Vietnam War Nurses

by Patricia Rushton

  My biggest thing about Philadelphia was when I was Nurse of the Day (NOD) for the whole hospital. I was just a lieutenant! I will never forget because it was my birthday, December 1. It was a common statement made by folks who had nothing to lose to say, “Well, they can’t take away my birthday.” On this December 1, I kept saying, “People are wrong, they can take away your birthday.” I was the NOD and it started snowing on the evening shift. The military nurses had to come in but the civilian nurses were calling in sick. I had to rearrange the staffing in order to prevent a shortage. It worked out because I kept a couple of OB nurses over to work a double shift. I told them they could sleep as long as there were no patients coming in. If one more nurse had called in sick, I would have had to work that whole shift too.

  I was transferred to Cherry Point, North Carolina, in 1977 and was the charge nurse for family medicine, basically females and pediatrics. It was a good experience. I was the only military nurse on night shift in the whole hospital. We had corpsmen and the civilian nurses that were on OB and in the nursery. It was full service but we had only 90 beds. If there was a “double header” in the OB, you would have to go and help with the second delivery. If there were more babies in the nursery than they could handle, you would have to go and help with that. On the weekends you were literally the OR nurse. If a patient came in and needed that OR, you did all the prep work, the circulating, and then you recovered the patient. Because I had the ICU experience, if we had an ICU patient, then I would end up providing the care.

  I attended pediatrics resuscitation codes. One was a four-day-old baby and one was a twelve-month-old. CPR really works because both of the babies pinked up as we provided it. They wouldn’t breath on their own and the minute you stopped, they stopped. We lost both of them. The four-day-old was a T4 deficiency and the mother had lost a baby earlier to the same thing. At that time they weren’t doing genetic testing or counseling. They were assuming that probably all of her babies would end up with this deficiency so she wasn’t going to be able to get pregnant again. The second baby was a 12-month-old that came in as an abused child. The father said that the baby had hung herself off of the crib railing. The railing was an inch wide and there was no way she could have got it caught behind her jaw. That baby didn’t survive either. The father was arrested.

  At Cherry Point I lived in the community. I bought a home because there weren’t any apartments there, and they all had waiting lists. I tried to “augment” a couple of times while I was at Cherry Point so I could go back to school. I was turned down for all of it, so I had a decision to make. Do I re-enlist for another two or three years or do I just get out? I spent two weeks crying while trying to make that decision. One day I woke up and I said, “I know exactly what I need to do. I love teaching corpsmen and I wanted to teach.” So I decided to get off active duty and I applied and was accepted to UCLA in the master’s degree program. I went to UCLA and received my master’s in nursing as a clinical specialist in acute care, adult medical-surgical nursing with a focus in nursing education. I contacted a reserve unit to try and get in but there were no billets. I then thought nothing of it. I didn’t realize I was still part of the Navy. I was just IRR.

  * * *

  Odette graduated from UCLA with a master’s degree in 1981. She stayed in the Navy reserve and eventually became a lieutenant commander. During Operation Desert Storm she was recalled to Oakland Naval Hospital for ten months. After she returned from her mobilization she continued with the reserve and was involved in a number of military field exercises, helping to put together 196 care-plan algorithms that were computerized and placed on the corpsmen’s PDAs so that the corpsmen could use them to care for patients in the field. Odette was stationed at the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery in Washington, D.C., as the reserve corps liaison. She acted as the commanding officer of several naval reserve units and retired from the Navy as a captain. As a civilian she has worked as a systems analyst and nurse educator, and now holds a full-time faculty position in the School of Nursing at George Mason University.

  References

  Doyle, E., and S. Lipsman. 1982. Setting the Stage: The Vietnam Experience. 25 vols. Boston: Boston Publishing Company.

  Hovis, B. 1992. Station Hospital Saigon: A Navy Nurse in Vietnam, 1963–1964. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press.

  Nurses in the Vietnam War. 1995. Nebraska Nurse: The Official Publication of the Nebraska Nurses Association 28 (2, no. 2) (1995): 1, 4.

  Roark, J. L., M. P. Johnson, P. C. Cohen, S. Stage, A. Lawson, and S. M. Hartmann. 1998. The American Promise: A History of the United States from 1865. Vol. 2. Boston: Bedford Press.

  Ruff, Cheryl L., and K. Sue Roper. 2005. Ruff’s War. Annapolis, MD: U.S. Naval Institute Press.

  Rushton, P. 2010. Gulf War Nurses: Personal Accounts of 14 Americans, 1990–1991 and 2003–2010. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

  Rushton, P., L. C. Callister, and M. Wilson. 2005. 1998. Latter-day Saint Nurses at War: A Story of Caring and Sacrifice. Provo: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University.

  www.vietnam-war.info/facts/facts3.php. Accessed August 27, 2011.

