Oral history interview with Mary Ellen Shugart

WOMEN VETERANS HISTORICAL PROJECT

ORAL HISTORY COLLECTION

INTERVIEWEE:Mary Ellen Shugart

INTERVIEWER:Therese Strohmer

DATE: 28 April 2015

[Begin Interview]

TS:Today is April 28, 2015. We're actually in Fayetteville, and what's the name of this?

MS:This is the state veterans center [Fayetteville State Veterans Center and Park].

TS:The State Veterans Center, to conduct an oral history interview for the Women Veterans Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina of Greensboro. Mary Ellen, could you state your name the way you'd like it to read on your collection?

MS:Mary Ellen Shugart.

TS:Okay. Well, Mary Ellen, thanks so much for coming here today to talk with me. Why don't we start out--a little bit about--tell me when and where you were born.

MS:I was born in Ellwood City, Pennsylvania, December 12, 1942.

TS:Okay. Do you have any brothers and sisters?

MS:I have one brother, we're eighteen months apart. My brother's name is John Charles but we always called him Chuck.

TS:Chuck.

MS:My father's name was Chuck too.

TS:Is he older or younger than you.

MS:He's eighteen months younger.

TS:Younger, okay, so you're the older sister, right?

MS:And I used to push him down when he was learning to walk. [both chuckle]

TS:Is that right?

MS:We were kind of close in age.

TS:Now, what did your folks do, while you were growing up, for a living?

MS:My father worked in a steel plant as a chemical analyst.

TS:Oh.

MS:And my mother was a housewife; she did not drive.

TS:She didn't drive?

MS:No.

TS:No. [chuckles] Now, the city that you grew up in, let's see, it was Ell--

MS:Ellwood City.

TS:Ellwood City, Pennsylvania.

MS:Right.

TS:Was that, like, a small town?

MS:Very small town; about sixteen thousand maybe.

TS:Yeah?

MS:It's halfway between Pittsburgh and Lake Erie.

TS:Oh, okay.

MS:So we get some of those lake effect snows in wintertime.

TS:It got pretty cold?

MS:It got pretty cold and pretty snowy.

TS:Yeah. So you were born right in the middle of the war?

MS:Right.

TS:Was your father in the service at all?

MS:He was not; his vision was so bad he had to wear very thick glasses.

TS:Okay.

MS:Plus, they had me in 1942 and their son in 19 [1944--MS corrected later] he had young children.

TS:Right.

MS:And he worked in the steel mill, and he became--although growing up I remember finding his air-raid warden's hat in the closet, and the little book that went with it.

TS:Yeah.

MS:How to black out your windows, and fill the bathtub with water. I still remember that. I wish I'd have kept it. But he was an air-raid warden.

TS:Oh, I see, okay.

MS:So that's what he was.

TS:Well, you would have just been a baby during the war, then.

MS:I was.

TS:Probably don't have much of a memory.

MS:I do not have much of a memory. The only war I remember was the Korean War.

TS:The Korean War?

MS:Watching that on TV.

TS:Yeah. Well, what was it like growing up, you and your brother in this little, tiny town? Now, were you in the city limits or--

MS:We were--No, we were out--two miles out on my grandfather's--had had a farm there. Andrew Nye had been there a long time. It's [on] a creek called the Connoquenessing Creek, which is an Indian name, and Nyes were some of the first white settlers in that area.

TS:Oh, okay.

MS:They had migrated. The Nyes originally migrated from somewhere--supposedly the name comes from--there was fighting between Sweden and Norway and they migrated to Denmark, and Nye means "new" in Danish.

TS:I see.

MS:Like Nuburg is "new city."

TS:I see, okay.

MS:So they had migrated from there, and then through Germany and then to England, and then from there to the forks of the Delaware River, which they weren't sure about--which--if that was Philadelphia or Chester, and from there westward to western Pennsylvania.

TS:I see, okay. So Nye is your father's name.

MS:Right.

TS:Okay, so your maiden name.

MS:Right.

TS:Now, growing up, as a young girl--so in the fifties is your formative years.

MS:Right.

TS:Did you like school? Did you enjoy school at all?

MS:I liked it. I was not one of the more popular groups--I mean, cliques. But I was--I wanted to be a nurse and so I was studying. I had to take chemistry--I had to take two years of Latin.

TS:Yeah?

MS:The first year was boring; second year was easy, it was Caesar's commentary. Which was interesting, but by that time the old man [the Latin teacher] retired--he retired.

TS:Yeah?

MS:And the young lady [second Latin teacher] that taught it wasn't interesting, but I had to take two years of Latin.

TS:Now, what school did you go to?

MS:Lincoln High School in Ellwood, Pennsylvania.

TS:Lincoln, okay.

MS:And then chemistry. Of course, biology in ninth grade, chemistry, and then I took physics, and I hated physics, but I liked chemistry.

TS:Now, why did you want to become a nurse? You said you'd always wanted to become a nurse.

MS:I always wanted to be a nurse. If it was a sick or hurt animal I was always the first one to help it. Just I could never--could never imagine being a school teacher or working in a bank or a store or anything. I just naturally always wanted to be a nurse.

TS:Nursing just appealed to you? Did you know any nurses at that time?

MS:My cousin Linda--

TS:Okay.

MS:--on my mother's side; Linda Smeltz[?]; and Smeltz was my mother's maiden name. She was going to St. Francis Hospital School of Nursing [in New Castle, Pennsylvania], and the year I entered she graduated.

TS:The year that you entered she graduated?

MS:She would have graduated [in 1960]--I went there in 1960.

TS:Okay.

MS:And she would have graduated that year.

TS:Okay.

MS:In September.

TS:In September, from her school. What kind of things, though, did you do, like, as a kid just growing up in Pennsylvania for fun?

MS:Well, we did a lot of hiking through the woods--[chuckles] hikes through the woods, and sledding and ice skating in the wintertime. There was a golf course across the street and in the wintertime it was great for sledding, and they had a pond which froze, and ice skating.

TS:Were you very good at ice skating?

MS:I was. I really liked ice skating. I don't think I could do it now.

TS:Yeah.

MS:[chuckles] I was good at it, yeah. In the summer, playing outside a lot. And in the neighborhood it was fairly[?]--kick the can, and at night it would get dark and our parents would call us in.

TS:Yeah.

MS:Hide-and-seek, and kick the can, and "Mother, May I?", and all those games.

TS:Yeah, just keeping busy outside, right?

MS:That's right.

TS:Yeah. Now, did you and your brother play together with other kids in the neighborhood?

MS:There was a family next to us--the Smiths--and their daughter was a year younger than I and their son was a year older, and then they had another son later on who was younger than all of us. And my cousin--cousins lived in the house behind us, so Carol, and Mary Ann were older, but Diane was a little younger than I, but she was part of the group--

TS:Yeah.

MS:--that stayed together. And we had some old chicken sheds out back and we played in them.

TS:Did you have to do anything on your grandfather's farm?

MS:By the time I was born he had sold most of it.

TS:Okay.

MS:But he always had a big yard--big garden in back and he raised corn and everything. And my mother had a garden.

[Speaking Simultaneously]

TS:Did a lot of canning and--

MS:Yes.

TS:--putting the food up for the winter?

MS:Right. My grandmother had had a stroke so she couldn't do a lot but--

TS:So your mom did a lot of it?

MS:My mother did, and my grandmother and grandfather lived in the big house; we lived in the little house behind them, and the house in back was my Aunt Jane and Uncle Dick, and Diana and Carol and Mary Ann were their daughters.

TS:So you had a lot of family close by.

MS:Family, right.

TS:Well, as you're going through school, so you said you liked it, but did you do any other extracurricular activities?

MS:I wasn't really one of those things that--social group. I mean, got ready--as a junior getting the prom ready and things like that.

TS:Right.

MS:I don't think I belonged to any clubs or anything like that, but I had friends at school.

TS:Yeah? Did you do anything through your church to keep--activities?

MS:I was raised a Catholic; my mother was Catholic, my father was Baptist. [chuckles] And it was difficult for them even to get married at that time.

TS:Oh, sure.

MS:They had--They couldn't get married in the church, they had to get married in the priest's house next door, and he had to promise that if mom died he'd have her buried in Catholic consecrated ground. So he would take her to church and we would go to church and he wouldn't go to church. He take her there and go to the newsstand or something and--while we were at church.

[Speaking Simultaneously]

TS:Pick her up? And then come pick you up afterwards?

MS:Yeah, and then come pick us up.

TS:Yeah.

MS:And I was part of the Sodality [Young Ladies' Sodality?]; that was a group of women--young women they call the Sodality of the Church. I can't remember how you spell it.

TS:That's alright.

MS:We'd meet once a month or something, and then every May we always had a Mary festival where we crown the statue of Mary with flowers, called the crowning of Mary, and that type of thing.

TS:Right.

MS:And so, I was busy with that group too.

TS:Did that too. Well, since you said you always wanted to be a nurse, and you knew you probably had to have some education after high school--What year did you graduated from high school?

MS:I graduated in [June 1960--MS corrected later] from high school.

TS:Nineteen fifty-nine, okay.

MS:And went straight into nurses' training [in September, 1960--MS added later].

TS:Went into nurses' training. Did you have to, like, plan for that, to prepare to pay for that short of training?

MS:Right, I had to apply for it, and I had applied that spring, and I can still remember, it was--snow on the ground and I'd come home, I was cold, and we had a little gas heater and I turned it on, looked, there was my acceptance--

TS:Oh, yeah.

MS:--at St. Francis. I had applied a couple other schools; one was in Washington, D.C., and [my cousin had gone to St. Francis--MS corrected later.]

TS:Same school that you were going to.

MS:Same school.

TS:Where was it located?

MS:New Castle, Pennsylvania.

TS:New Castle.

MS:It's about twenty miles west of Ellwood City.

TS:Oh, not too far away then?

MS:No.

TS:Oh, pretty close.

MS:Yeah.

TS:Did you have to stay on the campus, or did you come home at night?

MS:No, we had to stay there during the week but we could come home on the weekends.

TS:On weekends, I see.

MS:And then when we went to St. Francis in Pittsburgh we also were off on the weekends, and sometimes my parents would drive down and pick me up and then have to take me back Sunday night.

TS:Did you enjoy the nurses' training there?

MS:I did enjoy the training. As I said, we had a three month--what should I say?--session at St. Francis Hospital, which is a mental hospital in Pittsburgh, which is the mother house for St. Francis [unclear] New Castle. And psychiatry did not really interest me too much.

TS:No? Not very much, at all, at that time?

MS:At that time. Some of the girls, like, would play cards with patients. I'm not a big card player. I'd sit there and talk to them. They could smoke too. I just wasn't into that. I did do my case study--we had to do one--on an older lady with melancholia who never talked to me. [chuckles]

TS:No? She didn't talk to you?

MS:She didn't talk to anybody. But they still did--At that time, they were still doing shock therapy--electric shock therapy--and we had to get the patients ready. They did them on Friday mornings. They had a sunporch and we'd give them phenobarbital; they couldn't have breakfast; put them on a gurney. They wheeled the gurney out to the sunporch, the anesthetist put them to sleep, they did the shock therapy, and then we recovered them in the ward beyond there. And I had--I know some people say it does some good; I don't know, I never saw it doing any good.

One thing I did see there was insulin shock therapy, which is very rarely used now. A girl in her twenties and they had tried electric shock and nothing--and insulin shock therapy, they give them enough insulin to make them hypoglycemic; their sugar goes down and they go into insulin shock, and then they bring them back out. And that's an old, old method of shock therapy.

TS:Was that for mental illness?

MS:For mental illness.

TS:Really? I had never heard of that.

MS:Yeah, it's insulin shock therapy.

TS:Interesting.

MS:I only saw it once.

TS:Yeah.

MS:But it's the same thing, they put the patient--they shock the patient and then bring them out of it; give them IVs [intravenous therapy] with sugar and all that and bring them out of it. And supposedly--But that's an old treatment. Only time I ever saw it done.

TS:We were talking a little bit before I started the tape about the different places you were working in, in, like, the OBGYN [obstetrics and gynecology].

MS:Right, and we--as a three--It's a three-year program. You went to St. Francis for psych [psychiatry], Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh, the University of Pittsburgh, for pediatrics, and then we had our--because we were the first group that went we had our OB training for three months at the hospital at St. Francis there in New Castle. And they had just built this big new OB ward, and the birth control pills had just started coming out so there weren't too many patients there.

TS:Oh, really, because of that, you think?

MS:But there were a lot there. We had one little general practitioner, his name was Dr.--I shouldn't say his name--Dr. A.

TS:Dr. A?

MS:And he was short; he had a Napoleonic complex. He would throw--I would see him in the OR; he'd throw instruments in the OR. We also had three months in the OR, and he would throw instruments if the nurse handed him the wrong one.

TS:What was appealing to you?

MS:What?

TS:What was it that you were enjoying about the nurses training? Anything in particular?

MS:Well, I enjoyed being a nurse.

TS:Yes.

MS:I just enjoyed being a nurse, and let's say you--by the time you graduated from that program you were ready to work on a ward, unlike some of the four year programs, when they come out they need a year of internship, which is what they started doing with a lot of the graduates. And I'll explain it later. I ran into some of that.

TS:But you did a lot of hands-on for everything?

MS:We did a lot of hands-on. Of course, we didn't get history and all the other things.

TS:Right.

MS:We did get it eventually at university [St. Francis--MS clarified later] was affiliated with Penn State.

TS:Right.

MS:But that was after I left.

TS:I was talking to somebody the other day who said that the nuns really prepared you for everything.

[Speaking Simultaneously]

MS:Oh, they did, everything.

TS:Every situation.

MS:The only thing they didn't prepare you--

TS:Yeah?

MS:--which was, for me, not good because I was going in the Army Nurse Corps, so I had to be around men a lot, and our hospital, we did not catheterize men, we did not give men enemas, we did not furnish[?] their baths; we had an orderly that did all that. So when I'm in the military and I had never catheterized a man coming out of there--we could start IVs and everything, but because of their strictness there with male patients--

TS:So gender rules of--

MS:Gender, right. I had never done that before.

TS:First, so you started in '60, so actually the president was President [John Fitzgerald] Kennedy then.

MS:Right.

TS:And then we had, like, a Cold War going on with the Soviets.

MS:Right.

TS:Did you have an awareness of that, that--

MS:Right, we did. Actually, President Kennedy came to New Castle, Pennsylvania, and his sisters came and gave one of those teas that they gave. Ms. Link[?], who was our biology instructor, an older nurse, made sure we went to those things.

TS:Oh.

MS:And she went, and when President Kennedy came, I remember one of the nurses, "Oh, he shook my hand. I'm never going to wash it again." [both chuckle] And so--

TS:You didn't get to go to the tea though?

MS:Yeah, I got to.

TS:Oh, you did?

MS:Yeah, I went to the teas--

TS:With the president?

MS:When the president came was separate.

TS:Oh, his sisters.

[Speaking Simultaneously]

MS:But then his sisters had the teas.

TS:Okay. Which sisters were--

MS:They did teas, the Kennedy sisters.

TS:Yes, okay.

MS:--did teas in different areas too.

TS:I see. So you got to meet them?

MS:Right. Right.

TS:I see.

MS:And I didn't meet Kennedy but I saw him. I mean--

TS:Right.

MS:Apparently, he--one of the nurses said he touched her hand so she was never going to wash it again.

TS:Right, sure.

MS:But in that spring of our senior year, we got medical ethics, and that's when we found out all the things we could be sued for, and it was kind of--and that's we just--five of us decided we'd like to be stewardesses, not be nurses.

TS:Get out of nursing?

MS:Get out of nursing. [At that time stewardesses on overseas flights, especially to Hawaii, had to be nurses. We wanted to be nurses, but not in a hospital setting.--MS added later].

TS:What was it about the ethics that you were concerned about?

MS:Well, just all the things that nurses could be sued for. And also, one of our nurses--or one of the girls who graduated with my cousin whose--a lot of our patients were heavier. My roommate was five foot tall and she always got the heaviest patients to move. But she said something about a patient--and we had one ward on each floor--and she says said something about the patient and the family was outside [the curtain--MS clarified later]--about the patient being so heavy and all that--and they were going to sue her for that.

TS:Because they overheard her saying that?

MS:Right.

TS:Yeah.

MS:Right. So that came up [unclear].

TS:I see.

MS:And then medical ethics, and it was like, "Do we really want to be nurses?"

TS:You didn't want that kind of stress?

MS:Right.

TS:Okay.

MS:And--But anyway.

TS:So you went down to be a stewardess.

[Speaking Simultaneously]

MS:We went to Pittsburgh and--to see if we could be a stewardess. She told us all to lose ten pounds and come back, so none of the other girls ever went anywhere, but then the Army Nurse Corps recruiter came by, and the Air Force Nurse [Corps] recruiter came by, and the Navy Nurse [Corps] recruiter came by. And at that time I found out I could have--they had a student nurse program and they could have paid for my last year, because my parents had a hard time paying for it; I had to borrow money from my grandmother. And--But it was too late then because I was going to graduate in September.

TS:Right.

MS:But anyway, because I had never been on a ship, and I had never flown in an airplane, I thought the army sounded pretty good. Plus, they had the most places you could be stationed in the world.

TS:Is that what appealed to you?

MS:Yes.

TS:Yeah. Why was it that you didn't just want to go work in a hospital?

MS:I did work in a hospital after. At that time, you had--you had to have your RN [registered nurse] license before you could join the Army Nurse Corps. When I had graduated in September, normally we took our state boards in November, but that year there were so many nurses taking them that we got pushed back, and I couldn't join the Army Nurse Corps until I got my license as an RN.

TS:I see.

MS:So I flew by myself--my first plane ride [in January 1964--MS added later]--from Pittsburgh to Harrisburg with some other nurses that were taking it; I took my state boards there. Finally got the notice that I had passed my state boards, and got the notice from the army to report to Fort Sam Houston, Texas on the fourth of March, 1964.

TS:Nineteen sixty-four. Well, let me ask you, before you did that, about--with the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

MS:Right.

TS:Do you remember when that happened?

MS:I did work at the hospital [at St. Francis--MS clarified later]--

TS:Which hospital were you at then?

MS:--as a graduate nurse [at St. Francis--MS clarified later].

TS:Okay.

MS:I didn't have an RN but I worked on the ward [as a graduate nurse--MS added later]. And I can remember my parents had gone out and I was getting a bath before I went to work--I was working 3:00 to 11:00, and St. Michael's [?] Catholic Church was right down the hill from the hospital, and I heard the bells tolling. And the pope had died not too long before that and I thought, "Oh gosh, another pope's died. And I got on the floor and everybody--patients had their TVs on and President Kennedy has been assassinated in Dallas [Texas].

TS:What did you think about that?

MS:I was upset about it. I think everybody was.

TS:Yeah.

MS:But I--There was nothing to do about it, he was dead.

TS:But did you have any kind of fear about who had done it or the--

MS:No, I really didn't.

TS:Nothing like that?

MS:I think--And they've tried to prove that somebody besides [Lee Harvey] Oswald did it on several programs and movies, but obviously he did it, and I still think he did it by himself, because he wanted to do it. And I felt sorry for his wife and his family. I felt sorry for Jackie Kennedy. Of course, then we watched TV all weekend; the funeral and everything. And of course, that was--the nation was in mourning.

But I still remember his speech: "It's not what your country can do for you, it's what you can do for your country."

TS:Yeah. Did that inspire you at all?

MS:Yes.

TS:Yeah?

MS:Yeah. So I had worked there and--

TS:Where was this where you working at this time?

MS:I was working at St. Francis Hospital as a graduate nurse--

TS:I see.

MS:--because at that time I had not got my license, and I had to work there. And then when I did get my license I was still working there till February. I finished [in early March, 1964--MS corrected later], and then the next [week--MS corrected later] went to Fort Sam Houston.

TS:Okay.

MS:And--

TS:Now, when you told your parents that you were going to go into the Army Nurse Corps, what did they think about that?

