gunter Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama. While stationed there only a
few weeks, Rosa Parks made her famous bus ride. On my first pass off base, I was returning by bus from downtown Montgomery back to the base. As I usually did in Salt Lake, I went to the rear of the bus and took a seat. The bus went forward 10 or 15 feet and put on the brakes so hard I slid off of my chair. The driver then said, “You, white man, up here in front of the bus.”
We did not hear much about what Rosa Parks did on base. A couple of weeks later I went downtown to take some pictures. Martin Luther King’s chapel is right off of the main thoroughfare in Montgomery, below the state capital. I went out into the street to get a better picture of the church. A man walking by escorted me back to the sidewalk. It was not a police officer and he was white. I said told him I wanted a picture, as this was a famous chapel. The man replied, “Not in Montgomery, Alabama.” He and other white men with him did not want anything to enliven, capitalize, or broaden the problem that was going on at the time. It was a little bit of an eye opener coming from the West, where we did not have the issues of segregation.
I arrived in Alabama on Labor Day weekend in September 1955. The Korean War armistice had been signed, but skirmishes on the DMZ and on sea around Korea were still happening. Many in my graduating class were assigned to Osan Air Base, South Korea. Assignments were made according to your class standing and desires. I initially received orders to Hickam Air Force Base outside Honolulu, Hawaii, as an independent duty corpsman. During the second year of that assignment, I was sent on temporary duty to a small Pacific island, Johnston Island. The next year I was assigned to Palmyra Island during the British H bomb testing. The British were based out of Christmas Island. Our contingent on Palmyra was 75 engineers, physicists and basic support. I had a radio communication with Hickam Air Force Base if it had been necessary to evacuate a patient by evacuation aircraft. Luckily, however, there were only a few injuries requiring stitches and colds to treat. There were no serious patient incidents.
When my overseas assignment time was up and I was due to rotate, there were less than 180 days left on my enlistment. The Air Force was cutting back on active duty forces and those rotating, who were not planning on re-enlisting with less than 180 days left, were allowed to separate. They would remain in the active reserve for the duration of their obligation. Those of my age group had an eight-year obligation of which I still had 4½ years remaining.
I was released from active duty and returned to Salt Lake City and entered an Air Force reserve unit and began college. Two years later, I was informed that my contract with the Air Force had not been upheld and I was being recalled to fulfill my obligation. However, I was given the opportunity to attend advanced training for corpsmen, which was again in Gunter Air Force Base, Alabama.
I became interested in nursing as a profession and started my education at the University of Utah in the fall. While attending the University of Utah Nursing Program, the reserve pay came in handy for expenses. Six months into my junior year an Army recruiter talked me into joining the Army, which would pay for tuition and books. On completion of school and passing state boards, I would be an officer with a three-year payback commitment. In March 1963, I was discharged from the Air Force and joined the Army. I was downgraded to a PFC in the Army after having been a master sergeant in the Air Force. My pay was less, but the Army was paying for my tuition and books, so the purchase power of my income was greater. Three months before graduation I became an officer and put on the second lieutenant insignia, “the butter bar.”
I graduated from nursing school in June 1965. In September I went to the Army boot camp and basic training at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas. In January 1966, I attended the intensive care course at Fitzsimmons Army Hospital in Denver, Colorado. It was a six-month course, and on August 1, I was sent to Korea.
The majority of the overseas transfers were sent to Vietnam, but I was sent to Korea. They wanted me to work in the intensive care unit at the 121st Hospital. If you have ever watched the movie “MASH” or have seen the TV series, you might remember that when patients would come in critical condition they would send them to the 121st. The 121st did exist and we called it “the one too many.” It was the largest hospital in Korea and was located in Bupyeong, six miles from Incheon and 30 miles north of Seoul. We were all living in Quonset huts and the hospital was in a containment type of building with ICU in the center.
