Читать книгу Welcome Home From Vietnam, Finally - Gus Kappler MD - Страница 20

The army nurses were female and male. Both were exceptionally qualified and dedicated. There were fewer men; true army professionals and usually ordered to serve in Vietnam.

The women, referred to as round eyes, were mostly first lieutenants who all had volunteered to be there. They mostly were just out of nursing school and in their very early twenties as were the wounded and ill for which they cared. They also were true professionals who essentially acted as “house staff”, i.e., surgical residents in training. When they called with their evaluations of a patient’s status, we listened carefully and followed their suggestions. One such patient had been shot through and through the right chest by an AK-47. Stateside, draining the blood and air with a chest tube was usually sufficient treatment for the typical low velocity gun shot wound, i.e., GSW. That experience dictated my initial approach. In the ICU, the blood and air continued to drain, and I was notified. Without hesitation, accepting the nurse’s judgment, I asked to have the OR set up for surgery and quickly reviewed the anatomy of a lung’s major blood vessels as I mentally prepared myself to accept the responsibility of removing the damaged upper lobe of the right lung of this eighteen-year-old kid.

AK-47 round through the right lung (white area); normal lungs are black on x-ray. The young patient with open wound

All went well, and from that time on, all high-velocity wounds of the chest went straight to the operating room.

Of note, eight women nurses did not return home from Vietnam and are on the “Wall”, officially called the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC. A riveting bronze statue near the “Wall” and the grunt’s statue also honors all in-country nurses. Fifty-nine non-military women died in Vietnam. They were volunteers, Red Cross, and aid workers.

There are also twenty-one docs on the “Wall.”

Some of the nurses were married to army chopper pilots, and they lived as couples in the nurse’s hooch area. The aviators would leave in the morning, engage in combat and return home, in the evening. There were some wild tales in the Officer’s Club after-hours.

Patti at work and at her wedding

Patti, one of the OR supervising nurses met, dated, and married John, a scout pilot. A day before their wedding, his commanding officer, who was to walk Patti down the aisle, died in our OR from his combat wounds. The wedding was not postponed.

When Patti was dating John, she spent her free time at Camp Eagle where he was stationed. In February 1971, while waiting for his return from a mission, she joined in a running Kool-Aid squirt gun fight among the pilots and crewmen. In January 2014, Lt. John Smith contacted our 85th Evac group pursuing information about his brother who was killed with others returning from a rescue mission when his chopper went down near the 85th Evac. His brother had surely taken part in the Kool-Aid episode. As Patti said in her email to Lieutenant Smith, “I remember how much fun we had that day and the beautiful smiles and laughter. It was hard to think that they were all gone now.”

Read To Have and to Holdby John-Michael Hendrix, Patti’s husband.