MS:Well, they didn't--my mother and father, they both liked to travel so they weren't upset about it, I don't think. [chuckles]

TS:Yeah?

MS:But they had taken me to Pittsburgh airport so I could fly to--and they took me when I--we flew Bran--Braniff Airlines [Braniff International Airways], I think it was.

TS:Braniff?

MS:Yeah. And we were flying to Chicago [Illinois] and then down to San Antonio. There were two other girls on the flight from Pittsburgh that were nurses, and so we have--and it was still snowing in Pennsylvania--

TS:Sure.

MS:--in the first week of March, and we had our heavy winter coats, and we went to Chicago and we said, "Gosh, we can go up and get a drink at the bar now." [both chuckles] We didn't do that that; we got on the plane.

TS:Yeah.

MS:We flew to San Antonio, and we got off the plane and it's palm trees and it's seventy degrees. Fort Sam Houston was called "the country club of the army."

TS:Is that right?

MS:Because its situation there at Fort Sam. Fort Sam is in San Antonio.

TS:So it's a pretty nice facility?

MS:It's a very nice thing; very nice area. It's called the Army Field--Army Field Medical School [renamed U.S. Army Medical Department Center and School, Health Readiness Center of Excellence].

TS:Okay.

MS:And all your corpsmen go through there, your doctors and nurses, and what they call Medical Service Corps, which are [officers--MS corrected later]--for administration--the hospital administration, that type of thing.

TS:I see.

MS:It was also for physical therapists, occupational therapists, dietary [dietitians]. It's an eight--At that time it was an eight week course--it's shorter now--to orient you to the medical--Army Medical Corps.

TS:And you got there in--

MS:Fourth of March.

TS:Oh, March of 1964.

MS:Right.

TS:Okay.

MS:And ended up on the fourth--well, the second week in May of 1964.

TS:Okay.

MS:And then went home. A couple other nurses were being--had been assigned to Fort Lewis [now Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state], and one of the girls was driving her car out so--and one of the girls, Clancy, who's Irish, lived in Philadelphia, so we met her at the train [station.] My parents took me in that night, I stayed at the girl's house in Pittsburgh, and then Clancy came in the next morning and we started driving out to Fort Lewis, Washington.

TS:Was that where you went--Oh, for--you both went.

MS:Madigan Army Hospital [at Fort Lewis.]

TS:You both went there.

MS:Three of us.

TS:Oh, okay.

MS:Clancy and, I can't remember the other girl's name, it was Italian, and myself, and we took three or four days to drive out there.

TS:Well, while you were at Fort Sam Houston were you learning--the training, was that about, like, military training or was that nurses training?

MS:Well, let me just--This is--I still have the brochure from Fort Sam Houston, Texas.

TS:Okay.

MS:It tells you all the good things about being in the Army Nurse Corps.

TS:This is a brochure--

[Speaking Simultaneously]

MS:This was sent to me.

TS:--that says, "A new career, U.S. Army Nurse Corps."

[This brochure can be seen at this link: http://libcdm1.uncg.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/WVHP/id/6879/rec/1]

MS:Right.

TS:Oh, very nice. And then, "These are the things that most nurses want," in here. It says, "Education, professional experience, travel, and friendship." Did that appeal to you?

MS:Yes. Yes.

TS:Yeah. Pretty neat. Now, like, did you do marching and--

MS:Yes, we had to learn how to march; we had to learn how to salute; how to wear our uniforms properly; our rank and everything.

TS:Was--

MS:And we also spent time on a ward there at Sam Houston, Texas, working--one week we spent on a ward at one of the hospitals there.

TS:Was anything particularly difficult for you to do while you were in the training for that [unclear]?

[Speaking Simultaneously]

MS:Nothing was difficult. I mean, it was long days. They had a place called The Pit, which [unclear] down in the basement of one of the buildings where you could go get drinks and Happy Hour and all that type of stuff.

TS:Did you go down and participate in that at all?

MS:Pardon?

TS:Did you participate in that?

MS:Yeah, I did a little bit.

TS:A little bit?

MS:One time it made me--the drink made me sick so I didn't like it very much. But anyway. They had swimming pools; indoor pools. There's also a group of--The army medics take this course, and the Special Forces medics take this course, and there's a lot of controversy about one lab we took; it's called Goat Lab. I don't know if you've heard about the controversy about it.

TS:Well, go ahead and talk about it.

MS:Well, anyway, part of the course--I mean, we'd have the course--classes on army organization, army rank, army--just to get you used to the army, and part of that is Goat Lab, and they anesthetize goats and then they shoot them. Then you have four or five people working on each goat. You do a tracheotomy, put in a chest tube, try to get a bullet out; this type of thing. And I'm sure the goats are worked on by several groups before they put them to sleep, but--I mean, they are asleep, they're already dead, but you let them [unclear] do this on them. And they had--they had moved the one for Special Forces medics here to Fort Bragg and there was a lot of controversy about it, and I think it's quieted down now. And I like animals, and I don't like to hurt them, but for this to help you learn what you need to learn on a battlefield, I--it was worth it.

TS:Was it? Did it help you in later years?

MS:Yes, it did.

TS:Did it?

MS:Yes, it did. But anyway. There were a couple--the two nurses from Pittsburgh, and then a couple other nurses we met, one of them had a car, and one night we had gone out to the--there was a pancake house there and we got--came out, we'd had dinner, and we started driving down the road and somebody was flashing their lights at us. So then she realized her [head]lights weren't on. [chuckles]

TS:Oh.

MS:Then they pulled up beside us, they said, "Come with us." And they turned out to be four Special Forces medics that were there. And we told them tomorrow we were first--wearing our first uniform--first day in uniform. So when we came out of the nurses' hall the next morning they were there; "Good morning, ma'am."

TS:[chuckles]

MS:And the first salute she gave them all a dollar.

TS:Oh.

MS:That's just common your first salute; you give them a dollar. So they were all out there to get their dollars. [both chuckle] But they were nice, and there was one guy I liked, but at that time it was a little--not good for you to be dating enlisted men, but they didn't know about it at Fort Sam that much.

TS:Oh.

MS:And it wasn't a [unclear].

TS:Because fraternization?

MS:Fraternization, right.

TS:I see.

MS:And then we also had a week at Camp Bullis [Military Training Reservation], which is out in the boondocks [rural area], and you wore your fatigues, and you work in a field hospital, and you learn how to shoot a weapon. I have some pictures from that also.

TS:Oh, okay, we'll have to look at those.

MS:And--

TS:Had you ever shot a weapon before?

MS:I did. I enjoyed everything except the stupid compass course--

TS:Oh, yeah?

MS:--which, luckily, we had one guy with us, and we worried about snakes--I worry about--I hate snakes and I worried about snakes out there in the woods, in the boondocks.

TS:You run across any?

MS:What?

TS:Did you run across any snakes?

MS:No, we didn't.

TS:No?

MS:Thank goodness. But anyway, we did the compass course, and we had a night thing where they showed you--show you how you can, like, take a match, light a cigarette at night, it can be seen for almost a mile. Night security; this type of thing.

TS:Okay.

MS:And working in a field hospital; that type of thing. And they still do Camp Bullis.

TS:Okay.

MS:All nurses go down there, and then all the doctors are supposed to go through this [also].

TS:So you were thinking you could handle the--

MS:Yeah.

TS:--Army Nurse Corps after this?

MS:Right. Right. And then when I finished, went home to Pennsylvania, and then met up with the two other girls going out to [Madigan Army Hospital] Fort Lewis, Washington.

TS:And then you drove across the country.

MS:Yes.

TS:All the way across the country.

MS:All the way.

TS:How was that?

MS:It was interesting. I had never been out west before.

TS:Yeah.

MS:The only thing, we were in--Montana, and I can't remember--Malmstrom Air Force Base.

TS:Malmstrom.

MS:We decided we could stop there for the night. We were going to stop there instead of spending money on a hotel; it'd be cheaper.

TS:Right.

MS:So we pulled up to the gate--

TS:Yeah?

MS:--and we said, "Do you have female officer housing?"

And the sentry looked at us like we were crazy. He said, "No, ma'am, we have enlisted female housing, but we don't have officer female housing."

And we said, "Well, that's alright, we don't care." [chuckles]

TS:So you stayed at the enlisted housing?

MS:What?

TS:You stayed at the enlisted [barracks]--

MS:Yeah.

TS:Yeah.

MS:It was fine with us, but, I mean, women officers were still a little rare then.

TS:Right. Well, there weren't that many--

MS:Weren't that many.

TS:--women in the--

MS:Right.

TS:--in the military overall. It was still, like, less than 2%.

MS:Right. And then we drove on--drove over the mountains and there was still snow, and the Snoqualmie Pass, which you have to go across--

TS:Oh, sure. Beautiful.

MS:--up there, but there was still snow but you could go through it. One of our classmates--a male classmate--had taken the full thirty days and he drove up with his family, and when he got there he had to put chains on [his tires] to get across. And that's where all the rain stops, and why all the rains stops in Seattle, the western [sic, eastern--MS corrected later] part of--portion of the state is very dry.

TS:Yes.

MS:And that's where the rain stops. Anyway, we're driving up, and at that time you were supposed to report in your uniform, so we stopped at a gas station and we got in our uniforms and we changed, and we [unclear] report in, and the chief nurse wasn't there so they said, "Come back tomorrow." [both chuckle] And then we--they gave us rooms there in the B--nurses' quarters there at Fort [unclear].

TS:The BOQ [bachelor officer quarters]?

MS:Yeah.

TS:Yeah.

MS:Actually, the nurses' BOQ; they had a male and female.

TS:Okay.

MS:Then we did have housing there.

TS:What was your housing like, then?

MS:I had a bedroom [and bath--MS added later]. The major across from me had a living room and a bedroom [and bath--MS added later]. It was one main kitchen we could all use.

TS:Kind of a suite, sort of?

MS:No, she had a suite but--it was just new lieutenants. I had one room, just a bedroom, and a bath, and then she had her living room, bedroom, and bath.

TS:I see, okay.

MS:And we always spent a lot of--she had a TV so we'd watch TV over there a lot.

TS:Did you have, like, a regular visiting area?

MS:You didn't really, but you weren't supposed to have male guests up there.

TS:Oh, you weren't? Okay.

MS:In fact--I can re--should go back a little bit when I was [in nursing training at St. Francis--MS clarified later.] We could not have male visitors above the ground floor, the living room, and the nuns were always around there.

TS:I'm sure.

MS:We could not--We could not leave in slacks unless we were going horse riding--pants unless we were going horseback--

TS:That was in nurses' training? Yeah?

MS:When I was in training, yeah.

TS:Yeah. You always had to wear a skirt or a dress.

MS:Right, when we left the nurses' quarters. And when I was a senior we got a separate house across the street, but Mrs. Callahan was just as strict as the nuns. But anyway.

TS:Well, tell me a little bit about Fort Lewis, then. What was that like?

MS:Fort Lewis is a very large base, and McChord Air Force [Base] is right next to it. Now they're Joint Base Lewis-McChord. I was assigned to a female medical ward and a--well, female medical ward was in the back and then there were rooms where we could have patients with private rooms--patients with TB [tuberculosis] and things like that, and then we had another male medical ward on the other side. And--Twenty A and B. I worked a lot of nights [evenings--MS corrected later] from 3:00 [p.m.] to 11:00 [and nights 11:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m.--MS added later].

TS:Did you mind working those kind of shifts?

MS:No. No. The only thing that was kind of funny was, I was working one Sunday and the doctor had come in and written orders, and I had been out with a patient, so I looked at them and he had ordered a "Texas catheter". I was--What the hell is a Texas catheter?

TS:Yeah.

MS:So I went to my NCO, I said, "Do you know what this is?"

He said, "Oh, yes, I do. Do you have some money? I'll go buy some condoms."

I said, "Oh, okay."

So [unclear] buy condoms, and what it is, it's condoms and then drain--we have the kits now--I mean, they come in kits--sterile kits now. But the name for it in the military was a Texas catheter at that time. And so, you put a condom on and you wrap rubber bands around the end and that--the tube goes down into the bag. Now they come in kits--all one kit--all together. [It's called an external catheter kit set now--MS added later].

TS:Right.

MS:But then they didn't.

TS:Then they had to, kind of, jimmy [improvise] it with a condom?

MS:Right.

TS:I see. Interesting.

MS:That was one of the funny things.

TS:[chuckles]

MS:I didn't know what a Texas catheter was. I'd never catheterized a man anyway. But anyway. We had residents there and they were really good, and one night I remember working with the medical resident on a--on a woman who was pregnant and diabetic and just trying to monitor her blood sugar all night long to keep her stable. And we had people with psittacosis; certain people--soldiers had been in South America and gotten lung fungus.

TS:Psittacosis?

MS:It's psittacosis; I think it's from bird dung.

TS:Okay. Oh.

MS:It's a fungal disease of the lungs.

TS:I see.

MS:And what else did we have? The wives had asthma. [unclear] respiratory asthma. It seems like every time their husbands went to the field they developed asthma. But I worked there and I--I went and saw the chief nurse, I said, "Ma'am, can't we go to the field or do something? I'd like to do that. It's what we're trained for."

So in February, in the cold and rain, I went to the field with the field hospital there on Fort Lewis. And I still remember, I was in a tent with an older major, and we're out there, she pulls out a flask and she says, "Any time you go to the field you need to have this to keep warm." [both chuckle] And also--

TS:Did you partake of the--

MS:No, I didn't because I didn't want any. But anyway. And the guard; we had to notify the guard if we want to go to the latrine so he wouldn't shoot us. But I still remember the major there--there was a doctor in the field hospital--he said, "Look, if you're going to be in the nurse corps you've got to learn how to get in and out of a jeep right." So he showed me how to get in and out of a jeep. You sit down on the seat and then you swing your legs in.

TS:Oh, to kind of pull yourself in.

MS:Right. And he also was--we're practicing, patients are coming from field, and sometimes it's harder to practice when you're just--imitation injuries, than it is when you see real injuries. And he said, "What are you going to do? You've got this patient with a collapsed lung."

"Call lab[?]. Get an x-ray," just like it's real.

TS:Right.

MS:And that's how we did it, and finally I got used to that, but sometimes it's harder when you're just pretending than it is when you have an actual patient with a collapsed lung.

TS:Sure. Because you have to, kind of, figure out how it would look, and things like that.

MS:We also--One thing that happened there, we had--we had dinner in the officers' mess, and the colonel, apparently, had a private latrine, and one night he reamed out this poor lieutenant, right there at the mess hall, up and down, because there wasn't any toilet paper in his latrine. And at that time I said, "If I ever have to criticize anybody, it's never going to be in public like that." I felt so sorry for that poor lieutenant. But I still remember him doing that.

TS:Yeah. He embarrassed him in front of everyone.

MS:Right.

TS:When you went out in the field then, did you wear fatigues then, did you--

MS:Did I--

TS:Wear fatigues? Like, your outfit.

MS:Fatigues, yes, we did. Fatigues [and boots--MS added later], the same ones that they had given us at Fort Sam.

TS:Okay.

MS:When we went to Fort Sam we got our uniforms; I forgot to mention that. We had to go to Sugarman's [Uniform Company] in San Antonio to get our dress blues.

TS:Where'd you have to--

MS:Sugarman's in San Antonio.

TS:Sugarman's.

MS:It was downtown San Antonio, and they'd been there for years, and they do all the military uniforms.

TS:Okay.

MS:And to get our green [dress blue--MS corrected later] uniforms we had to go there. Now, the green uniforms we got on post and they made sure they fit us. We had to go to a tailor on post.

[Speaking Simultaneously]

TS:Is that the Class As or the--

MS:The greens. They used to be a green jacket and green skirt.

TS:Okay. Like a Class A. Yeah.

MS:But anyway. And then the--for some reason we wore a--what they called a green cord; a green and white short-sleeve jacket and green and white sk--seersucker [for summer weather--MS added later].

TS:Seersucker, right.

MS:And then of course you wore a white uniform. We also were given fatigues, and they gave us black leggings-- [I mean] brown boots that had been made for women in World War II, and we had to dye them black.

TS:Oh, my goodness.

MS:They also gave us the heavy--a cap and a heavy coat, and it was rose colored. It was left over from the Korean War; they were that rose/red color.

TS:Okay.

MS:Left over. And we got also an Eisenhower jacket and pants that we're supposed to wear--if we went on--had to work on a plane. I just wished I'd have kept that stuff; I don't know where I got rid of it. [unclear]

[Speaking Simultaneously]

TS:You had a whole bunch, yeah.

MS:Yeah, we all got it. We had to go through--take your duffel bag, go down the line, just like recruits. But--And then we--at the end we had to wear our dress blues when we had a dinner--farewell dinner. And I have some pictures of that too.

TS:Okay.

MS:So anyway, at Fort Lewis I'm wearing my whites and I say, "Can I go out to field?" That's when she sent me to the field for a week in the pouring rain but that was alright; I enjoyed it.

TS:Did you?

MS:And then I applied to go to Korea.

TS:Now, why did you want to go to Korea?

MS:I wanted to go to Vietnam but they wouldn't let us--they wanted someone more experienced at the time.

TS:Okay.

MS:And that's why I had gone the furthest place I could go from my home, to Fort Lewis, Washington, on the Pacific Coast; that was the furthest place in the U.S. I could go.

TS:Oh, you wanted to travel and get away?

MS:I wanted to travel.

TS:Okay.

MS:So then I was assigned to the 121 Evac [Evacuation] Hospital in Korea.

TS:This is in February of 1965?

MS:Right.

TS:Okay. And so, you wanted to go to Korea and Vietnam why? Why did you want to do that?

MS:I wanted to go to Vietnam and help.

TS:Okay.

MS:I felt like nurses were really needed over there. I didn't want to go to Korea but I said, "Well, if that's all they'll assign me to now that's fine."

TS:Okay. What was that like?

MS:I was assigned to 121 Evac Hospital. We landed in Kimpo [Kimpo International Airport, in Seoul, Korea]; it was a military charter flight. We had--I remember still I had to fly down from Seattle to San Francisco [California] to Travis Air Force Base, for the military charter flight, and for some reason it was canceled so they sent us to a hotel overnight, and then it left the next day. And we landed at Kimpo Air Force Base in Korea. It was dark, and they had a car; there were two or three nurses coming in so they had a car. I remember driving through the Korean countryside how dark it was. Once in a while you'd see a little, like, oil lantern in a hooch or--I mean a hut. And we got to the 121 Evac Hospital, which is in [unclear]; it's part of the army material command--Apparently, that's where it ended up after the Korean War; it was [unclear] Quonset Huts. It was the only army [evacuation hospital--MS clarified later] in Korea at that--No, no, there were two MASH [mobile army surgical hospital] units still there.

TS:Okay. That was a MASH unit you were in?

MS:No, it was evac--we were the evac hospital.

TS:Evac, okay.

MS:I think there was two MASH units and they were up north--the DMZ [Demilitarized Zone] is not very far from Seoul--forty miles--and anyway, I was assigned to septic surgery ward. Because the roads are so rough over there a lot of the guys ended up with anal fissures and hemorrhoids and pilonidal cysts, so we had a whole ward of those kinds of problems.

TS:Just dealing with that?

MS:Yeah. And I still remember one time, some of them were on penicillin--I have a picture there--but went to give a guy a penicillin shot, I said, "Sir, would you turn over? Which buttock would you like?"

And he said, "Any way you want to give it to me, honey." [both chuckle] First time I ran into that.

I said, "Well, just turn over. [unclear]"

TS:Just turn over?

MS:Yeah, so anyway--And then I worked there and we were--would get invited to parties up in the DMZ; the 1st Cav [Cavalry Division] was there at the time; they were across the Incheon River. And they were stationed above the Incheon River, on the north side, and their tanks were in the ground pointing north, and they knew they were just bumps in the road if any North Koreans ever came across, and the bridge over the Incheon was wired to blow. The bridge over that river--the Han River in Seoul is still wired to go up.

TS:Is still what?