Besides the occasional skirmishes, our biggest medical problem was hemorrhagic fever. A doctor from the U.S. Public Health Service had just discovered the causative agent for hemorrhagic fever in Brazil. He was sent to Korea to see if he could do the same there. The disease is only found in Brazil, Russia and Korea along the DMZ (Demilitarized Zone). People who contracted the disease were sent to the 121st intensive care unit.
Hemorrhagic fever was a nursing challenge like I have never known in my life. It was treated entirely with intake and output (I&O). The way I&Os were monitored was input equaled output or the amount that was then given the next hour. It was sometimes 20 to 30 ccs out and 20 to 30 ccs in. The body fluids were so depleted that the vessels would literally opened up and everything except the heavy cells went out into the interstitial fluids. Shock was our biggest problem. We did not have kidney dialysis, so we did peritoneal dialysis. The patients’ abdomens were swollen like basketballs. They would go into renal shutdown because the Loop of Henle was plugged with all kinds of cells and there were literally no fluids to flush the kidney as all the fluid went through the open part of the vessels. This cycle would go on for about a week to ten days. Afterwards, the vessels would regenerate, close and the patient would go into a heavy type of diuresis. You would actually see the long blood coils coming through the urinary down drains in the shape of the kidney vessels. It was impressive. We did not lose one patient. One day I took a patient’s vital signs and prepared the IV with the amount of fluid to be given him. Everything looked good at that moment. Then I walked out of the unit to attend a meeting and had only walked a short distance down the hall when I was paged back to the ward. I ran back and the patient had dropped into shock just after I left. That is how critical the patients were. We treated 50 to 60 patients.
Hemorrhagic fever would always come in the fall and spring. During the summer and winter there weren’t any cases. Hemorrhagic fever was only found in a triangle around the DMZ and not found all over Korea. It was found at the American end of the DMZ and not the Korean end. The people we were treating were American troops. All of the cases were eventually air evacuated home once they were stabilized, usually with peritoneal dialysis. They were not put on air evacuation right away because layovers and aircraft changes took a full 24 hours to fly them back to the States. On an average, it took two to three weeks to stabilize each patient. When I was teaching later, I would always bring up their experience because people would often take I&Os lightly when they are something to be taken seriously.
I was a first lieutenant with only a year’s experience as a nurse. I had received very intensive training. I set up the first EKG monitoring systems in Korea in our intensive care unit. The cardiologist was amazed that we were monitoring EKGs and telemetry as nurses. The head cardiologist taught the ICU nursing staff to read the monitors. We could identify PVCs, ventricular tachycardia (v-tach) and a normal heart pattern. The head nurse, who’d come from the Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington, D.C., asked one of the nursing staff, “What is this?” She was told it was a monitor. She then asked “Can you read it?” She asked what a PVC was and what it meant. Also ventricular tachycardia came up and the head nurse asked what it was. The nurse replied that the heart was beating faster. The head nurse replied by saying “You mean V–tach?” She said that she couldn’t read an EKG and why did we even have them? Right then the cardiologist came in and said the nursing staff was the beginning of what would happen in nursing in the future.
I came home from Korea in 1967. My military records showed that I had flown air evacuation. The Army said that they wanted me to work in helicopter retrieval or th
e “dustoff” testing office. In the days of the Korean War we had an evacuation pattern where the corpsmen would be with the men at the fighting front and render first aid on the battle front. The injured would be evacuated back to a battalion aid station where they would be stabilized somewhat and then would be brought back to a MASH or evacuation hospital It was a stepping stone to come back home. In Korea we had an actual battlefront with specific demarcation.
In Vietnam the front was all over the place. It created for us, as medics, a necessity for a different evacuation. The “dustoff” was the bringing of the area of evacuation helicopters to the front lines and bringing the troops back to more definitive care in a hospital. When they came back by helicopter, they did not have to stop by steps. They could come directly back to a hospital situation where they could be stabilized immediately. There were times in Vietnam when we had upwards of 100 people waiting out in front of our pre-op tent and helicopters up in the sky, circling and waiting for their time to come in.
Vietnam War Nurses Page 20