  List of Names and Terms

  Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS)

  Air Evacuation Reserve Flight, 66th

  Air Evacuation Squadron, 902nd

  Air Force Bases

  Air Force School of Aerospace Medicine

  American Nurses Association

  USS Arizona

  Armstrong, Margaret

  Army Medical Centers

  Army Nurse Corps Candidate Program

  Army Student Nurse Program

  Association of Military Surgeons of the US (AMSUS)

  Baczkowski, Jim

  Bailey, Pearl

  Barton, Clara

  Bataan Death March

  USS Benevolence

  Bien Hoa

  USS Bountiful

  Brooks, Mary

  Brown, Jerry

  Bulshefski, Veronica

  Cam Ranh Bay

  Camp Bullis

  Camp Eagle

  Camp Pendleton

  Can Tho

  Cannon, Mary Ford

  Case Western Reserve Francis Payne Bolton School of Nursing

  Cat Fever

  China Beach

  Chu Lai

  Conder, Maxine

  Davis, Tim

  Department of Health and Environment

  Dickinson County Memorial Hospital

  Dix, Dorothea

  Dong Ha

  Dragon Mountain

  Duerk, Alene

  Dustoff

  Eagle Beach

  Eisenhower, Dwight D.

  Emil, Jan

  Engle, Joan

  Enterprise (space shuttle)

  Erickson, Ruth

  Evacuation Hospitals

  Feeney, Bess

  First Marine Air Wing

  Flynn, Errol

  Flynn, Sean

  Fort Belvoir

  Fort Benjamin Harris

  Fort Bliss

  Fort Bragg

  Fort Des Moines

  Fort Jackson

  Fort Ord

  Fort Sam Houston

  Freedom Gate

  Freedom Hill

  George Mason School of Nursing

  George Washington University Hospital

  Godfrey, Walt

  Gostlin, Bill

  Hanoi Hilton

  Harken, Dwight

  USS Haven

  Hayes, Anna Mae

  Hemorrhagic fever

  Higgins, Margaret

  Hiroshima

  Holme, Jeanie

  Hospital Corps School

  Hovis, Bobbi

  Hue

  Humphrey, Hubert

  Idaho State University

  Infantry Division, 4th

  James Walker School of Nursing

  Johns Hopkins Hospital

  Johnson, Lyndon B.

  Kaiser Permanent Medical Center

  Ken
nedy, John F.

  King, Martin Luther

  LaVenture, Ed

  Lincoln Memorial

  Long Binh

  MAG 16 (Marine Air Group)

  USS Marigold

  Marquette University

  McCumber, Sue Ann

  USNS Mercy

  Mercy Hospital School of Nursing

  Miller, Jean

  Montagnards

  Mount Sinai Hospital

  Nagasaki

  National League of Nursing

  Naval Air Station, Albany

  Naval Clinic, Reykjavik

  Naval Hospitals

  Naval Station (Hospital), Da Nang

  Navy Nurse Corps Association

  Navy Nurse Corps Candidate Program

  NBC

  Nha Trang

  Nightingale, Florence

  Nimitz, Chester W.

  Nixon, Richard

  Nurses Association Alumnae

  Oakland Athletics

  Office of Naval Intelligence (NCIS, ONI)

  Officer Indoctrination School

  Operation Homecoming

  Pack, VaLaine

  Parks, Rosa

  Pearl Harbor Day

  Peter Brent Brigham Hospital

  Pfeffer, Henrietta Herman

  Phu, Sgt.

  Phu Bai

  Pinkerton Academy

  Platoon

  Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

  Quang Tri

  HMS Queen Elizabeth

  Qui Nhon

  Rach Gia

  Radar Hill

  Raye, Martha

  USS Refuge

  USS Repose

  Ricks College

  Rolling Thunder

  Rutgers University

  St. Joseph’s Hospital School of Nursing

  St. Mary’s Hospital, San Francisco

  St. Therese School of Nursing

  St. Vincent’s Hospital

  USS Sanctuary

  Schering-Plough Pharmaceuticals

  Seattle University

  Shellback

  Sisters of Mercy

  USS Solace

  Stack, Robert

  State University of New York

  Surgical Hospital, 18th

  Swedish Hospital School of Nursing

  Tet Offensive

  Texas Woman’s University

  Titulinka

  Todd, C. Edwina

  Truman, Harry S.

  United States Agency for International Development

  University of Arizona

  University of California at Los Angeles

  University of Maryland School of Nursing

  University of Michigan

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Public Health

  University of San Francisco

  University of Utah

  Veterans Hospital, Minneapolis

  Victory in Europe Day

  Vietnam Veterans Association

  Vietnam Women’s Memorial

  Vita Blue

  Walter Reed Army Institute of Nursing (WRAIN)

  Wangensteen suction

  Wathen, Jane

  Westmoreland, William Childs

  White House

  Whitecell, Margaret

  William Beaumont General Hospital