MS:The bridge over the Han River in Seoul is still wired to be exploded if--

TS:Oh, wired to be exploded. I see.

MS:Wired, explosives, yeah.

TS:I see.

MS:And Korea's very hilly country but it's barren because they've cut all the trees down for fuel. It's a beautiful country, I have a lot of respect for the Korean people. At that time they still used oxen to pull the wagons. They still used A-frames on their back. They still used the honey wagon [a vehicle for collecting and carrying human excreta used for fertilizer (Korea and Vietnam)] for the rice paddies. And on one of our wards--I was on the septic surgery ward, but we also had another ward down the hall, it was eye, ear, nose, and throat ward. I usually didn't go down there except to give meds for the corpsmen down there.

And we also did a lot of reconstructive surgery on Korean boys especially that were out [collecting brass--MS added later] and they would find pieces of mines [shells--MS corrected later] and they would blow themselves up and they'd end up with no nose or hands or anything. And the one boy I remember, they did, what they call, grafts on the arm and they would--their arm would be up to the nose for the graft to take, they were in a--

TS:Oh, they were just holding it up there with--

MS:In a cast. They were casted that way. And so, they were growing a new nose. And also--

TS:Did that work?

MS:It did.

TS:Oh.

MS:We also took--At that time the Turkish troops were still in Korea. They had been there in the Korean War.

TS:Turkish?

MS:Turkish troops, and our troops, we also had what we called KATUSA, which is Korean Augmentation to U.S. Army, and these were Korean troops that would come as a unit with their own NCO into the army--U.S. Army to train with our soldiers. Unfortunately, their NCOs were allowed to kick them in the face for punishment.

TS:The Koreans?

MS:Yeah, and they'd end up with fractured jaws.

TS:Oh, that was pretty--discipline.

[Speaking Simultaneously]

MS:So we had patients with fractured jaws, and you couldn't send them back to the units because they had to have a liquid diet, so they stayed there for quite a while. And we had soldiers that were in fights with fractured jaws; our soldiers. I hate to say this, dumb doctors would give them a pass and tell them, "Don't--Whatever you do, don't drink, because if you start vomiting [unclear] you might choke." Well, of course they went out and drank.

So one night the corpsmen called me and said, "Ma'am, you've got to come down here."

I said, "Sergeant?"

"So-and-so's vomiting in the toilet."

I'm standing there with my scissors, right beside him ready to cut the damn wires [rubber bands--MS corrected later]--

TS:Right.

MS:--if he choked, but he got it out.

TS:Oh, geez.

MS:And then they assigned me to the Emergency Room because their major that had been in the Emergency Room left and we didn't--I was assigned there in the Emergency Room, because at that time, too, we had a lot of people from Seoul. We had women that come up there to get there physical exams to get married; forty [thirty--MS corrected later] year old marrying--Korean women were marrying twenty year olds [soldiers], whatever.

And we also had a urinary clinic there, and we'd have--at that time they had families stationed at Seoul, so children would come up and have their bladder [urethra--MS corrected later] dilated and things like that. And they'd com--parents would complain [about waiting--MS clarified later.]

"Ma'am, a soldier's here ahead of you," whatever.

But anyway, I--in Korea we wore wool fatigues [in the Emergency Room--MS added later].

TS:Wool?

MS:Wool. And a maroon scarf. And the corpsmen wore them all the time and I'm freezing out there, and I finally said, "Can I wear my fatigues out here?" They finally let me do it.

TS:What had you been wearing before that?

MS:White [cotton uniforms, white nylons, white shoes--MS clarified later]. That's what I wore in the ward but it was freezing out there. And the one thing that happened there I just want to mention--is my first grand--first--[unclear]--big disaster [mass casualties]--MS added later] that I was involved in, treating patients.

TS:Okay. For what? For treating patients?

MS:Yeah.

TS:A disaster?

MS:Korean patients.

TS:Okay.

MS:Right outside the front gate. The Koreans used at this time little minibuses and they had female conductresses. They had no safety glass, just hammered tin, and one of the trucks--army trucks--five ton truck--[unclear], smashed into one of the buses right outside the front gate. And I lived--we lived in hooches [huts], and a couple of the nurses that lived next to me worked on ICU [Intensive Care Unit] and they got calls to come in. I said, "What happened?"

They said, "Well, there's some kind of disaster and they're calling us in."

So I said, "I better get in to the Emergency Room."

So I went to the Emergency Room and it was filled. First of all, the conductress was screaming at the top of her head for the whole time but nobody could get her to stop. They finally got her to sleep, I guess, with an injection of something. And the surgeon's yelled, "tracheotomy," so I got them a tracheotomy kit, got them gloves, and then one of the surgeon's came to me and said, "I want you to stay with this guy. He might have a ruptured spleen. Check his blood pressure every ten minutes."

And he looked Korean but he spoke perfect English. Okay. So finally his blood pressure started dropping, his pulse went up, and I called the surgeon. He said, "Let's get him in the OR [Operating Room]."

We didn't even take his clothes off, and the OR was down the hall, and we started rushing to the OR. We got there and, [the OR nurse said --MS added later] "Get his clothes off!"

So we started taking everything off and somebody handed me all his clothes and wallet, and the office--what they call the Administrative Office--was right there, so I get--handed all that to him--the patient's name and everything--and he did have a ruptured spleen. Turned out he was a spy [an [?] agent --MS added later].

TS:What kind of spy [agent]?

MS:Our--One of ours. He was going back--He had [South] Korean money and North Korean money in his wallet, and he was American-Korean, and he was going back and forth over the DMZ, and back and forth [working for the South Korean government--MS added later].

TS:Oh.

MS:But he was--happened to be on that bus at that time.

TS:Yeah.

MS:Anyway, that was--But anyway, that was my first mass cal--it was one of those mass casualty situations--

TS:I see. I see.

MS:--in Korea.

TS:How did you feel like you were handling it?

MS:Oh, well, and all the corpsmen from the ER [emergency room], they had all been called to the ER by the NCOIC [Non-commissioned officer in charge], and the night--male night nurse supervisor came through and I thought, "Well, he's notified everybody and we didn't get any more help down there." I thought, "He's notified everybody." We were there till 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning trying to get everything cleaned up and we all had to come back at 7:00 [6:45 a.m.--MS corrected later]

So I come back in the next morning, and we all got a couple of hours sleep and went back to work, and the chief nurse of the hospital was there, and the assistant chief nurse, Major Brown--and she was here at Fort Bragg later--and they looked at me and they said, "Why didn't we get called?"

And I said, "Well, ma'am, I thought the night supervisor would notify you what was going on." Nobody in headquarters got notified; the colonel--the colonel in charge of the hospital, the XO [executive officer], the chief nurse, the assistant chief; none of them got notified. Nobody woke them up to tell them there was a [second--MS added later] mass casualty going on.

TS:Oh no. It sounds like you only got called in because of the ICU.

MS:That's right. That's right.

TS:Yeah.

MS:And so, the hospital, we had a big thing at the theater. The hospital was honored with an award from the Korean government and all that. The colonel gave a nice speech. He called me over, he said," But next time, please call us." [both chuckle]

TS:Yes. Yeah, to help, for sure.

MS:Yeah. But anyway.

TS:Besides the difficulty of treating people that are not well--

MS:Right.

TS:--did you enjoy your time?

MS:I did. I enjoyed working on the ward, and my thing was--I mean, we had a couple chest cases there, too, [unclear] TB [tuberculosis]; Korean TB, and that type of thing.

TS:Oh.

MS:But I enjoyed working on there. And we also were invited to parties. All the units up on the DMZ invited us to parties.

TS:How were those parties? Tell me a little bit about those.

MS:Well, they were great, except every time your glass was empty you got another glass, and I'm not a big drinker. And we also flew one of the--they're called the "flying banana;" the [Piasecki] H-21s [Workhorse/Shawnee]; an old helicopter; what they used in Korea. No, it was between the Korean War and Vietnam, and they used them first in Vietnam [Korea--MS corrected later]. Anyway, I had carried my shoes in my bag going up there because I wore older shoes or something, and coming back and we're in the helicopter and I had to throw up because I drank too much.

TS:Yeah.

MS:So I grabbed my shoe bag and I'm throwing up in that thing.

TS:That's what you threw up in?

MS:Yeah, in my bag.

TS:Yeah.

MS:So the next day I was on the ward--and I still remember his name--

TS:Oh no.

MS: --PFC [Private First Class] Tankersly[?]--I felt awful. He said, "Ma'am, do you want me to go get you some tomato juice or something?"

I said, "Fine." I was better after he did that.

TS:Yeah.

MS:But there were nice parties, but drinks flow freely, and there--and they were nice, but it was [unclear].

TS:Was there a lot of dating that went on?

MS:Somewhat. Not a lot of dating. We were just going to the parties and things like that. And we had one--The unit--The 1st Cav[alry] was first [in the Seventh Calvary], which is--"Garryowen" is their motto; one of the units with the 7th Cav [Regiment] that was [wasn't--MS corrected later] killed at Little Big Horn--

TS:Okay.

MS:--"Garryowen" is their motto. They have a nice club up there that overlooked the Inchon River, and you could see the ice flowing on the Inchon River, but as I say, their tanks all pointed north and they knew if they decided to come across they weren't going anywhere; they'd die right there.

TS:So they just wanted to have a good time when they could?

MS:Right. Right. Yeah. And some of them were married, but.

TS:Besides the nurses that were there, were there other women in the military around you at all?

[Speaking Simultaneously]

MS:Well, there might have been some in Seoul but there were not in our area.

TS:No? Just nurses?

MS:Yeah, it was just nurses. There might have been--Well, some were occupational therapists, some are [physical therapists--MS added later] --

TS:In the medical field.

MS:--medical field, and there were Donut Dollies; Red Cross workers.

TS:Right. You had contact with them as well?

MS:Right. Right.

TS:Did you guys get along?

MS:Yeah. Yeah, everybody got along fine, but I never--I don't remember--Well, there were some--there were some enlisted women in the medical [units] too; corpsmen. I mean, they were women. Yeah, they were there, too.

TS:Okay.

MS:And now the 121[st] Evac has moved to Seoul to ASCOM [Army Service Command] now; was at ASCOM. Army supply depot, it was moved into Seoul to--I can't remember the name of the big base in Seoul [8th Army Headquarters at U.S. Army Garrison Yongsan in the 1980s--MS added later] --

TS:That's okay.

MS:--right now, but that's where they moved it, so it is in Seoul now.

TS:Now, did you get out into the countryside at all?

MS:I did. We did. We would go--There was a tailor in Bupyeong--a star tailor--and he'd make--you'd walk into his little place--he had one little room--and we'd walk in and he'd measure you, and then in the back there was--they used heating--in-floor heating--there was a place you could stand, and that's where they slept at night, on that in-floor heating area, and that's where he'd have you stand while he pinned everything. He was really an excellent tailor. He was pretty [good--MS added later]--And fabric was cheap, brocades and things like that, so [we] always had clothes made.

TS:Yeah.

MS:And then we went--three of us went to Japan on R&R [rest & recuperation]--we caught--there's a flight called the Stars and Stripes flight that brings the papers in each night and flies back. That night they had a coffin in there too. But we flew to Tokyo, stayed at the navy--The navy actually has a navy facility there in Tokyo [the Sanno Hotel--MS added later] where you could stay. And we were going to spend the time in Tokyo and we decided--there was a trip you could take on this bullet train, so we ended up going down to Nagasaki, Kyoto, Nara.

[Speaking Simultaneously]

TS:How was that?

MS:[We got to see more at Japan than just Tokyo--MS added later]. And we stayed in hotels, and they had a to--a tour in each city. We saw the--outside the--by the--there's two stones that are together, and they have ropes around them tied together; they're supposed to be married. And the ocean we saw. We went to the pearl diving place there in Japan. And anyway, it was nice; it was nice. We took that, although one time our train was stopped because they were having a typhoon, and so that [unclear], we couldn't go any further.

TS:Oh, goodness.

MS:The train had to stop and wait till the typhoon went by. [The trains are running on electricity in Japan--MS added later].

TS:Yeah.

MS:And I enjoyed Japan, although there's a lot of hostility, still, between the Japanese and Koreans, because Japan occupied Korea for--all during World War II.

TS:How was that reflected? How did you notice that?

MS:Well, I noticed it more then, although now you don't notice as much, but supposedly they recruited Korean women for brothels there for their soldiers, and that's still--some of those women are still trying to get paid, and things like that. A lot of that has died out.

TS:But when you were there, was it visible to you, this tension, at that time?

MS:Not that much at that time.

TS:Okay.

MS:Because we were in Korea and they were in Japan, so--

TS:Right. This is something that you've seen--

MS:That's something that--

TS:--read about, things like that.

MS:Read about, yeah. I still have Korean friends. I know how to say, "Komapsumnida," which is "thank you," and I know how to say, "Annyeong-haseyo," which is "hello," and that's about my--

TS:Yeah? Well, how about the kimchi [fermented vegetable dish] and the bibimbap [mixed rice] and the bulgogi [marinated meat dish]? Did you have any of that?

MS:Well, the kimchi--We could go into Seoul and there were places. I don't like kimchi, although summer kimchi is better than winter; winter kimchi is very spicy. There was one restaurant in [unclear] that we had gone to one time, and I went back to use the bathroom, it was just hole in the ground. [chuckles] I thought, "Okay." But we did get--we did enjoy that, going to Japan. And it was a thirteen month tour [in Korea--MS clarified later] at that time--it's now twelve month--and of course, Vietnam [War] was going on there, so the 1st Cav, as a unit, they moved the unit [name--MS clarified later] to Vietnam and the 1st Cav became the 2nd Infantry Division.

TS:When they got to Vietnam?

MS:They became the 1st Cav in Vietnam.

TS:Oh, I see.

MS:They moved the name. The people that were there still had time to go to Korea. It's a big Indian head patch; it's a black patch with an Indian head patch; 2nd Infantry Division patch. And that was a little different than it was in the [unclear] corps than it was when they were 1st Cav. There was also--It's not too far from the DMZ, and OP [outpost] Maisie overlooks the DMZ, so that 1st Cav unit always gave the briefing, and the nurses, that's how [unclear] [went up there?] first--all the nurses, they get the briefing, and they [the colonel--MS clarified later] used a saber to point at everything on their briefing wherever the DMZ is, and where these--all that is. And I really got to feeling like, "Americans should come over--Everybody should look at the DMZ and feel how lucky they are."

But the DMZ is only thirty mile--forty miles north of Seoul, and when they came the last time it only took them two days. Of course, they're still threatening to come across.

TS:Were you afraid at all when you were there?

MS:No, I wasn't.

TS:Not really?

MS:We had--We were supposed--I have the book and I can't find the one from the 121 Evac. Supposedly we were supposed to be on a train to get casualties out, which in this day and age would be dumb because it would be--the jet fighters--MS clarified later--Also we had a--we went to--we were in the field in Korea, it was in October, it was cold. There was an alert area where you had to go out there and help put up the tents, and then [pretend to see patients--MS clarified later]--it was so cold that that night we--we had our wool uniforms, but that night a Herman Nelson--which is like a heater--in our tent had run out. It was cold. I mean, we were almost freezing, so we went in the mess hall where we knew it was--

TS:Where it was warmer?

MS:--warmer. And it was so nice to get back to the hospital and get a hot shower after being out there three or four days.

TS:Yeah. Was that, like, a MASH unit that you set up out there?

MS:Yeah. It was still an evac hospital but a tent unit.

TS:Oh, okay.

MS:A tent unit, yeah.

TS:But you weren't nervous?

MS:No.

TS:No?

MS:No. I wasn't worried about them coming over. They hadn't--My husband was stationed there [in 1980-1981--MS added later] in what they call Crazy Horse Canyon, which is headquarters for 2nd Infantry Division north of Seoul, and there's people still worried about that. In fact, a lot of wives go over there unauthorized and they think, "Yeah--" they'd never be able to get them out, because nobody knew where they lived, nobody knew where they were.

TS:But this time you weren't married yet, right?

MS:No, I was not marri--No, I wasn't married then; this was later.

TS:That when he came--He went later [in 1980-1981--MS added later].

MS:Yeah. But I liked the Korean people.

TS:Yeah?

MS:To me, they're very energetic. I couldn't--They say if you go back, Seoul's a modern city now. And I wanted to mention one thing.

TS:Sure.

MS:The two Korean units went to Vietnam; the Whitehorse Division [9th Infantry Division] and the Tiger Division [Capital Mechanized Infantry Division], and apparently I--this was told to me secondhand--they were at the party with the American officers; the higher-ups in Seoul. And apparently there was some doubt about how they would do, and this one little Korean guy, he was probably five and a half feet tall, stood up and said they will fight, and they did.

The other thing with the Turks, in Korea they have something called "slicky boys [GI slang in Korea for a thief]--"

TS:Slicky boys?

MS:Slicky boys.

TS:Okay.

MS:After the war, because food and tobacco and all--you had to have a ration card in Korea.

TS:Right, the rations.

MS:And the slicky boys would steal things from the different compounds and sell them on the Black Market. The Turks didn't have that problem, because they caught a slicky boy one night and cut his head off and put it up at the gate. They didn't have any problems with slicky boys [after that], but they were mean, and they were mean in the Korean War, too, but they didn't have problems with slicky boys.

TS:I guess not.

MS:But I admired the Korean people for what they were doing with Korea; all the damage after the war. One of my friends--Korean friends, she worked on ICU--took us around Seoul one day and up on [unclear] Hill where you can look out over Seoul. I still admire the Korean people for what they've done.

TS:Yeah.

MS:I drive a Hyundai. [both chuckle]

TS:And you said you still stay in touch with some of the people that you met then?

MS:I--Well, no, some of the vendors over at Fort Bragg. There's a lady from Korea, she sells stuff from Korea, so I always say, "Yeoboseyo," [Korean, meaning "hello"] and you bow your head and--

TS:I see.

MS:--I say, "Komapsumnida," [Korean, meaning "thank you"] and we talk a little bit. She talks English but I--she enjoys it when I try to talk a little Korean to her.

[Speaking Simultaneously]

TS:Try to talk a little, sure.

MS:And--But I do admire the Korean people and what they've done with their country; South Korea.

TS:Yeah. So where did you end up next after Korea? Did you put in--

MS:I came back to Fort--Fort Bragg.

TS:Fort Bragg? And Womack Army [Medical Center]?

MS:And I worked on ICU and Recovery at Womack.

TS:Okay. Did you put in to go to Fort Bragg?

MS:Yeah, I did, because it wasn't too far from home.

TS:Okay.

MS:I still remember the first thing, driving down [Interstate] 95--my father had bought me a car--and you get to Cumberland County and it says, "The Ku Klux Klan welcomes you to Cumberland County."

I'm thinking, "Where in the hell am I going?"

TS:When was that, 1966?

MS:Nineteen--Right.

TS:October [April--MS corrected later].

MS:Supposedly there was one at the south border [of Cumberland County] too. Some of the guys--Some other people mentioned that there was one at the south border of Cumberland County.

TS:Yeah. Well, they had segregation at that time. Was that something that'd you'd never seen before then?

MS:I had never seen that before, and of course the army by that time was integrated.

TS:Right.

MS:And I--

TS:But you went off post.

MS:I had never--I didn't notice it off post that much.

TS:No?

MS:But by that time, even this area, because the military was here, and because the military integrated so much earlier than the rest of the area, it kind of grew around Fayetteville, too, that they integrated pretty early in their schools because of the military

TS:So you didn't see it as much?

MS:No, I didn't, but the sign--

TS:It kind of rattled you a little?

MS:Yeah. But anyway. I was assigned to ICU and Recovery, and there was a redheaded nurse, tall, and everybody called her Big Red but her name--she was a married nurse and her husband worked at the Smoke Bomb Hill Dispensary.

TS:Where at?

MS:Special Forces area at Fort Bragg is--the old [unclear]--Smoke Bomb Hill. It used--

TS:Smoke Bomb Hill?

