LYNDA
VAN DEVANTER, a 33 year old Manhattan
Beach resident, was stationed in Pleiku and Qui-Nhon, South
Vietnam, from 1969 to 1970. She was sent to the neuro-emergency room,
where her way was marked by a long trail of blood. She took care of a soldier with his face
blown away and his teeth swinging from the jaw that dangled loose. She pumped 120 units of blood through needles
in his leg, neck, and both arms. While
changing a blood bag, LYNDA accidentally kicked the soldier's
clothes
and his photograph fell down. She compared
the happy young man standing with his girl friend in the picture and the mass
of blood vessels and bruised skin in front of her and she felt sick. (7)
In
an article on the editorial page of The
Los Angeles Times, LYNDA wrote "I am reminded of tiny children with
their arms and legs blown off. I
remember a pregnant woman with a wound in her stomach, and her child delivered
by Caesarean Section –- a child who entered this life with a gunshot wound in
his stomach..." (8)
Another
woman veteran is KATHY GUNSON who was stationed at the 85th EVAC HOSPITAL
in Phu-Bai. She spent most of her time
there as an emergency room nurse, triage officer, and evaluator of the cause of
death for the KIA (Killed In Action). She said it was hard for her to tell the
wounded soldiers that everything would be okay.
She wrote "The sight of pain, suffering and blood makes me ill...
and I grieve because I can no longer cope with my feelings when I am working . .
. ." (9)
PEGGY
DU VALL will always remember pumping blood into an 18-year-old U.S. soldier
who stepped on a mine. She said both of
his eyes were gone. His face was totally
chewed up, he had lost an arm and a leg, and a shell fragment had torn a hole
in his trachea. After saving his life,
she wondered what kind of life she had saved. (10)
Mrs.
DUVALL worked in hospitals in Da-Nang and Long-Binh from July 1970 to July
1971. She said in an interview, "In
Da-Nang, there was no one to protect us.
If there was a red alert while I was sleeping, I'd have to put a helmet
and jacket on and crawl under my bed."
She noted that nurses had the tendency to over-invest emotionally in
their patients even if their chances of survival were poor. She said: "These men were very grateful,
probably the most grateful patients I have ever had. We worked twelve hours a day, six days a
week. And we'd often work on our day
off." According to Mrs. DU VALL, on
the 7:00 P.M. to 7:00 A.M.
shift two nurses and two medics would take care of 78 men. (11)
Unlike
other women veterans, entertainer CHRIS NOEL was wearing fashionable mini
skirts and trying to mend the troops' minds (12). She was the first woman for the Armed Forces
Radio who voluntarily spent five to eight weeks at a time in Southeast
Asia, building morale and playing to perfection the role of
All-American girl-next-door, sweetheart, sex symbol, sister, and mother
surrogate. It is said by those who were
there that her message was simple: She
told them to stay alive. (13)
Television
and motion picture actress NOEL also said in an interview "I built
morale. I did for morale what LYNDA did
for bodies on the operation table. I did
it with energy and a lot of smiles. I
went to fire bases, I landed in helicopters across Vietnam." (14)
She
also spent long hours at hospitals and aid stations, chatting with the maimed
and burned, giving autographs on bandages and casts. She also trooped out to rifle companies and
visited the motor pools and maintenance shops, even the morgue and grave
registration office. (15)
Sharing
her feelings with LISA CONNOLLY from The
Los Angeles Times, Ms. NOEL said she got mad at herself twice because she
broke down in front of people. Once she
was sitting in a small tent out in a field and a tiny Vietnamese boy was dying,
his stomach bloated from starvation and from eating garbage. She looked at the GIs,
the medics, the boy's
father, and she couldn't take it. She
had to leave. (16)