MS:Smoke Bomb Hill.

TS:I see.

MS:It used to be an artillery area.

TS:Okay.

MS:Fort Bragg was set up as an artillery post originally.

TS:Okay, I get it.

MS:But he worked at the dispensary there. He was one of Medical Service Corps officer that--they worked in hospital administration or clinic administration, and she was a nurse, so they were married. One of his NCOs was [Staff Sergeant] Barry [Allen] Sadler.

TS:Barry Sadler?

MS:"Ballad of the Green Berets?" You don't know it?

TS:Sorry.

MS:Sorry. I'm sorry, you don't know it.

TS:No, that's alright. Barry Sadler, alright. So one of his NCOs was--

MS:Was Barry Sadler. At that time his first album came out--Ballads of the Green Berets--and the second album--and one of the albums--second or first one--there's a song about the nurses in Korea [Vietnam--MS corrected later]. [The song title is "Salute to the Nurses"] To the nurses of Qui Nohn, to the ladies in white--men and ladies in white [correction: "Many owe their lives to the ladies and men in white"] [unclear] wear white then but whatever. But he, later on, got involved in drugs and everything, but--

TS:Who got involved in drugs?

MS:Barry Sadler.

TS:Oh, he did, okay.

MS:"Ballad of the Green Berets": Put some [correction: silver] wings on my son's chest, Let him jump with the best [correction: Make him one of America's best].

TS:The song I know.

MS:That's the song. My son loves it.

[Speaking Simultaneously]

TS:I guess I didn't know--Yeah.

MS:Anyway--And he had a second album. I still have them. They're--Albums are coming back [chuckles]; record albums are coming back.

TS:They are; that's true.

MS:But anyway, I also--working on ICU/Recovery. We were treating soldiers that had come back from Vietnam. One soldier, very bad abdominal wound, and he'd been back to surgery several times; a young black guy, probably nineteen, twenty.

TS:Yeah.

MS:One night, it was evening--it was about nine o'clock at night--this little black girl comes in and she said she wanted to see him, so I said, "Sure. Go ahead and go see him." [unclear] and she came out and I said, "Where are you going?"

She said, "I came on the bus."

And I said--At that time we didn't have patient family housing; now they have the Fisher House. And I said, "Where are you going to go?"

She said, "I don't know."

I said, "Come on, you can go with me. We're going to the hospital." Let her stay with me that night so then she could get out of there [to the hospital] the next day.

[The Fisher House Foundation donates comfort homes where military and veterans' families can stay at no cost while patients are receiving medical care at major military and VA medical centers]

TS:Oh.

MS:Because that was too--They didn't have any Red Cross there that I could call at that time.

TS:Right.

MS:Also, many times--

TS:Was that her husband or--

MS:It was a friend.

TS:--a friend, just visiting.

MS:Probably her boyfriend, I don't know. But then, also, that was when Fayetteville was known as "Fayettenam," [nickname for Fayetteville that conflates it to Vietnam] and if it was payday weekend or a weekend night, if I'm not busy on ICU, one of us would get called down to the Emergency Room because they had guys with lacerations of the scalp from a broken beer bottle [and various other injuries from bar fights--MS added later].

[Fayettenam is a nickname for the city of Fayetteville, NC]

TS:Lots of fighting?

MS:Lots of fighting. And we did the [unclear] Vietnam veterans[?] [unclear], and as I explained, it was a different culture. They were all young unmarried guys. They had nothing else to do besides go to the bars and the whore houses down on Hay Street. At that time no self-respecting woman would go by herself down Hay Street. I mean, you could see the prostitutes, and the bars, and the fights on the weekend, and that's how it got its name Fayettenam, which it still has in the military.

Our son is U.S. Air Force [Lockheed] C-130 pilot [unclear], if people ask him where he's from--and he was born in Germany--he says, "Fayetteville."

"Oh, you're from Fayettenam." And people still get that in the military.

TS:Right.

MS:But that's--And at that time everything was Hay Street downtown; the Capitol Department Store; the Sears was downtown, [JC] Penney's was downtown. It was where everybody went to shop on the weekends, but nobody went there at night except the soldiers. [chuckles]

TS:Oh, at night it was like the Red Light District [an area containing many brothels, strip clubs, and other sex businesses] or something.

MS:Dis--Right. And a lot of the wives--soldiers would tell their wives, even today, "You're not going downtown Fayetteville," because that legend still lingers. I go down there all the time, those antique places, it's [a really nice place to shop and eat now--MS added later].

TS:It's not the same.

MS:It's not the same. It's not the same culture.

TS:Right. It's changed.

MS:Now it's--probably 75% of your soldiers are married; you're older, more mature group. Then they were all draftees.

TS:Yes.

MS:By the way, there's a big show on the draft last night, too, about all the problems they've had since they started in the Civil War up through Vietnam, and that was on last night.

TS:Oh, the PBS [Public Broadcasting Service] show?

MS:Yeah.

TS:I see.

MS:And--But--So anyway, I was here for six months and then I met a guy who was in Special Forces.

TS:What was his name?

MS:Barry.

TS:Barry?

MS:And I met him through my head nurse, she knew him, and her husband knew him, and I had met him at a party and started talking to him. He was on his way back to Vietnam. He was in Special Ops and he was one of those guys, unfortunately, that does great in the field, but you put him--he worked at the JFK Welcome Center--Not Welcome--the big JFK building where they put all the VIPs [very important persons] and stuff [U.S. Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center?], so he met John Wayne [American actor] and all this stuff.

Anyway, he was going back to Vietnam, but at that time Special Ops was not--it was a specialty, it wasn't a career field. And so, you could--he worked in Special [Ops]--he had been in Vietnam doing patrols, but he drank--a lot of those guys would drink when they came back and he was one of the ones that did it.

He told me he was going to take me to dinner at Pinehurst one night. I waited two hours, he came and was drunk. I should not have let him take me, but we went and the place was closed. But he did invite me to New Jersey to visit; his cousin was getting married. So I took the train up to New Jersey and spent the night with his parents, and then came back on the train. It was Memorial Day weekend I think. But anyway, I wanted to go to Vietnam so I tried again to go, and finally got orders to go to Vietnam.

TS:Do you think that having some experience in Korea, and being in the Army Nurse Corps a little bit longer helped you get there?

MS:Yes, it probably did help me, yes.

TS:Yeah.

MS:And I was assigned to 67th Evac[uation] Hospital in Qui Nhơn.

TS:Okay. So you were there in October 1966? Is that right?

MS:Yes.

TS:Okay.

MS:Till October '67.

TS:How was that? Do you need a break or anything yet, Mary? You doing okay?

MS:No, I'm doing fine.

TS:Okay.

MS:It's getting--I don't want to keep you all day, but I've got a long story.

TS:Oh no, no, we've got to get through it. That's fine. That's good.

MS:But we'd go--the nurses all had to go out--at that time the planes landed at Tan Son Nhut [Air Base] airport.

TS:Tan Son Nhut?

MS:Tan Son Nhut airport, Saigon. As soon as you get off the plane you smell it. I mean, you smell--

TS:What does it smell like?

MS:Like sewage and heat; heat and smoke where they're burning the sew--they used barrels to burn human waste and stuff in; the military used to burn--and heat, when you get off the plane. And I was traveling in my green cords, my nylons, heel--black heels that you wore. And of course, the men all had what they call, TWs [Tropical Worsted]--the khaki uniforms--on. We were taken to a compound and assigned to this little room-- there were six bunks in there--then told me I had an interview with the chief nurse in Vietnam and then we'd be assigned.

TS:Oh, so you didn't know where you were going to go yet?

MS:No, we didn't know where we were going. And I had my interview--

[Speaking Simultaneously]

TS:I see. So at Tan Son Nhut your--

MS:--and she said I was assigned to the 67th Evac Hospital at Qui Nhơn, and I would be leaving, and I'd be notified--they'd fly me up in a [Lockheed] C-130 [Hercules] and I'd be notified. So one by one the girls left, and finally I was the last one there, and it got to five o'clock in the morning and go out to Tan Son Nhut and we did a couple hours and got on--that's the first ride on a C-130. And they sat--In that time they tried to sit the women up in the front because the latrine [unclear] the back of a C-130 are just a bucket. So if they had women on board--and they sat me in the bench behind the pilots--

TS:Because you faced backwards, right?

MS:What?

TS:Do you face backwards?

MS:No, you face frontwards.

TS:Okay.

MS:The pilots are in front of you.

TS:Okay.

MS:And the navigator and the engineer officer, and then there's a bench in the back, so they sat me back there. All the way up there--we went to [unclear]--Chu Chi, which is just north of Saigon, where the 1st Infantry Division was located; stopped there. Then we went north to Pleiku; stopped there. They made the run. They weren't stationed--A lot of--

TS:They were just dropping everybody off?

MS:Dropping everybody off. Went to An Khe, where the 1st Cav was stationed at. It was getting close to sundown and we came in to Qui Nhơn, and Qui Nhơn is a peninsula; it sticks out in the South China Sea, and it's a beautiful little town; it's the provincial capital. The runway goes--After you get out of the mountains the runway goes straight out into the ocean and you have to circle--he had to circle around and come back down the runway. And as we were coming down to land--coming in to land, he's taxiing down the runway, he said, "You know you're getting off here." He said, "Run around to the back--We're not shutting our engines off. Run around to the back and they'll throw your luggage off." And here's this huge engine spinning right next to me as I'm trying to--I'm scared to death. [chuckles]

TS:Oh yeah.

MS:But anyway, they don't shut down because they don't want to stay there.

TS:They want to get up and out.

MS:They want to get up and out. And so, I got my luggage. It didn't even get halfway across the runway to the little tin shed that was the "airfield office", whatever, and they were taking off.

TS:Yeah?

MS:And went to the little shed and sat on the side of the 67th Evac Hospital [where I was assigned to--MS added later], and he said, "We'll call them over there and they'll send somebody over here." So this black guy comes up and says, "Airborne. All the way, ma'am. All the way, ma'am."

And I say, "Airborne," because I've been at Fort Bragg. I used to say Garryowen because I've been in Korea, but I learned how to say airborne. At the gates at Fort Bragg, they still do it too; "All the way, ma'am."

You say, "Airborne." They'd still do it when they're at the gates.

TS:You do it as you're saluting?

MS:Yeah, but they don't--they did salute me then but they don't salute me now because I'm not [an officer now--MS added later]--But--And he had an army panel van.

TS:Okay.

MS:And at that time our hospital was right at the end of the taxiway.

TS:Oh.

MS:It had been--It was supposed to be air force barracks and General West--[William Childs] Westmoreland said, "No, we need another hospital in Qui Nhơn," and so it got changed into a hospital, and they built ramps--there were two stories so they had to build ramps so that they could get litters [stretchers] up and down--to the upstairs and downstairs. It was right on the taxiway, right next to the runway--the end of the runway.

TS:That's pretty loud, then, wasn't it?

MS:It was.

TS:Oh, wow. So--

[Speaking Simultaneously]

MS:But--

TS:Go ahead.

MS:One hospital, at that time, the 85th Evac Hospital was there, and they had been there--they had been out in the valley in tents, but they were there and we were there, also, on the runway.

TS:So there's two evac hospitals there?

MS:Two hospitals, right.

TS:Okay.

MS:There were two MASH hospitals, the 44th at Pleiku and the 42nd at An Khe. I was assigned to the medical ward--and it was a medical ward--it was up on the second floor, and we had a lot of patients with things like malaria, because they don't take their malaria medication because it upsets your stomach and they don't want to take it. Blackwater Fever [a complication of malaria infection].

TS:These are the non-casualty ward? So medical issues.

[Speaking Simultaneously]

MS:Non-casualty, right. They're medical patients.

TS:Okay.

MS:One day I was weighing a guy and he starts--he was about six foot tall, and he started fainting. I just went down to the floor with him because there was nothing else I could do. And one night one of the guys--a corpsman came and said, "Ma'am, just took So-and-so's temperature, it's 106 [degrees]."

I said, "Take him [unclear]. We've got to get this down."

And my supervisor came down, and [unclear] the mess hall is the only place you can get ice from, and it was after dinner so all they had was enough for four bags of ice. So we put two in each groin, two under each arm. There were big fans on the end of the ward. Wet sheets, wrapped him in those wet sheets, turned the fan on, and just had ice bags here and here, and it came down real quick. But for an adult to have a temperature that high, it can fry the brain.

TS:Yeah. Did he come out of it okay?

MS:Yeah, he did. He did.

TS:What was wrong with him?

MS:Malaria.

TS:Malaria?

MS:Yeah. My husband's father was stationed in China-Burma-India Theater during World War II, and he had malaria attacks even after the war.

TS:Oh, after he came back?

MS:So there was a lot of--[unclear] but it's the same way in Iraq and Afghanistan, they don't take their malaria pills. It wasn't so much they were against them in Iraq, they were supposed to take them, too and people don't take them. But anyway, you can still get it while taking them because there are all different types of malaria.

TS:That you can?

MS:Another pill we had to take when we were up in Qui Nhơn was Dapsone--But it's used [now--MS added later] for leprosy, too--because there's another species of mosquito up there. But every Monday in mess hall you're supposed to take it, it's right there at the door, but it does tend to upset your stomach and give you the runs [diarrhea], so a lot of people just didn't take it.

But anyway, I was assigned there and when we weren't busy they kept calling me down to ICU, and they knew I worked in ICU and Recovery at Fort Bragg.

TS:Oh, I see. Okay. So you helped out there?

MS:And they said, "Why don't we transfer you down to ICU and Recovery?" And Major Z--I can't remember her last name, Zabroski or something like that--was the head nurse, so I became the assistant head nurse in ICU and Recovery.

TS:How old are you when you're in Vietnam?

MS:Twenty-four, twenty-five.

TS:Okay, that's looks about right.

MS:Recovery was attached to OR--it was a Quonset hut--and OR was on the side and then you had to come through the anesthesia room and then you came into Recovery, and I--when we first opened Recovery we had ICU--the recovery room was right here and ICU was at that part--last part of the Quonset hut, and that didn't work out.

TS:Why not?

MS:We had so many patients coming out of Recovery--

TS:Okay.

MS:--and we had all these patients [unclear], so they opened up a big ward next to us and that became ICU, and the Quonset, all of it, became Recovery. When we first--I was there when that hospital first opened. We were--They wanted something for us to do so we're painting, cleaning chips of paint off the toilets; just stuff to keep us busy.

But in IC--in Recovery we had three suction machines and we put--what the NCOs had done is put wheels on them because some--in the normal hospital you put a suction machine right beside everybody's bed, especially coming out of anesthesia. We had three, we had to shove them around, and we changed the catheter down their throat but that's all we changed. And we also had the old, old army from World War II [unclear] suction pumps.

TS:What are those?

MS:That's for somebody that has a [nasogastric] tube in their stomach [for suction].

TS:Okay.

MS:If they ate they--especially if they ate before they--they'd have to have a stomach tube put in, or if they had abdominal surgery. And what they--And normally you had--it's a pump that you hook into a wall. Well, we didn't have anywhere to hook them in either. And it's a big--about this high--tin--it looks like a garbage can but it's got a top on it, and there's a lever you push to build up the pressure, and that supposedly pulls the stomach contents. It didn't work very well.

TS:No?

MS:But they probably used it in World War II. But that's what we had and that's what we used. And--

TS:Did technology change while you were there? Did you see--

MS:It did.

TS:Did it?

MS:It did, yeah. Once--But the first openings at the hospital and that's what we had to work with.

TS:Just taking what you got?

MS:We take what we got. We didn't have--They were cots, you couldn't raise the head of the bed. The NCOs made wooden triangle things to put under the mattress so you could raise the--

TS:Like a wedge that you could put in there?

MS:Wedge. Especially in chest cases, you needed to get their head up.

TS:So they're just flat cots.

MS:We just had flat cots. We did have a few--and finally got a couple hospital beds. We had one, I remember--there was a pilot who'd gotten out of his helicopter to go urinate and stepped on a mine and he was--he died. But he had so many suction pumps, IVs running--we had him in a hospital bed. We had two or three hospital beds. We tried to keep them for the lung cases and the severely injured, and the rest were just the flat army cots.

TS:Well, how are you dealing with these issues of death and war and things like that? Are you thinking about that at all while you're there?

MS:Not--Not while we're--You're just too damn busy.

TS:But when you're not. I mean, not right on the ward, but--

MS:Well, later on sometimes I'd say some prayers for the people. I'd be upset about it but [unclear] I don't have time to cry.

TS:No time to cry?

MS:Yes. Anyway, we had--one nurse would cover Recovery, and then we had three other nurses, one would run the desk and one would run each side of ICU, and so we had about four nurses on each shift. I worked a lot of nights, and we all worked a lot of nights, and we worked--some hours--sometimes we were on twelve hours, sometimes we were in eight hours. It was really hard switching back and forth. We lived in this old Vietnamese hotel down on the ocean, and Qui Nhơn had been a tourist place there and they had the [beach]--because the Vietnamese used the upper part of the beach as a public latrine, the women would be on one side squatting, men would walk by [on the other side--MS added later].

TS:On the beach?

MS:Yes, in the morning. The ocean was so polluted they wouldn't [let us--MS corrected later] swim in it. They would--If you went further north, up to what they called Red Beach [Base Area], there was an engineer unit there that you could swim in, but any place south of that the water was so polluted. You could go lay on the beach but you couldn't go in the water.

We had a Special Forces compound, a "B"--an "A" Detachment is a twelve member team, a "B" Detachment is their headquarters team, a couple blocks down from us. One day one of the girls and I went down there to their beach, and we just walked down there and we were hot so we went into their club and got something to drink, and there was one guy sitting there drinking, and he said, "Well, what are you girls doing?

I said, "I work on ICU and Recovery."And he said, "Well, I don't want that job."

I said, "What do you do?"

He said, "I'm the explosives expert." [EOD Explosive ordnance disposal specialist soldier--MS clarified later]

I said, "Well, I wouldn't want your job, either." [chuckles]

TS:He was an explosives expert?

MS:Expert. They have an EOD [technician]; demolition.

TS:Oh, okay.

MS:Explosive Ordnance Disposal [Demolition--MS corrected later]; they have one on their team trained in that.

TS:Right.

MS:Of course, in Iraq and Afghanistan they use them a lot to clear the roads and stuff. But anyway, we also were told we were not allowed to fly in the helicopters. The VC [Việt Cộng] and NVA [North Vietnamese Army] had fifty caliber machine guns and they could shoot down helicopters, and two or three nurses in Saigon had been killed when a helicopter coming in to Tan Son Nhut hit wires and crashed.

TS:They hit what and crashed?

MS:Wires; electrical wires.

TS:Oh, wires.

MS:Coming in, wires are very dangerous to helicopters. I mean, when it runs into them they lose their rotor and everything and they crash. So they said no flying in helicopters. Well, it didn't last too long.

TS:Didn't stop you?

MS:Didn't stop us, yes. But anyway.

TS:Did you like flying in helicopters? What was it like?

MS:Yeah. I'll tell you about that later.

TS:Okay.

MS:Anyway, Major Z finally left and they made me head nurse in ICU and Recovery.

TS:Oh.

MS:So that meant I worked mostly days but didn't--you didn't get weekends off. I mean, you got one day a week off, who knows when it would be, or sometimes you didn't get any days off if you were real busy.

TS:Right.

MS:But we had a couple patients. We had a Vietnamese girl that had been caught in crossfire between the North Viet--VC and the U.S. troops, and she had an abdominal wound. She was there when I came there, and they kind of made a pet out of her, and she--they kind of made her a pet on the ward.

TS:Oh, okay.

MS:She didn't have a home to go back to and she--they had bought her earrings for her ears, and she helped out on the ward; she took papers and stuff like that. There's a disease, [unclear]. Sometimes when you receive a lot of IV fluids or blood, it is blood that's old, that's not fresh blood--and your clotting mechanism breaks down in the body and you start bleeding from everywhere, and she developed that. I was in the recovery room the night they took her to surgery, and they took her back to surgery and [unclear]. We even put her in those--one thing they used was pilots' pressure pants. They put those on her to try to get her blood pressure up, and she died that night.

[Pressure pants are military anti-shock trousers, or pneumatic anti-shock garments (PASG); medical devices used to treat severe blood loss.]

TS:Oh, she didn't make it?

MS:She was taken to surgery two or three times and she just kept bleeding. [And died--MS added later].

TS:Yeah.

MS:And then we had a soldier that happened to, too, and he died. It's--One of the problems with blood--and when we would get it, it would be old, it's not fresh, it's shipped from the States--and one of the things we learned over there, that after you get seven units of whole blood you have to give a couple units of fresh blood, and you get somebody to donate them, because that way your clotting mechanism doesn't break down. [I hope that they didn't have--MS clarified later] to learn that again in Iraq and Afghanistan.

TS:Why was it being shipped from the States?

MS:Because that's where we got our blood from. But if--if--the corpsmen or somebody--Some of the people would donate blood there at the hospital if you needed the fresh blood. But somebody was usually good enough to donate. That's where the shipment stays, and by the time you get it it's only good for two weeks and then you've got to throw it away. Actually, the Vietnamese would come by and pick it up because they would use it, because they didn't believe in donating blood, but they would use it.

TS:Right.

MS:But it's one of the things we learned there, that you cannot give--sometimes you're pushing in twenty units of blood. They're putting it out if they hit in a femoral vein, and you've got tourniquets on them, and sometimes--it's a little later than that but--it's nothing to put in twenty units of blood to get them stabilized. And sometimes you do it and sometimes you can't [save them--MS added later].

TS:The time that you were there, '66 to '67, was there a lot of casualties coming in all the time?

[Speaking Simultaneously]

MS:Yes, 1st Cav, 4th Infantry Division, 101st Airborne, 173rd Airborne, 25th Infantry Division from Hawaii, and they--each unit had a representative and they would come around and put their cards on the bed with their unit, so that's how--he always--he stayed there at the hospital and did that.

We had one one night, a lieutenant, and I wasn't working Recovery that night, but we were going off, and walking through Recovery, they had been--he had just come in from the 1st Cav and they had been practicing autorotations. Do you know what that is?

TS:No.

MS:A helicopter has rotors. If it starts falling out of the sky, if you can get the rotors to slow it down you might end up alive, and so they have to--what they have to do is cut the--cut the power, get the rotors turning, and then cut the power back on, so they don't crash. They have to practice doing that because that's the only way you can live in a helicopter--lose your rotors--or your power. And they were practicing and they came in, hit kind of hard--hit hard, and he ended up with a fractured femur [thigh bone]. The other two guys, I don't think anybody else was hurt that bad, but he had a fractured femur. I went off that night and I came back the next morning and was walking around--he looked like he was sleeping, and a corpsman came to me, he said, "Ma'am, Captain Nye--Lieutenant, he's not awake, I can't get him awake."

I went over to him, tried to get him awake. His vital signs were okay; couldn't get him awake. I called the doctor, who, of course, was in the OR. He finally came by. They took him to x-ray, and he had blood clots [fat emboli--MS corrected later] all through his lungs. He had a femoral fracture, and the femoral bone is the largest bone in the body, and the inside is filled with marrow--fat--and when it's broken that gets into the bloodstream and it goes to the lungs, it goes to the heart, and it kills you usually. We were giving him IV alcohol to try to dissolve the fat--and they took him to OR and they said he's just got clots everywhere, there's nothing to be done. One of the things I remember is getting his effects out of his drawer, and all pilots have a little blue log--it's called a pilot's log--and a girl in a prom dress in a picture fell out.

TS:Picture of a girl in a prom dress?

MS:Prom dress.

TS:Yeah.

MS:I didn't lose it [cry] then, but I do now. And one afternoon we had a Vietnamese man who had fallen out of a tree on his head and he--we had two neurologists there who were chest, lung surgery, neurology surgery, and OR was so busy one was usually on call--one was working and one was on call during the night, and he was sleeping over in the pre-op [pre-operation] tent and I'm trying to find him, and one of the nurses said, "Well, I don't want to wake him up."

I said, "Well, this guy's getting worse. We need to call him."

Went over there to wake him up, he says," What's going on?"

I said, "[unclear] he's a Vietnamese man, his vital signs are get--in trouble."

He says, "Yeah, he's going to die. Call me when he does and I'll do the paperwork."

He had ascending paralysis and eventually it was going to reach the vital [areas of his spine--MS corrected later] and he was going to die.

TS:Ascending, so it's going up his spine?

[Speaking Simultaneously]

MS:Ascending paralysis, going up--It was going up his spinal cord, and he [the doctor--MS clarified later] knew he was going to die. I said--I thought later, "Well, you should have told us that in the first place. I wouldn't have come bothered you." But anyway, he did come, and when I was running out to get him I noticed we had POWs [prisoners of war] there and one of them looked blue, so I yelled at somebody to take his vital signs on my way out of there, and he was going into shock so we got blood started on him. I think we had three deaths that day.

TS:That day?

MS:Yeah. But that unusual.

TS:It was or was not?

MS:Was not usual.

TS:Was not. Because are you patching them up to send them somewhere else?

MS:Yes. At that time we could not evac anybody on ventilators like they can now, and they do now from Afghanistan and Iraq. They can put these portable ventilators and ship them back to the States; then we could not. Burn patients we tried to get out as soon as possible because they got infected so quick with pneumonitis. They took them straight to the burn center at Fort Sam Houston, Texas.

We also evaced to the 6th Convalescent Hospital in Japan, we evaced to the air force hospital at Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines, and we evaced to Okinawa. And it was--You may think, "Well, the air force--" the air force nurse rode the bus, but we had to have twenty-four hours' worth of IVs ready for them when they left; they had to be beside the patient. They were on litters with the records. The air force nurse came in, you gave her the report, you showed her the IVs, and then they took them out and put them on a bus and took them out to the airfield.

TS:Was that coordination pretty good between the services?

MS:It was pretty good, yeah.

TS:Yeah.

MS:It was good. The--[chuckles] We used to make fun of the air force nurses because they wore their old brown shoes.. But anyway. And they didn't have a hospital yet. They did later on at Cam Ranh Bay, but they didn't then.

TS:But not initially. So your uniforms, are you in fatigues normally, then?

MS:Yeah. Yeah.

TS:Throughout Vietnam you wore fa--

MS:No.

TS:No?

MS:Some hospitals in Saigon still wore their whites, and we had to ship our white uniforms over there because we never knew where we were going, and our white hats. I colored my hair at the time, and because they were shipped in unpressurized planes the bottles broke [chuckles], and luckily I didn't have to wear my white uniforms because the dye broke on my white uniform.

TS:On your uniforms.

MS:But anyway, we did later on, and it--We had a chief surgeon there, his name was Dr. Walker, he was a pulmonary surgeon. We had a lieutenant there, had got hit in the chest, and [unclear] pieces of broken rib going into the lung and we had to have--it was the first patient we had on a ventilator, and he'd given us a class, and we kept him [the patient--MS clarified later] on Recovery on that ventilator for almost a week and a half, because we couldn't evac patients on ventilators, and he lived.

We also had a NCO that had been shot in the back of the neck and he was paralyzed, and we had to have him on a--oh, what are they called?--Stryker Frames [metal frame that secures the patient in position and permits turning]. It's a bed that you can turn. Do you know what that is?

TS:Yes.

MS:Okay.

TS:But you can describe it for the people reading.

MS:Well, it's an iron frame and it's got--one side is padded and the other side is padded, and to move them, or to turn them, you have to put them on the frame and turn the frame. They can--And be on their back or on their stomach. He had paralysis up to his neck and he was paraplegic, and we knew he was going to die, especially when we turned him on his stomach he would get short of breath, and the doctors would be, like, "You need to turn him, you need to turn him." And we knew he was going to die, and he did, but we could not evac him because he was on a Stryker Frame. Now they can do that, but we couldn't.

TS:Right. Do you think they learned a lot about how to deal with these kind of wounds and--

MS:Right, we did.

[Speaking Simultaneously]

TS:--ailments in Vietnam?

MS:We did.

TS:To help even in the civilian world, I guess.

MS:Right. Right, in the civilian world too. And helicopter evacuation.

When I was at Fort Sam Houston, Texas, we were given--Here's how it works in the army [medical] corps. You have a corpsmen there with the unit. He takes care of the patient first. Then you have the unit field station. Then you have the MUST [Medical Unit Self-Contained Transportable] unit--or the surgical--we call them surgical [hospitals--MS clarified later] in the hospital. Then you have the evac hospital. Then you had the field hospital. Because of helicopter evacuation it did not work that way and it doesn't work that way now.

TS:How did it work?

MS:Because helicopters would pick up guys fresh from the [fighting--MS clarified later]--and they'll come to the nearest hospital. Sometimes they have an IV started if they have a medic. Sometimes they don't and you've got to do all that. Cut their uniforms off, get their IV started, get blood in them, and get them stabilized before they can go to OR.

TS:So you mean get them right from the field?

MS:Right from the field.

TS:I see.

MS:And also, at our hospital, because we were on the airfield, we would have a Caribou, which is a little bigger--the army--the air force didn't like the army having it so they took it back, and then it was taken out.

TS:What was the Caribou?

MS:A Caribou; it's a small plane; fixed wing, two engines. The army developed it to fly between bases [unclear] supplies and to fly into Special Forces bases. But then the air force got jealous and they ended up taking it over and then they didn't use it anymore. Now they have the [unclear], which is a two engine plane. The air force wants--The army wants it. Whatever. But anyway.

It would come down--if the--if the battle was going on near them, near the surgical hospital, they'd start to go up, so they had to push their patients back to us, and they'd bring--we might--we called them "regurgents" from insurgents"--we would have a plane on the runaway unloading patients that'd been treated in surgical hospitals, and some of them would come to ICU and some of them could go--some of them would [go to other wards--MS clarified later], and we had a Dust Off [emergency patient evacuation of casualties from a combat zone] unloading fresh casualties through the emergency room.

TS:So you had all sorts coming in.

MS:Right. Right. I mean, there were not lines like there were in World War II. There were not--I mean--

TS:What do you mean "line"?

MS:There were not lines of battle.

TS:Oh, right.

MS:It was jungle warfare. A lot of it was guerilla warfare.

TS:Yes.

MS:It was not like [their] army's here and our army's there, it wasn't that way.

TS:No clear front line.

MS:There wasn't front lines, and that's what they had told us. That's how they had told us what happened. It didn't happen in Vietnam, it doesn't happen in Iraq and Afghanistan. As I said, we got "resurgents[?]from the surgs [surgical hospitals--MS clarified later] ". One patient we got, he had lost both legs; that was all that was left of him--here to here--and he had been resuscitated so many times his mind was gone. We finally evaced him out.

TS:You ever wonder what happened to some of the men?

[Speaking Simultaneously]

MS:You wonder what happens to them.

TS:Yeah.

MS:And some patients we had, they would lose their limbs and say "I'm going to go back," and everything else [that they did before they lost their limb/s], and some of them were withdrawn. Some of them you had to use tough love and say, "Hey, you've got to get up today and walk on your crutches and do this." And you had to do that with them. You couldn't let them lay in the bed and die.

TS:That had to have been a very difficult part of the job.

MS:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I did it and I stayed there in IC[U]. I was the head nurse for six or seven months, and she wanted to move me. I didn't want to move because I enjoyed working there with the doctors.

TS:What was it that you enjoyed about it?

MS:Well, I enjoyed working with all different kinds of casualties, and feeling like I was really doing something to help people. Also, a good friend of mine--one of my friends who had been in the room--we stayed at the old hotel; we had six nurses in each room and one little bathroom between, and when they built the new nurses quarters [near the airfield] we had--she and my other friend roomed together, and they were over beside the runway, and every time the C-130s took off you got all the dust. We had, like, chicken wire fencing to-- Anyway, there were slabs of wood that overlapped the slats, and then chicken wire behind them to keep the bugs out, but every time the planes took off--we were right on the end of the runway so they put up lots of dust on take off.

But anyway, Jerry--we called her Jerry [unclear]--she asked--she was working on the medical ward, she asked to come on to ICU, and I said, "Well, if you want to try it, Jerry," and she did, and one day we had a patient that had been there quite a while, and the doctor gave her an order for so many units of blood, and she misheard the order and put seven and he said five, and she got real upset about that afterward. And one time--then she had a nightmare. Have you ever seen M*A*S*H? Did you ever watch M*A*S*H? Do you remember the dream sequence one where [Margaret] "Hot Lips" [Houlihan] is in a wedding dress and she's running down [a walk?] [unclear] towards her groom and there's a bed there with a soldier all bloody?

[M*A*S*H is a 1972-1983 American television series, about a team of doctors and support staff stationed at the "4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital" in Uijeongbu, South Korea during the Korean War]

TS:Okay.

MS:And she holds up her hands and they're covered in blood?

TS:Okay.

MS:Jerry had that dream.

TS:Oh, really?

MS:Yeah. She woke up and she said--she heard [knocking on] the door--she woke up, she went to the door, and there's a woman standing there in white and she held up her hands and they were covered in blood. She got off ICU after that.

TS:It wasn't for her?

MS:It wasn't for her.

TS:Was that okay? Were they--

MS:That was okay.

TS:Yeah.

MS:They usually let us rotate after six months. The only problem is, the 67th had come over as a unit from Fort Lewis, Washington, so they were all leaving at once. [We were not with the 67th Evac when it came from Fort Lewis, Washington--MS added later.] The new--There were a few of us that were new, and Dr. Walker asked me to stay on ICU. He said, "We need some continuity here because we're going to get all new doctors, all new nurses, and they don't know what the hell is going on." So he asked me to stay, and I said I would. Unfortunately, the new chief of surgery and I did not get along at all. We did not get along.

TS:Oh, okay.

MS:One of the reasons is because he thought we should work--he wanted us in white shoes and white hats and scrubs. So what happened was, we couldn't ride to work like that. We had--This is when we still lived--We had to change from our jungle fatigues, boots. One shift is trying to change going off, one shift is trying to change coming on, but he thought that would be nice if we were in scrub dresses--green scrub dresses with the white nylon, white shoes, and white hats. I thought it was stupid. He was dumb. [This is when we still lived at the old French hotel in Qui Nhơn--MS added later.]

TS:It was more of an image thing than--

MS:Yeah, yeah.

TS:--a practical working--

MS:All of the other nurses would complain because they were waiting for us, but sometimes we had a deuce and a half [2.5 ton 6x6 U.S. Army cargo truck] to ride back, sometimes we had a bus, you never know, and we had to change into our jungle fatigues, I mean, to jump in the back of a deuce and a half, and you can't do that in scrubs.

TS:Right.

MS:I mean, you can but it would not be pretty.

TS:Yeah.

MS:But he made the changes. And then there was a new major that came and the chief [nurse was new--MS clarified later] --one thing that happened, we were still in the quarters there at the French hotel. One night we're eating dinner there. It must have been on eight hour shifts. There was a big explosion. Everybody ran outside, which is a stupid thing to do. I see this huge column of orange smoke going up in the air, and somebody said, "Oh, they must have hit the Special Forces ammo dump." Somebody yelled, "Get your weapons!" I was more scared of being shot by some guys with these weapons than I was of whatever was happening.

TS:Yeah.

MS:What happened--Qui Nhơn is a port and ships come in and out there, and Exxon oil storage had a big facility there, VC had a--or NVA had a America jeep with guys in American uniforms. They shot the guard at the gate, came in and blew up one of the oil storage tanks. That was the only person that was killed.

But anyway, Colonel Johnson, who [was the new chief nurse--MS clarified later] --Colonel Nellie Smith, who had left, was great, and she had a twin sister, by the way, that was at Fort Knox; they were both army colonels; nurses.

TS:Yeah. What were their names?

MS:Smith.

TS:Smith.

MS:She was Nellie; I don't remember the name of the other one. So Colonel Johnson, we had always been told if there's something--we would command [set up--MS clarified later]] a first aid station in the mess hall. I walked upstairs and we were turning out the lights, I got my flashlight, I had it pointed, and she went, "You get in here and sit down on the ground. Turn that flashlight off."

I said, "Colonel Johnson, I--"

"No, nobody's leaving here. We're staying here in this room."

And I said, "Well, Colonel Johnson, all the men are on the back porch--[unclear]."

And she panicked. She was awful. I mean, when finally, things quieted down, she said, "Well, no, I'm not staying here tonight. Anyone that wants to go to the hospital get on the bus," because the eleven o'clock bus was coming [to take the 11 pm to 7 am shift to the hospital--MS clarified later].

I said, "I'm not going over there." I was supposed to move out the next day anyway. So I stayed there and moved out the next morning, because I had a day off and that's when I was moving my stuff out. [They had finally built the new nurses' quarters by the hospital next to the air strip--MS clarified later]. But she was awful. I never got along with her. Never.

TS:Did you end up staying longer, then, or did you--

MS:[Yes, I did stay longer---MS corrected later], but she and I didn't get along.

TS:Mostly--

MS:A new major came in and she kind of--she [Colonel Johnson--MS clarified later] didn't take me off as head nurse, but she told that major that she was kind of running things in ICU. So we had always done, what they call, intake and output sheets in the morning before the doctors come in--no, at night--at midnight--we did them at midnight so we had them ready. Well, we had to do them now at six o'clock in the morning because she wanted them that way, and that means the corpsmen have to run around, add up all the intake and output and do that before the next shift comes on. It just--And Colonel Johnson, before--One of the guys was from Louisiana, he made the best soup, and he had a heater. Now we couldn't eat anything on the ward. We had to go to mess hall and all they had was breakfast food, and it was so nice to have hot soup or something, or hot coffee. Now we couldn't do that [on the ward--MS clarified later].

TS:So it was somebody coming in that really didn't understand this--

MS:Right.

TS:--the circumstances of the work environment you were in.

MS:Right.

TS:And Mickey Mouse [slang for insignificant or unimportant] kind of stuff, right?

MS:Right. And one night when we did move over there to the new quarters, we had--it was in May--we had a [unclear], and some of the 1st Cav would send down some of their helicopters to--if they had to go up to--up on the coast, [unclear], I can't remember the names. [Landing Zone (LZ) English, Bong Son, Binh Dinh Province, Vietnam--MS added later].

TS:It's okay. You remembered quite a few.

[Speaking Simultaneously]

MS:But they were flying to the coast, and An Khê was inland, so they would send them down to us, and in the morning, at five o'clock, they'd wake us up with the rotors turning to leave. [Five or six helicopters make a lot of noise.--MS added later]

But anyway, some of the--we had met some of the guys before, and I had been up to one of the parties somewhere before, and that's another story. It was one of the Cav units [1st Air Cavalry Brigade, 229th Aviation Regiment--MS clarified later], their call sign was serpent, and they had a--

TS:Serpent?

MS:Serpent. Serpent Seven, Serpent Six.

TS:Got it.

MS:And they had a snake as a mascot. We were sitting there at the club drinking, and they had the snake down at the other end of the table. I hate snakes.

TS:A real snake?

MS:A real snake.

TS:Okay.

MS:A boa constrictor snake. Not a--It wouldn't bite you or anything. Not a poisonous snake. Finally they let it come down there, and I said, "I don't like snakes."

And the guy said, "Just touch him."

And I touched him, I got up, and I walked to th2e other end of the bar and I sit there talking to Major Blanton[?], and there were pictures there--the 1st Cav was involved in the Battle of Ia Drang. I don't know if you remember the battle. It was before I got there. There was a--It's in that movie We Were Soldiers Once and Young [We Were Soldiers (2002)].

TS:Okay.

MS:It was that exercise. When the soldiers were falling dead off the helicopters [as they got to the L.Z. landing zone in the Ia Drang Valley--MS corrected later] the army would be--smash the Vietnamese. [The soldiers had landed in the middle of a VC/NVA unit--MS added later]. Still there's a song about it, too, they sang it over there, but I have to find it somewhere.

But anyway, I went up there, and then this night, four or five of the choppers had come in from the 1st Cav, from the 229th Aviation Battalion, and they were the Slicks; that's Hueys [Bell UH-1, a helicopter used for troop transport] without guns on them. Some of the Hueys had guns, but at this time Slicks, they carried people, they carried supplies, they dropped troops off; they're called Slicks. And they went out there and I went out there, I had met some of the Cav officers before, and this captain comes walking down and he says, "Hi. How are you?"

I said, "I haven't[?] met you before."

Anyway, we ended up talking a lot, and they went over to the 85th Evac Hospital Club.

Actually, we had get our ham--they had sent us--they were grilling hamburgers [unclear] so much dust when all these helicopters landed. The nurses knew what was going to happen, so we walked around the corner. The cook was covered in dust, and the hamburgers were covered in dust.

Anyway. But then the guys came back and saw us. We sat down and talked. He was a nice guy. He [had been with the 101st Airborne at Fort Campbell, Kentucky--MS added later]. And his mother had died so his--[his orders] had been delayed getting over to Vietnam, and he was with 229th. He was a nice guy.

The night of the Fourth of July, they were going to send a couple helicopters down to pick us up on the airfield. And so, I wasn't working that night--I was off--so I came in on the bus--came over [to the ward--MS added later]--and then I started my period. I was so upset. But anyway. So I had to find ABD pads [a sterile, highly absorbent medical dressing] from the ward.

TS:Wasn't easy to find feminine hygiene products over there?

MS:Yeah, it's kind of hard sometimes. Yeah. No, we had a small PX [Post Exchange] and they did have [sanitary pads--MS clarified later] but sometimes they ran out.

TS:Right.

MS:So you could grab what they call an abdominal pad or something from the dressing cart [unclear].

TS:Whatever worked, right?

MS:Yeah. I used to be--on my second tour standing in a line of guys at the PX and having to buy feminine products. [both chuckle] But anyway. Two choppers came in and we're hiding out there on the runway because there are sentries out there and we're not supposed to be out there. So we're hiding until they--finally about one o'clock in the morning they come in. Picked us up, and we were supposed to go up to--it was the [LZ] English was at [Bồng Sơn?]. Bồng Sơn is the base on the coast north of us. And the weather turned bad so they turned back. We never got there. We stopped at An Khê and had lunch; had spaghetti with chili on top of it. And my stomach was upset and actually I--they finally admitted me to the hospital; they thought I might have dysentery. So I was a patient on the medical ward for a while, but I got better, and I think it was that chili--spaghetti and chili.

TS:Yeah.

MS:But anyway, he was a nice guy.

TS:How did you like flying on the helicopter?

MS:It was alright. I got used to it.

TS:You do it very many times?

MS:Yes, in fact, I even flew one once. The major that was with us at--

TS:You flew one?

MS:Flew with him. There's two pilots that--But he said, "Here, you take [the controls--MS clarified later]--you can do that."

I couldn't. You've got to use your feet. Flying a helicopter is awful--your feet and your hands and you have to coordinate. He let me do it for a little while and I said, "You take over." We were flying over the ocean, and they try to go as close to waves as they can, which is dangerous because you can get your skid caught in a wave. But anyway.

TS:They're just showing off for you?

MS:Showing off. That was--turned out wrong for one of our nurses [on my second tour--MS added later] who--her husband was--they crashed in the ocean.

TS:Oh.

MS:He [hit a skid on the chopper--MS clarified later]. A captain was showing him and he was new. They got him out but the captain died. The NCO--the medic--the crew chief got her husband out. He ended up with a fractured femur, and he never flew again. But that was on my second tour.

But it was fun to go to the parties and things like that. [Just getting away from the hospital was great--MS added later]

TS:Now, you weren't married yet, right?

MS:No.

TS:Okay.

MS:And we had a small club there on Qui Nhơn for us, and the 85th had a club, so sometimes the guys would come down. They had a--That was when they sang the song about the [1st Cav at the Ia Drang Battle in 1965--MS clarified later]. It's in that Vietnam magazine. I've got to get it someday.

TS:Okay. Well, did you have any downtime at all? That's what you did, like, went to these parties?

MS:One day [off--MS clarified later] a week usually.

TS:Once a week.

MS:Once a week.

TS:Kind of just tried to--

MS:Tried to relax. We had mama-sans [older Vietnamese women] and they washed our fatigues, and the mama-san that was assigned to us--had been assigned to us at the hotel--she was a nice lady--very little lady--and she was pregnant and had twins, and she was scared to death of the VC and NVA, and she would--she knew that her husband was with the [South?] Vietnamese Army, and she would be--And I'd say, "What's wrong, mama-san?"

And she would say, "They're close," and things like that, so they knew when they were close by. And when they blow that thing up she--the next day when she came in she was scared to death.

But they did your wash; we called them mama-sans. They did all the wash, they ironed your fatigues; pressed them and all that stuff. They would do your civilian clothes, too, if you paid them a little extra. When you got your paycheck there was a place where you could pay them. I mean, it was done that way--

TS:Like an allotment sort of?

MS:Like an allotment taken out and given [to them].

TS:I see.

MS:--and they were paid that way. We didn't hand them money. The one I had [first--MS corrected later] time [tour], I won't talk about her, but she was a nice little lady. She looked like she was fifty years old, but she obviously wasn't; she was part of the group.

TS:Yeah, worked real hard?

MS:And had twin babies too. But anyway, I--

TS:Were you afraid here, at Vietnam?

MS:Was I what?

TS:Afraid.

MS:No, not really. The only time--I was more worried about getting shot by some rear detachment guys running around with their weapons, when they said [get your weapons at the Old French Hotel--MS corrected later]

TS:Right. But bombs coming in or rockets?

MS:That happened on the next tour.

TS:Oh, more in the next tour?

MS:Qui Nhơn was pretty safe. One of our patients was a French woman who was--had been there--she was from Paris and her job was to go out in the country in her little jitney three-wheeled vehicle and visit the farmers and help them with agriculture stuff. And she was sick; she had a bladder infection so we had her on--and she gave me two pieces of Montagnard cloth, because I gave her my little refrigerator. We had these little--you could buy these little refrigerators. But she rode all over by herself out there in the countryside.

TS:Did you ever get outside the wire?

MS:I did a couple times.

TS:Where did you go?

MS:What?

TS:Where did you go?

MS:Just rode around outside Qui Nhơn a little bit. The navy was there, too, and this guy was an EOD ex--They--Underwater EOD guys were there, would check the ships; that mines weren't planted on them. They took us out one time to the countryside. Not very far. [chuckles]

TS:Were you ready to go back when--

MS:I was but--I was ready to go back, but at the same time--this is more so the next tour--you know you're leaving, but the wounded are still coming in, and the people are still there, and you're leaving. So you feel like you're letting them down sometimes when you're leaving.

TS:Did you feel that way?

MS:Yeah.

TS:Yeah?

MS:Sometimes. And we had a good crew [on ICU and Recovery--MS clarified later] at the 67th. The [unclear] was good, the NCOIC [Non-commissioned Officer in Charge] was good. He had a heart attack there. But the--I mean, it's not like it's over and everybody can go home. [he was sent back to the United States--MS added later You had a twelve month assignment.

In one of the books, which I recommend--it's called Home Before Morning and it was written by Lynda Van Devanter--whatever--she was one of the nurses that lobbied for a statue of the nurses at the wall [Vietnam Veterans Memorial]--wrote it, and it's good because--you go to--I went to Cam Ranh Bay, actually, by then. The air force had by this time a hospital at Cam Ranh Bay and I worked in the [unclear]. I had to get a flight out of Cam Ranh Bay and it went to Midway [Atoll] in Hawaii and it was all the way across the South Pacific [to Travis Air Force Base in California--MS added later].

TS:Was this on an R&R that you did that?

MS:I went before I left, that's why I had to go--I did go on R&R to Hong Kong twice, and that was nice. I had clothes made that I'll never wear again, but whatever.

TS:[chuckles]

MS:Because they put such little seams in you can't make them bigger.

TS:Oh, I see.

MS:Yeah. But they're beautiful clothes. And you pick a picture and say, "I want that," and that's all you have to do and they make it for you. But anyway, I went twice to Hong Kong. Actually, three times, because I went once on my second tour. But even then you worry about what's going on back in the ward, and making schedules, and all that kind of stuff; it was my job to do.

TS:Right.

[Extraneous Comments Redacted, Recording Paused]

TS:Okay, I turned it back on. Go ahead, Mary Ellen.

MS:Especially with Colonel Johnson, the ex--assistant chief nurse was great; she was a great lady, the--Colonel Johnson.

TS:Yeah?

MS:I shouldn't say her name. She and I just didn't get along at all.

TS:So you left Vietnam.

MS:I left Vietnam, went back home for--

TS:A little bit.

MS:--a little bit; a month.

TS:Then you went to Fort Meade?

MS:Then I went to--No, Fort Meade, Maryland.

TS:Fort Meade, Maryland?

MS:Yeah. Women's ward.

TS:Yeah? Different pace, I'm sure.

MS:Different pace. And we also had the women there that were having miscarriages and everything because they didn't want to put them up on the OB [obstetrics] ward. And one night the doctor was there and he was sitting there and I was--he looked at me and he looked really upset--the military doctor. I said, "What's wrong?"

He said, "I don't know what to do." He said, "This lady's had a miscarriage and her husband just got home from Vietnam last week." And he said, "What am I going to say?"

I said, "I honestly don't know what you're going to say."

He said, "I could say she had a really early pregnancy but that's not--"

TS:Oh, I see.

MS:You see? He just got home--

TS:I'm understanding the--

MS:He just got home last week and she's pregnant.

TS:Right.

MS:And having a miscarriage. [comment redacted.]

TS:Right.

MS:But things like that. That's when I decided to get out.

TS:Why did you decide that?

MS:Because--I don't know. I thought I'd try civilian nursing for a while. So I worked at Glen Burnie in [North] Arundel Hospital [Maryland] there.

TS:Oh, Anne Arundel [Medical Center, Parole, Maryland].

MS:For about six months, and then I found out there was going to be an opening at Fort Knox [Kentucky], so I drove out there. The chief nurse at Fort Meade knew I wanted to go back in and she arranged it with the chief nurse out at Fort Knox to hire me as a GS-7 [pay scale for U.S. federal jobs] .

TS:How long did it take you to decide that you wanted to go back in after you got out?

MS:I just wanted to go back in. I knew I wanted to go back in after I got out and didn't like civilian nursing.

TS:Like, a month or something?

MS:A couple months. [Three months--MS corrected later.]

TS:A couple months?

MS:Yeah.

TS:What was it that you didn't like about the civilian nursing?

MS:Well, it's just so--Some patients will tell you, if you want to get her [the patient] an aspirin you've got to call a doctor first, and things like that.

TS:Really regimented and--

MS:Regimented.

TS:--and a lot of things you couldn't do that you could have done in the army or--

MS:Right.

TS:--especially Vietnam.

MS:Right. So anyway, I drove out to Fort Knox.

TS:Okay.

MS:And that was July of '69--'68?--'68 I think.

TS:Sixty-eight you said.

MS:Yes, so I was--

TS:You were at Fort Meade from October '67 to February '68, then you got out, then you went as a G[S]7 [general staff] to Fort Knox?

MS:Right. I worked in ICU and Recovery there.

TS:Okay.

MS:And petitioned to try to go back in.

[Speaking Simultaneously]

TS:To try to get back in?

MS:[In July 1969 I rejoined the Army Nurse Corps as a captain and was assigned to Fort Steward in Georgia--MS added later]. In the meantime, at Fort Knox, Sunday nights they had--they let women who were non-military come to the [NCO] Club, and they had dancing there, and that's how I met my husband. I was dancing with this guy--[chuckles] my husband's [unclear] with the white bucks shoes. He was dancing. I stood there watching him, so my husband came over and rescued me. I met him there.

TS:What's his name?

MS:Wayne.

TS:Wayne.

MS:And Wayne had already decided he was going to be a helicopter pilot. He was in armor branch, that's why he was at Fort Knox. Fort Knox is home of the armor.

TS:Okay.

MS:And at that time aviation was not a branch, it was a specialty like Special Forces. You still had to stay armor, or personnel management was his secondary MOS [Military Occupational Specialty]. But he was--already knew that he was going to Fort Wolters, Texas. And so, we dated for a while. He took me out to watch the firepower[?] demonstration a couple times. We started writing back and--he was assigned to Fort Wolters, Texas, for initial--

TS:For training?

MS:--helicopter training, and we started writing back and forth, and then I started flying back and forth, and later on we said we wish we'd had stock in Delta Airlines. [chuckles] And he graduated from there, and then he came to Fort Rucker, Alabama, which is about six or seven hour drive from Fort Stewart [Georgia], and then I started driving back and forth. There's no four lane highway. You drive southern Georgia and then southern Alabama. But anyway, he was at Fort Rucker now and going through the flight school Huey transition. He graduated in--on the fifth--the third of September 1968? Nineteen sixty-eight--nine. [1970--MS corrected later.]

TS:Sixty-nine?

MS:Sixty-nine.

TS:Sixty eight, sixty-nine. [1970--MS corrected later.]

MS:And we had already--Oh, I know.

TS:I see.

MS:He had orders. I knew he was going to Vietnam, and I had already started--In June, I asked if I could go back to Vietnam. [In July 1969 MS was stationed at Fort Stewart as head nurse for OB-GYN clinic--MS added later]. They said, "You're not married yet."

I said, "Well, we will be."

We got engaged in June and we were married on the fifth of September, and three days after graduation, because his parents had come down for graduation at Fort Rucker, and we drove back to Fort Stewart and were married at Main Post Chapel on the fifth of September, with some of his classmates, one of them a marine, holding sabers, and one of them, a male nurse, my friend, in the old chapel here at Fort Stewart. And his--my parents had come down by train, because they'd never flown. And a couple of his aunts and uncles were on their way to Florida so they stopped by. So we had a nice family group there for our wedding.

And by then I had gotten orders--I had gotten orders so I knew I'd be going to Vietnam. We had three days honeymoon in St. Augustine, Florida. And I started--I had been working as charge nurse in OBGYN clinic, and in the emergency room there at Fort Stewart, Georgia. And [unclear] hadn't worked in OBGYN since training. I said, "That's not really my [specialty--MS clarified later]"

"That's where you're going."

So I worked there, and there was a civilian aide, and also covered the emergency room when they needed me, but I did a lot--

TS:Was this at Fort Stewart you're talking about?

MS:Fort Stewart, Georgia. It was an old ramp-style hospital, wooden ramp style. They have a new one there too. And Wayne said if he was flying helicopters, he wanted to be able to shoot back so he wanted to go to [AH-1] Cobra transition, which was at Hunter Army Airfield in Savannah, which is only about fifteen miles through the swamps between Stewart.

And also, when I was getting married, I went into Savannah to look for a wedding gown, and there's a town called--a place called Town and Country and they sell upscale dresses and formals--and wedding dresses. I went in there and she said, "When are you getting married?"

I said, "Three o'clock at Main Post Chapel at Fort Stewart, Georgia."

And she looked at me and she looked at her schedule. She said, "That can't be. I already have a wedding scheduled for three o'clock."

I said, "Well, we talked to the chaplain and everything."

Well, it turned out that wedding was on the Hunter Army Airfield at three o'clock, and my wedding was at Fort Stewart at three o'clock. So we finally got it straightened out.

TS:I see.

MS:And I wasn't--I can't believe this [unclear] thing--with the wedding dresses. I mean, I went in there, I said, "Oh, that's fine. How much is that?"

"A hundred dollars." She said, "Well, you know, that's kind of cheap."

I said, "That's fine. I'm only going to wear it one time anyway." It was pretty--It was a pretty dress. And now these women go through hysterics if they can't find the right gown. I couldn't believe it. And my maid of honor was one of the nurses and she had a yellow gown.

And then after the wedding we had a reception at the Officers' Club, and then that night we took all the visiting guests from his family and my family into the Pirates' House [historic restaurant and tavern established in 1753] in Savannah for dinner. And then everybody left the next day, and then we went to St. Augustine, Florida for a honeymoon, and then he went back to class and I went back to work.

And then we--In October we [unclear] McGuire Air Force Base [Trenton, New Jersey], and we went to visit my family in Pennsylvania, and then we took New Jersey to stay with his family until Thanksgiving Day. And then Thanksgiving Day we drove up to McGuire Air Force Base to leave and they said, "We're not flying today; it's Thanksgiving Day." So we went home and had Thanksgiving leftovers and came back the next day.

TS:The next day.

MS:And it was Capital Airlines. We boarded--I guess it was about 8 o'clock or 9 o'clock at night. It was a military flight. [A military charter with Capital Airlines--MS added later].

TS:Right.

MS:They use commercial airlines. And we got on, and we were supposed to fly to Alaska--to a base in Alaska. I can't remember the air force base in Alaska.

TS:Fairbanks [Eielson Air Force Base].

MS:One of them. I think--Anyway. And then to Yasaka, Japan, and then to Vietnam. But anyway, we got to Alaska and the pilot came on and said, "We won't be landing at the military base here. They've had a crash. We'll be going into Fairbanks [civilian airport--MS clarified later], and you all probably need to call your families to tell them it's not your plane."

One of the Capital Airlines planes, filled with troops, was taking off. They didn't de-ice it enough and it crashed on takeoff. I think fifty people were killed. And of course, the people on our plane knew the people on the other plane so they were all upset.

Wayne finally--There was a line to make phone calls. Wayne finally called his parents because he thought they'd see it on the eleven o'clock news. They hadn't even--they'd gone to bed. Wayne asked them to call my parents.

TS:Right.

MS:Anyway. Then we went to Yokota [Air Base] in Japan, and from there we went to Vietnam, and a lot of things have changed. We no longer went into Tan Son Nhut. We went to, I think, the air force base outside Saigon. I can't remember the name of it. [Bien Hoa Air Base?]

TS:It's okay.

MS:We got to stay together that night in a tent, and then the next day he was assigned. He had to go in and see the aviation commander in Saigon, and he got an assignment around Saigon. And there were still three hospitals there, and I went in to see the chief nurse of Vietnam, and she said, "Captain Shugart," she said, "We have an assignment for you at Chu Lai, and that's fifty miles south of De Nang."

I said, "Ma'am, it's my second tour. My husband's here."

She said, "That's too bad, it's where you're going." On assi--On a company tour and that's where you'll be. ["The needs of the army come first".--MS added later]

He went back to aviation command and got his assignment changed. [unclear] fly to the Americal [division] in the mountains where all the bad guys where. [unclear] if something happens to him, it will be my fault.

TS:You felt because you were up in De Nang so he--

MS:Well, he changed his assignment to go up there.

TS:So he had a riskier job?

MS:Yeah. Yeah. But anyway, I was assigned. I flew up, [on] a C-130 to De Nang, and they're--the 44th Med [Medical] Brigade had come in and taken over the medical group up there. That group is at Fort Bragg right now; it's still the 44th Med Brigade. First tour, we were assigned to the first COSCOM [1st Sustainment Command]--which is an outhouse; we called it the leaning outhouse patch; it's an arrow which leans to the side--which is like 1st COSCOM, a support unit. Now 44th Med Brigade had taken over all the medical facilities in the northern part of Vietnam, and so we wore the 44th Med Brigade patch, which I can show you.

But anyway, he--I had to go up there to Da Nang first, but flew down to Chu Lai, and Wayne knew I was coming in and he came up to--our hospital was on a bluff above the South China Sea. Colonel K found him waiting for me at the hospital.

He said, "Yes, ma'am." [unclear]

She said, "I want to talk to you. This will be an unaccompanied tour. You'll come off the compound by nine o'clock at night." Assigned me a room with three other girls, and assigned me as head nurse in the Vietnamese ward, which included the POW ward, because he was flying the Cobra helicopter which is an attack helicopter. [unclear] days he would shoot them and two days later I'd be taking care of them, or the next day. So that was kind of hard sometimes. But as I tell everybody, they got the same care our soldiers did.

TS:Right.

MS:And it was difficult at times, but I'm a nurse, I'm going to take good care of whoever was on my ward. And they weren't in any shape to do anything.

TS:Were you upset about having them assign you as a unaccompanied?

MS:Well, he would try to come up and there'd be three other nurses, and we'd sit out and sit out there in the rain. Finally in January she assigned me a room; I got a room in January.

TS:By yourself?

MS:By myself. And then he could stay overnight.

TS:I see.

MS:There were five of us married there but she [unclear]--

TS:Was that the chief nurse over Vietnam?

MS:No, the chief nurse of the hospital.

TS:That you were at in Chu Lai?

MS:It was at the 91st Evac Hospital at Chu Lai. The assistant chief nurse, Colonel Douglas, was fine--[Colonel K.]--and once she found out I could do my job she was fine with me being there.

TS:Yeah.

MS:In fact, when the chief nurse of the Army Nurse Corps [Colonel Anna Mae Hays] came to visit all the hospitals in Vietnam, she called all the married nurses together. And she said chief nurse wants to speak to the married nurses, and that night she said you can stay in the military and have children. Up until that time pregnant [women] had to get out. That was when it was changed; that Spring of '71. Of course, none of us really wanted to stay in too much after that. She told us, "Now you can have kids and stay in." It's still difficult if you're both in and have kids.

TS:Right.

MS:And then she left and Colonel Douglas took over. But it was on a bluff above the South China Sea. We had a little beach down on the shore. We had to walk down rocky cliffs. I was still getting oriented to the Vietnamese ward. One night, it was about dinnertime, giving out six o'clock meds, and I heard a couple thuds. The other nurse yelled, "Get your helmet and flak jacket!" We had a bedside stand by the nurses' station with our helmets and flak jackets. As soon as--she knew the rocket--the sirens never went off until after they'd landed anyway, and she knew it had landed and I was mad because I had to secure my medications cart. What we did, you had to get your flak jacket on and then you started covering up the patients. If you couldn't get them out of bed, you got them under the bed. If you couldn't you covered them with a helmet and flak jacket. And Wayne was in the mess hall at that time down at the Americal Division and they bracketed[?] the mess hall with the rockets. He said everybody was crawling in the dirt down there.

And then they used to do it in the middle of the night. My quarters were on the [second floor--MS added later]--right above the ocean, and most of the doctors were in there, but three or four rooms we had women. And the women's latrine was on the other side of the nurses' quarters. Sometimes in the middle of the night if I had to get up I'd go use the ward latrine.

TS:Use the men's?

MS:[chuckles] I didn't care.

TS:Yeah.

MS:But they would try to wake us up at 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning with rockets, and we had a bunker right outside the steps, and the first time I ran down there with my helmet and flak jacket. I said, "Now, that's stupid. Why am I running down open steps?" And everybody would light up their damn cigarettes in there and that made me sick. And sometimes we had to stay in there until the "all clear" sign, which could be an hour or two hours. So I finally stopped running down the steps and just got under my bed, because you had a helmet and flak jacket hanging on your bed too.

TS:So you just stayed?

MS:What?

TS:You just stayed in your room?

MS:I just stayed. And one night Wayne was up there, and we'd both gone to sleep. It was a single bed--it was like a three-quarter single bed--and the rocket land--I heard it land, and I saw the flash, and he was--I said, "Wayne! Wake up! Rockets! Rockets!" And he's kind of [makes grumbling noise]. I said, "Get out of bed. There's rockets!" [chuckles]

He pushed me under the bed and we just stayed under the bed. But that night they were close.

TS:Yeah?

MS:And the Americal Division headquarters was right across the street--it was across the cliff--and they were probably aiming for them. I need some Kleenex. They were probably aiming for them.

TS:Do you want me to pause for a second for you?

MS:[unclear]

TS:Okay.

MS:But they can't aim those things. What they do, they set a timer on them, so they're not even there. There's no way they can fire anything back. Although, one night the battleship [USS] New Jersey was setting off--firing heavy, heavy shells at the side of the [unclear] over our heads into the jungle. And I mean, they'd fire and the whole place would shake. But you couldn't see them; you couldn't even see the flashes; they were way out in the ocean. Wayne finally called me and told me what was going on; they were trying to hit rockets [targets--MS corrected later] twenty miles inland. But they were right off the coast shooting those big, big guns [unclear].

TS:Were you more afraid on this tour than the first one?

MS:I wasn't really. [I was too busy to worry about anything, except taking care of patients--MS added later.]

TS:No, really?

MS:Not really. It was different because my husband--Wayne took me down to a unit party. I'm standing there with some of the other nurses, and somebody walked over to me and nobody looked for wedding rings. He starts coming on to me, and Wayne finally came over and said, "Hey, that's my wife." And the one thing that--One night we had AVRN [Army of the Republic of Vietnam--The South Vietnamese forces] soldiers--we had two--and one had come in and he'd been hit in the chest by a round but it hadn't gone through the skin. So they started an IV and type--we always type and crossmatch for blood in the ER. Sent him to us and he--got a tray for him--we worked 7:00 to 7:00--and I'm walking out and I look at him and he was blue. I yelled at somebody, "Get the crash cart!" And when we got the crash cart over there, the doctor was in the OR, I said, "Start--Let's get some blood, let's get some oxygen." I ran the whole code. Gave him sodium chloride; the stuff we're supposed to do. Finally the chief surgeon walked in--[unclear] Dr. Carter--I said, "Dr. Carter, would you like to write some orders?"

He said, "No. Dr. So-and-so can do that when he gets out of surgery." And he walked out.

Well, we got him back, and what happened, he had pul--here again--pulmonary emboli, when it hit so hard it--[started] blood clots. And he died the next day on ICU, because I said he needs to be moved to ICU because we have one nurse on night to cover two sides and there's no way we can do that here. And that doctor walked back out of OR, he said, "What'd you do?" I told him. He said, "I'll write it down [as doctor's orders--MS added later.]

TS:So you had autonomy to do things as a nurse in Vietnam--

MS:Right.

TS:--that you wouldn't have had even in stateside army hospital.

MS:No. We did, right. We did, because sometimes the doctors were tied up and you had to do it; there was nobody else there to do it.

TS:Yeah. You just had to decide. You just had to make a decision.

MS:A decision; do it. Yeah. But anyway, we got him back and they transferred him to ICU, but he did die the next day at ICU.

TS:What position were you at at Chu Lai; what was your--

MS:I was head nurse in the Vietnamese ward.

[Speaking Simultaneously]

TS:You were head nurse? In the Vietnamese ward, that's right.

MS:And we had two sides. We had children and women on "B" side, and all the serious diseases, and then on our side, the first part was head injuries usually, and then the other side--back part of the Quonset hut--we were in Quonset--Quonset hut was POWs [the "A side"--MS added later.]

TS:Besides being married, and having your husband come visit you sometimes, what was different about your tour the second time than from the first?

MS:I think I was more confident. I'd been there before; I'd done it before. Other than Colonel K and the problem we had at the beginning; she was fine with me when she knew I was going to do my job. Also--I want to mention this. There was only one nurse killed by hostile fire in Vietnam and that was [unclear]. It happened the year before I got there. Lieutenant Sharon Lane. She was--

[On the morning of 8 June 1969, the 312th Evacuation Hospital (later the 91st Evac) at Chu Lai was hit with rockets fired by the Viet Cong. First Lieutenant Sharon Ann Lane was struck and died instantly of fragmentation wounds to the chest. She was the only American nurse killed in Vietnam as a direct result of hostile fire]

TS:This was at Chu Lai?

MS:At Chu Lai. At that time it was the 312th Evac [Hospital]; the numbers changed. At that time she was at the end of the Quonset hut giving out medication to a Vietnamese man in the bed. The rocket landed outside. There was no protection in the front, came right through the tin, fragments hit her in the neck--her vein and artery right in the neck--she died right there. She bled to death right there. The Vietnamese man was not hurt. She was posthumously promoted to captain. She's from Canton, Ohio, I think. [Lane was from Zanesville, Ohio and was buried in Canton.]

And other nurses died. A few [unclear] in that helicopter crash. And there were a couple of--one died of disease. Also, when Tet [Offensive] happened they sent a group of nurses [from the 67th Evac[uation] Hospital in Qui Nhơn and the C-123 [military transport aircraft] they were killed when their return flight crashed--MS edited later.] But she [Lane] was the only one killed by actual hostile fire.

[The Tet Offensive was one of the largest military campaigns of the Vietnam War, launched on 30 January 1968, by forces of the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese People's Army of Vietnam against the forces of the South Vietnamese Army of the Republic of Vietnam, the United States Armed Forces, and their allies. It was a campaign of surprise attacks against military and civilian command and control centers throughout South Vietnam.]

And you could still see the holes in the wall. I mean, they put patches but you could still see the holes where the fragments had come in. And by then they had built a big wooden boxes?] filled with sandbags around the front. You still didn't have any protection on the sides, but they had built them around the front.

TS:Is that where the one came in, was through the side?

MS:In front; to the front--

TS:To the front?

MS:--of the Quonset hut.

TS:I see.

MS:And the Quonset huts are just tin--hammered tin. But she was the only one killed by hostile fire. I understand they have a memorial for her at Fort Carson, Colorado. That's probably where she went to--where she went to Vietnam from.

But anyway--What was I going to say? Anyway, after six months she said, "Oh, you've done a good job. Why don't we transfer you?"

I said, "How about the emergency room?"

The emergency room was called receiving evacuation field hospital, and also, part of that is a pre-op tent [ward--MS corrected later.] A lot of times when you get casualties in, once you get them stable you can move them down to pre-op. They don't have room in the OR but you've got a nurse and corpsmen down there and they can take care of them and keep them until--take care of them until they can put them in the OR, and that's what pre-op is; they take care of the casualties before they get to OR because they're full of casualties; they're waiting to get them in there.

TS:Right.

MS:So that came under [unclear]. I enjoyed that. We had Special Forces medics there, because they didn't get enough practice where they were at, and so they would come in and spend a couple weeks [at the ER--MS corrected later] , and the medics were good. Although we had some dumb ones there sometimes.

One morning I went on duty and I had to be there at 6:45, and this corpsman came in--a new corpsman, a young corpsman--and he's carrying his breakfast tray and he puts it on the desk. I said, "What are you doing?"

He said, "Oh, I'm eating my breakfast."

I said, "No, you're not. You go back to the damn mess hall and eat there, and next morning you get up earlier. Everybody else has to be here on time. You're not going to sit here and eat your breakfast."

[The ER NCO usually took care of any problems with the enlisted men but I don't know who he was that morning.--MS added later]

TS:Right.

MS:And I usually let the NCO take care of that but he wasn't there. One other nurse I want to tell you about. We had a lot of patients with tracheotomies once, on the Vietnamese ward, and the NCOIC said the night corpsman was telling--he's doing all the trach care, all the suctioning, and the nurse is sitting there doing nothing.

So I--The only place we had that was private was the linen closet, so I called her back there and I said, "Lieutenant So-and-so, I understand you--he told us--" She had never taken care of a patient with a tracheotomy; she didn't know what to do. That's why she wasn't helping him.

TS:Right.

MS:So we had a quick OJT [on the job training] lesson there on the ward; how to suction, how to change the inner cannula of tracheostomy tube.

TS:Right. Was she a young nurse, then?

MS:What?

TS:Was she young?

MS:Yeah, they were young, and I think they were four-year graduates. There were three of them, they were all from the same place in Massachusetts, and they had enlisted under that "all together" system.

Also, they had started this thing in Saigon for Christmas holidays, and then they started that year in De Nang. If you could spare five hundred dollars they would fly you back to San Francisco on a charter, and you could go to your--home for Christmas. And there was no way--If they had the money and they wanted to go you had to let them go. Three of my nurses; those three decided they were going back to Massachusetts. I went to Colonel K, I said, "Colonel," I said, "I can't run the ward with three nurses."

"Oh, I'll send you some help."

Okay, the next morning they're gone. Actually [unclear] schedule; who wanted Christmas, who wanted New Year's; and now we had to work both holidarys--

TS:Right.

MS:--all the holidays. So she sent me a nurse from the medical ward. Of course, my patients--some of the medical patients on the other side were mostly surgical. She came up, I said, "Oh, hi, how are you?"

[unclear]. She said, "I want to talk to you." She said, "I've got a cousin," or somebody, "that's a prisoner in North Vietnam. I'll be damned if I'm going to do anything for these POWs." That's the only help she sent me.

I said, "That's fine. You just do all the medications and I'll do everything else." Just made me mad.

TS:Yeah.

MS:I can understand how she felt that way, because there are prisoners who are not treated well [by the VC and the ARVN--MS clarified later.]

TS:Right.

MS:And then [in May 1971--MS added later] I was assigned to the emergency room, and Captain Lilly[?] was a black nurse with a huge afro--beautiful--and we had a shower but we had--water ran from a tank, it had a pump--water tower--and if water started [stopped--MS corrected later] running your shower started [stopped--MS corrected later] running.

TS:Right.

MS:And I always--[unclear] color my hair and was so afraid it would happen to me, and I thought if it happened to me I'll run down to the ocean. Well, it happened to Captain Lilly [unclear]. So she had gotten everything on [her hair--MS added later] and it stopped, so she ran down to the ocean and rinsed her hair out [unclear]. She was going home anyway so she [unclear]. It was never as pretty.

But I was still getting oriented. I was getting oriented. I had gone through orientation, and ER was just a big barn with saw--metal sawhorses you could put litters on and sterile supplies and all that. And I was working in pre-op and I heard the Dust Off come in, so I went back up there to see if she needed any help.

First thing I saw when I walked through the double doors was something on the floor was glowing, like a cigarette ash, and I thought, "Who the hell is smoking here?" Because there's "No [Smoking], Oxygen" signs everywhere, you can't smoke. And then I realized it wasn't a cigarette, it was Nomex [material], which is a flight [suit]--they came out with Nomex, which is fire-resistant, because so many crews--helicopter crews had died in the [crash fires--MS clarified later.] These are supposed to char, not burn, and that's what it was, a piece of Nomex. It was charring on the floor, because this guy had been in one of the small Loaches [Hughes OH-6 Cayuse; nicknamed "Loach", after the requirement acronym LOH-Light Observation Helicopter]--a Loach helicopter--which is a small helicopter, and they had little flares in the back and a round had come through, hit him right above his ear and set the flares on fire. So his Nomex was on fire and they were cutting it off of him and throwing it.

And I turned around--I went to Captain Lilly, I said, "Do you need help?"

She said, "No."

I said, "Okay, I'll go back to pre-op." She had only one patient and plenty of help.

As I go to push open the door this huge full colonel walks in. I'm looking up at him and he's about six foot four [inches], two hundred pounds, and right behind him is a major, and they start walking. I said, "Sir, hey, stop." I said, "They're busy with him. Once he gets stable I'll tell Captain Lilly you're here. There's a bench outside, you can wait there." And they kind of grumbled a little bit, but they turned around and walked out. And I told Captain Lilly and she said she'd talk to them and let them in once they got done. So I didn't think anything of it.

Well, a week later my husband got a call to go see his aviation group commander, Colonel Silvers[?]. Got in there, and Colonel Silvers[?] said, "Colonel Shugart, your wife's up there at the hospital."

He said, ["Yes, sir." --MS corrected later]

TS:[chuckles]

MS:He said, "Not too many people tell me what to do because I'm kind of big guy." He said, "She told me what to do [in a polite way--MS clarified later] and I respect that. Anytime you need my Jeep, if I'm not using it to go up there, you can take it."

TS:Oh, that's nice.

MS:He also was a Mormon and he was upset that some of his younger officers--warrant officers--[unclear] with an air cav [cavalry] unit [1st Squadron/ 9th Cavalry "Dragoons" --MS added later], which put infantry on the ground and then they fly overhead. He was a Cobra [unclear] Cobra Command unit, and they're called the "Blues;" the infantry was called the "Blues." Anyway, a lot of warrant officer helicopter pilots [unclear], they were going down to the local vill.

TS:Going down where?

MS:Vill; village; vill.

TS:Okay.

MS:We shortened it to vill. And the Latin was called [Victus?], where the Roman soldiers went, and it's still there, for soldiers anywhere. It was a place where they could go to get sex.

TS:Oh, right. Red Light District, sort of thing.

MS:Yeah.

TS:Okay.

MS:Anyway, he found out that a lot of his soldiers--and some of them were warrant officers too, even though some of them are only twenty-two or twenty-three. He put out this letter and said, "No officer or enlisted man in my command is allowed to have sex with anyone else except--anyone except their lawful wife." And the guys called it the "no nookie letter".

TS:No nookie?

MS:No. And Wayne got teased to no end because he was the only one with his wife over there who was allowed to have sex. [both chuckling] It was funny sometimes.

TS:I bet that letter was not followed to the T.

MS:I'm sure it wasn't, but he [the colonel] put the letter out and the guys called it the "no nookie" [letter]--My husband told me that's what they called it, and he took a lot of ribbing--

TS:Oh, I'm sure.

MS:--because he was the only one authorized to have sex.

TS:Yeah.

MS:But anyway, we were having our--and our emergency room was busy, and we got casualties in. We also [unclear] Vietnam women in having babies. Vietnamese, like a Jeep--they have, like, a Jeep--pulled up in front of the--and this old woman who looked to be sixty years old, gets out. We had an interpreter there. I said, "How many?"

She said, "Ten."

I said, "What did she come here for?"

"I don't know. I thought she was going to die if she had another one."

I got her on the table--or the litter--first [unclear] I got--we had a precip [precipitous] kit there. Precip is a kit for birth happening--emergency birth. Opened it, put the gloves out for the doctor. The doctor on duty that night was an ENT [ear, nose, and throat] doctor. They had to pull doctors. Ear, nose, and throat doctor. [Every doctor had to pull for ER duty--MS added later.]

TS:Okay.

MS:They had to pull [duty in] the emergency room. Got everything out, got her on the litter, pulled her black pants down, the head's coming out, I'm holding it. He runs over and says, "Oh, I've never delivered a baby without gloves before."

And I said, "Don't worry. The baby's here." By that time I'm trying to support the head and shoulders.

TS:Right.

MS:Baby is born fine, her uterus is clamped down fine. I said, "What do you want? Do you want to take her home?"

They said, "Yes."

I said, "Fine. You can take her home."

Well, chief of surgery said, "You shouldn't have let her go home."

I said, "She wanted to go home. Her uterus was clamped down. She was fine."

TS:That was her tenth baby?

MS:I don't know how--eight or ten. The problem is--and we also sometimes did have C-sections [caesarean section] on Vietnamese women. One of the problems is--well, I shouldn't say this--but it's a race thing. [They] have smaller pelvic openings, and if they have a child that's by a Caucasian male, with a big head, they run into problems, and a lot of times they had to have C-sections or the baby will die or they'll die.

So we used to have patients have C-sections on our Vietnamese ward too. We also had a warrant officer. The eye doctor was his friend, and his girlfriend was pregnant, so he admitted her on the Vietnamese ward. And I saw him one night, I said, "Dr. So-and-so--" she had her own fan, she had her own radio--I said, "Dr. So-and-so, [unclear]. I don't want her to have more privileges than other patients have on this ward." [unclear] Anyway, she miscarried and had the baby, but he was doing it because his friend was a--the doctor was a friend [of the warrant officer.]

TS:Right.

MS:Anyway. But, I mean, when I was at Fort Stewart, Georgia--I should tell you this--I was head nurse on the OB-GYN clinic and the ladies were supposed to see the chief of staff, who was Dr. K--, who was from Long Island [New York] and had a practice there. They were drafting doctors at the time. He was drafted. He didn't like being there. He wore his Italian leather shoes with his CWs[?]. But he had that New York accent. Most wives didn't want to see him, but he was supposed to see all the doctors' wives as a professional courtesy. She--The other wives would come in [unclear] they only had one car--they come in at seven o'clock and they were waiting in line when I opened the door, and I had to put the doctors' wives ahead of them, and that really upset me.

But one day, I put this wife back, I said, "You're going to see Dr. K--"

She starts bawling her head off. "I don't want to see Dr. K--. I want--"

I said, "I'm sorry Mrs. So-and-so."

Dr. H was [an] old country south doctor and he was the one she wanted to see, and everybody [unclear] Dr. K-- [unclear]. I said, "I'm sorry." And I said to myself, "Just send me back to Vietnam where all I have to worry about is someone bleeding to death."

TS:[chuckles]

MS:I said that in my mind to myself.

TS:Yeah?

MS:But anyway, that's another story about professional courtesy.

TS:Right.

MS:But anyway, we had patients--we didn't have a lot--we had some fighting going on there but not as much as there was--units were starting to draw down in '71. And then Wayne came down on orders to go home--their unit was drawing down--but he didn't want to leave, and I didn't want to leave him. And then we had a typhoon, and it was a big typhoon. We had had typhoons before but nothing like this one. We were on a bluff right above the ocean and--we had a [unclear] the night before and Wayne didn't come up for it, and Colonel Nelson made some off the color remark about married couples, which really irritated me and I was going to tell him about it the next day. Wayne was staying there, and his chief [sic, driver--MS corrected later] was coming up to pick him up from there. I got up in the morning and I had to go downstairs, and I could see the spray was coming halfway up the cliffs. They were booming into the cliffs. And I said, "Wayne, we're going to get a bad storm here."

And he said, "Yeah." He got up and we got breakfast; the mess hall was right above him. And went to the emergency room.

He was waiting for his ride and the tin starts going off the emergency room roof, so he and some other corpsman put sandbags on the tin. And then we got a call from the Americal headquarters [unclear] putting up tin and [unclear] tin hit him in the upper arm and broke his humerus, because they were flying around fast. So they were sending him over and I said--told my husband, "Get off the roof. Don't put anybody else up there." And the roof started flying off.

Wayne went back to try to get some covers over my room, and he was--by that time the roof was coming off the ER and the front part was coming in because it was facing the ocean.

TS:Oh, goodness.

MS:And so, we started moving all our sterile trays--the chest tracheotomy, [sterile] tray--they're wrapped in plastic, and we started moving them all into pre-op, which was--by then had two inches of water running through it, but it's a Quonset hut so--and we had a refrigerator back there. And after we got all the sterile stuff out--the IVs were left because they were in their bottles and rubber bags and every--they were still bottles then so they were safe in there.

I remember the emergency room refrigerator had seventy[?] ounces of blood we always kept there. We always had [eight to ten bags--MS corrected later] of O-negative [blood] because O-negative is general donor.

TS:Universal.

MS:And one thing you had to remember, too, is they had to [unclear], after you give so many units of O-negative you can't go back to giving them their own type; you've got to give them [unclear]. But sometimes they'll have a reaction then.

Anyway, I ran back and got a bath basin, got the blood bags, and then I realized our tetanus and our rabies--rabies is endemic in Vietnam; they don't have any kind of immunization program--and there was a garbage heap for the hospital and the dogs and people would fight over the garbage, and this Vietnamese woman had been bit by one of the dogs. And one of the MPs had shot the dog, and we got her on the rabies stuff [inoculation--MS clarified later], and impressed on her so much to come in every day and get that rabies shot. She walked in in the middle of a typhoon to get her shot. [chuckles]

Anyway, we got her [unclear] back, and I'm carrying all this stuff. I come into pre-op, grab the refrigerator door--and I got shocked. I got a shock because I was standing in two inches of water--

TS:Oh, right.

MS:--and the refrigerator's still plugged in and there's still power. I yelled at the NCO, "Get a sign on this refrigerator." It was open, I went ahead and put the stuff in there, but I get a broom handle so we can open it with something and not get shocked.

TS:Right.

MS:It didn't knock me on the floor but it hurt.

TS:I bet.

MS:Because I'm stand--Didn't even think of it--I'm standing in two inches of water.

TS:Right.

MS:So then they were doing surgery in the OR, an old Vietnamese man, and they had started at 7:30 in the morning before this all came in, and they normally would be taking to recovery, but they could not take him over to ICU [unclear]. Well, the rain was coming down in sheets. Rain's coming in so there was no way so they rolled him into us. [The power had gone out, but we were using flashlights--MS added later.] They also brought the major in that [had a fractured humerus--MS corrected later] he was in a cast, and he was not heavily sedated like the old man was, but he had been in surgery for three or four hours. He had so much mucous, and I'm thinking, "We can't use the [electric] suction machine." And then I remembered the old [unclear] bags. Do you know "ambu bags? [a bag valve mask]

TS:Yes.

MS:[They used to have a suction that you pushed with your foot so it worked without power--MS explained later]; they have one. They don't always but this one did. [unclear] suctioning. So I stood there in the water and suctioned him until about noon. The eye of the storm came out and we were able to transfer them over to ICU and Recovery. And about that time Wayne had heard that [unclear]. He comes running down the walk, and saw me coming out comes around, "I heard that the ER had been destroyed."

I said, "Well, it kind of did but we're all here."

That night the mess hall couldn't even get out a meal. They gave us cold ham sandwiches with cold pineapple on them. So some of the corpsmen had those Bunsen burners. The guys made soup and that tasted so good.

TS:[chuckles]

MS:It was cold, it was rainy.

TS:Yeah?

MS:And sometimes during the rainy season Vietnam can get cold.

TS:Sure.

MS:You see the little babies and they have a cap and a sweater on but they have nothing from [the waist] down; they don't use diapers; but they trained them real early. But it gets cold during the rainy season, and damp. It stays damp. When I was there the first time, our bunks would be so damp we'd stick the hose from our hairdryer under our bunks to dry our sheets out before we went to bed, because everything was damp during the rainy season. But anyway.

TS:Did that make you decide you want to get out of Vietnam?

MS:Well, he came down and he stayed with us, and that wind started back again, because--I had a splitting headache and I know it's the pressure changes and just hearing the shrieking of that wind.

TS:Right.

MS:And finally it went by and we were able to get the emergency rooms going. So we moved everything into pre-op [which we were using as an emergency room-MS added later], and this Vietnamese came in. He had an orphanage and one of the children had been hit by bricks falling, she had a big gash--laceration--but he brought all ten kids with him. So they're getting ready to suture her, and I was getting ready to go off and I--and we had moved everything into the emergency room and we were using that.

Next morning I came on duty and they had closed the gates; they wouldn't let any Vietnamese in or out. So they had kept those ten kids and the guy in this cast[?] room, and there are all full bedpans in there waiting for us when we got there because the night shift hadn't emptied them because they didn't know where to send them for emptying. We had a room they put families in, we could have sent them in there, but I don't know, maybe it was blown away, too.

But--And then the nurses [unclear]--we still had an emergency room and pre-op [to run--MS clarified later.] They brought in the--one of the "Slick" helicopters that crashed in the storm, and they brought in the bodies hanging from a sling because they smelled so bad, and they brought them in to us. Pilot still had his hand up over his face.

The--Also, one day I got a call from Dust Off and they said, "We got a call from an [AVRN--MS added later] sergeant who's with an army unit out at firebase and he wants us to come pick up some [unclear] with a fever.

And I said, "What's his fever?"

He said, "Oh, I don't know." He said, "[unclear]." The guy says, "Well, he's got a hundred and two." [The Dust Off person was talking to the sergeant at the firebase--MS added later.]

I said, "Give him some Tylenol. That's not a night Dust Off mission to me. We'll pick him up tomorrow."

TS:Right.

MS:"Oh, we're out of Tylenol."

"Give him some water." [unclear]

So they ended up going up and picking him up at four o'clock in the morning. He came in, of course he was riding with the doors open. His temperature was ninety-nine. We sent him to the hut to go on sick call in [?].

This is was when they also tried to make Viet--they were training Vietnamese pilots, and they trained a Vietnamese Dust Off unit, and the saying was: [unclear] calm down[?] on a Sunday [They did not fly unless it was a clear day--MS added later.]

TS:Calm down?

MS:Calm down[?] on a Sunday. That didn't mean we wouldn't be fighting on a Sunday afternoon, but they very seldom did anything, but that's what they were trained to do.

TS:Yeah.

MS:They also decided to start painting Dust Offs white, which is stupid; made them white.

TS:Paint--Oh.

MS:Instead of being army green with a big white [sic, red--MS corrected later] cross, now they're white with a big [red cross]--which made them targets.

TS:Pretty good target.

MS:It was stupid. But anyway, [my husband's unit 1/19th Cavalry], the infantry unit was out on the ground--MS edited later] and they stepped on a [land]mine. And the [unclear] we had the same kind of injuries they have in Vietnam and Iraq--we didn't call them IEDs [improvised explosive device], we called them mines--and they were usually walking along a jungle trail and they stepped on them or pulled the tripwire. And the first five guys, including the medic, were killed. The NCO survived. That was bad for his unit though.

But anyway, [during the typhoons--MS added later] they had put all the helicopters and planes in these old, big hangars that the marines had built there. Those hangars collapsed. They had no helicopters. Wayne was worried. He was afraid the VC and the NVA because all the electrical sensors were down on the wires where they might come through. He was really worried they might come in, but they were apparently as battered as we were from the storm.

And then finally--Everybody else was off because all the wards closed and the patients were shipped to De Nang, except a couple of the wards that they kept open. Everybody's off doing their laundry and I'm--I went to Colonel Douglas and said, "Colonel Douglas, I've got eight efficiency reports to write. I'm going to have to get packed because I'm supposed to leave--" And I said, "You've got to make somebody else the head nurse of the emergency room because I've got too much to do."

So then I finally got things dried out, and Wayne got orders to go back. We went and got our whole baggage shipped to the States and we're standing there--There are two, three other nurses going home. We're standing down on the runway in Chu Lai. A C-130 comes in, I'm standing there with three other nurses, and Wayne had gone off. A couple units were standing down there and they had the colors--[they were retiring the colors?]--he was down there taking pictures.

The pilot and copilot get off, and the copilot looks at me and says, "How would you ladies like to ride with us up front?"

I said, "Oh, sure. Can my husband come, too?"

He said, "I don't know, I guess so." [both chuckle]

And Wayne always kids me, that's why he got to ride up front. And I--Our son is a C-130 pilot and I always tell that to the guys. "Oh, yeah, we do that now, too." And I tell them about having to get off with the rotors [sic, engines--MS corrected later] still running and they still do. A C-130, to get started it has to have--they have to have a machine that jumpstarts it. I thinks that's why they do the same thing in Iraq and Afghanistan still.

TS:Keep running it?

MS:Because they don't want to shut down the engines. And they--Todd [MS's son] flew with the British C-130 J model, which is a new model. He flew for three years as an exchange pilot with the British over there. And they had a soldier who--his legs were gone [unclear] just laying there. They were taking him the hospital there; he didn't tell me what base. Anyway, as they came down the runway they made the right turn to go into the hospital, and they were unloading him, and he and the copilot watched a rocket explode on the runway where they would have been if they hadn't [unclear].

TS:Made the turn?

MS:Yeah.

TS:Well, so, you left Vietnam--

MS:But he says they're still the same way because the C-130s take--there's a little thing they start them up with. Even to start them by itself, it's hard to do, and they were big targets.

TS: They don't want to be a sitting duck, right?

MS:And they obviously--A lot of them were--flew in and out of Vietnam but they might have been stationed at Clark [Air Base, Philippines] or Okinawa [Kadena Air Base, Japan]. There were very few of them stationed actually in Vietnam. They would go in, fly the mission, and then--for a couple days, and then they'd rotate back to Okinawa.

TS:Well, let me ask you a couple general questions.

MS: Right.

TS:So now you're back from Vietnam.

MS:Yes.

TS:And you're--

MS:Oh.

TS:Go ahead.

MS:We got back to Fort Lewis, Washington.

TS:Fort Lewis, Washington.

MS:And because--Trying to get R&R together, he's--it wasn't his branch, it was the Nurse Corps that was such a pain in the ass. Trying to get R&R together. We went to Hawaii on R&R because we'd never been to Hawaii. And we were getting ready to come back from Hawaii, and we were in the airport there and everybody that's--they said, "Everybody that has tickets on this"--it was a American Airlines flight--"Everybody that has tickets on this flight, move into this room."

And so, I moved into that room with Wayne. [unclear] behind me--And I'm giving my ticket to the ticket agent there, and behind me I heard, "How come that woman's allowed in there!?" And women can be catty sometimes. "How come she's allowed in there?"

And the ticket agent said, "She's going back to Vietnam." [both chuckle]

And we went to Hong Kong. Got to Hong Kong and they gave a briefing. They take you--all the men to this big place. [unclear], he says, "Now, ma'am, would you leave so we can finish the briefing?"

I said, "Oh, sure." I knew what they were going to talk about. Wayne told me; VD [venereal disease] and prostitutes and all that stuff. And I said, "Yeah, I know about it. I have to give penicillin injections, 1.2 million units in each buttock, to some of these guys that get it too." They'd send them in from--they'd fly them in on helicopters so we could give them their--

TS:Their shots?

MS:--1.2 million units of penicillin in each buttock if they had VD or something.

TS:Yeah.

MS:"You're not going to tell me anything I don't know about." [chuckles]

TS:Yeah, that's right, you've seen it all.

MS:But he didn't want me to--

TS:[unclear] hear it, embarrass the men probably.

MS:Embarrass the men, yeah.

TS:Obviously you dealt with a lot of death.

MS:Pardon?

TS:You dealt with a lot of death and injuries.

MS:Yeah, but as I say--I mean, gosh, you didn't have time to think about it. I mean, you just can't stand there crying, you have to do something.

TS:Yes.

MS:Some of the nurses mentioned that, and they mention that in some of these books. I mean, the first time you see it or something it's really hard, but you've got to do something; you can't stand there and cry.

TS:How was your coping mechanism?

MS:How what?

TS:Did you have a coping mechanism?

MS:Yeah, I did. I mean, sometimes at night I would get upset, cry, and say prayers.

TS:Yeah?

MS:But I mean, most of the thing was just do what you have to do.

TS:Yes. Did you suffer from PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder]?

MS:No, I did not.

TS:No?

MS:And neither did Wayne. One of the guys at Fort Bragg, he was the game warden--not game warden--but he was--worked on the--what was his name? Wildlife thing, he was a good friend of Wayne's, he lived over in Southern Pines, and we would visit him. His wife said, "Oh, he's got such bad PTSD every time the artillery starts firing at Fort Bragg, and he can't sleep any."

I said, "Oh, it doesn't bother me." [chuckles]

But some people it does still bother. And for a long time--I think it was the fact that we [Wayne] still stayed in the military. [We were on?] the military, he was in the military.

TS:You had gotten out in '71?

MS:I got out at Fort Lewis, Washington when we came back.

TS:Okay.

MS:It was just too hard to try to get orders together. And actually, we came back home to New Jersey. There was no celebration. Nobody spit on us, but there was nothing; "Glad you're back, but--" I mean, and that's what was bad for those soldiers--

TS:Would you have wanted to stay in, do you think?

MS:I thought about it, and I might have. But as things worked out it was for the better. And sometimes I wished I would have.

TS:What was it that pushed you out?

MS:Mainly just the colonel's attitude when I first got there, toward married nurses, and just the fact that it was kind of hard. And I had friends--

TS:At Fort Lewis, you mean?

MS:What?

TS:When you got back to Fort Lewis?

MS:No, Germany, I worked at the army hospital there, and our chief nurse, she was a--her husband was an MP, they had five kids between them, and she stayed in. I had a good friend at Fort Knox, she was a nurse in ICU/Recovery. Her husband--there was what they call RIFs [reduction in force] after Vietnam. People were put out. Her husband was RIFed out, she stayed in, and they told her she had to go to Germany, and she had a new baby and her husband has been RIFed out of the military. What is she going to do? She went to Germany, I think. So it's still difficult. And people I talk to in the Army Nurse Corps say it's still difficult. The needs of the military come first and you have to realize that.

TS:Joint assignments are really difficult, even if you're married, right?

MS:Yeah, and still; still sometimes. I know they do try to accommodate you sometimes, but as they say, the needs of the military come first. So if you're needed here and your husband's somewhere else, [unclear] going to be sent there. I mean, it's just one of those things.

As it turned out, it worked out better because when we came back we went back to New Jersey, and they called us and said our [unclear] bag had been shipped to Washington D.C. and Wayne hadn't been assigned. We asked to go to Germany. They wouldn't do a [unclear] intra-theater transit; they wouldn't do it.

So we came back to New Jersey and Wayne went down to Fort Meade, Maryland. He found out he was going to be assigned to the VIP helicopter detachment, which is not Marine One, but they fly the senators and things like that.

[Marine One is the call sign of any United States Marine Corps aircraft carrying the President of the United States]

We got quarters at Fort Meade, and we went to Washington to see his Colonel for the armor branch--Colonel Coe--and he was now the army branch personnel manager. So we talked to him. And he got a phone call and walked out, came back and said, "You guys still want to go to Germany?"

We said, "Yes."

He said, "I have a guy that's supposed to go but he has--got a medical emergency with family; doesn't want to go."

We said, "We'll go." Our housing goods, what we had in the trailer we lived in at Fort Stewart, were already in route to Fort Meade, Maryland.

But anyway, we ended up going to Friedberg, Germany. It was just north of Frankfurt. Have you been to Europe?

TS:I have been to Germany.

MS:Okay, well, Friedberg is where Elvis [Aaron Presley; American singer] was stationed with the 1st/3rd Armored Division], and Wayne's NCO, in fact, had been an NCO then back when Elvis was there in the fifties.

TS:Yeah.

MS:But Friedberg was a nice assignment. We--He, in fact--He met me--He went two weeks earlier--he went two weeks early--and I came in the middle of January. He met--His unit was already at Grafenwoehr. It was a tank unit. He met me at the airport. We went back to [Ayers Kaserne at] Kirch-Göns, where he'd been assigned. He stayed there. He was getting ready to fly back to Grafenwoehr. He spent a couple nights there, and that night--the next morning a major came out and said, "You've been transferred down to Friedberg. They need you down there."

So we moved down to Friedberg, he put me in the Bachelor Officer's Quarters and flew back to Grafenwoehr. And luckily the rear detachment commander's wife Vickie was very nice and saw that I got helped. And I went over and spent the afternoons with her and stuff when he was gone and everything, and heat a nice dinner on a hot plate, or she had me for dinner. She was really nice to me. We enjoyed it there.

He still flew helicopters. They still had to keep up their flight time, but aviation was not a branch, it was still a specialty. So his specialty was armor. We had an incident there which was horrible. Colonel--what was his name? I can't remember his name. Most of the time when they went to Grafenwoehr they shipped the tanks by rail[road], and this colonel wanted to do it like they would do in war and take his tanks down the Autobahn to Nuremberg. They took them to Kur--Oh, what was that place?--Kitz--Kitz--Kitz-something [Kitzingen]; it's on the Autobahn. And they unloaded them there and they started moving down the Autobahn to Grafenwoehr and one of the tanks lost its steering and went across the median and crashed right on top of a white Mercedes with a German doctor's wife and two kids. They air-evaced one of the children to Nuremberg [but the whole family died--MS added later]. It made a big stink among the Germans.

Unfortunately, the corps captain [company commander] was the commander of that troop took the whole responsibility for that. Not our colonel. He didn't, and he's the one that wanted to do it. It really irritated me.

TS:Where did you work when you were in Germany?

MS:I worked as a volunteer nurse in the dispensary at Kirch-Göns. Friedberg just had a military sick call. So I drove to Kirch-Göns, which is about ten miles from Friedberg. They had a dependents dispensary there. I worked as a volunteer. And then we had Todd, and so I didn't--we extended for five months. We would have left in January but we extended to June.

TS:Of seventy--

MS:Seventy-five.

TS:Seventy-five?

MS:He was--Todd was born on 18 December '74 at the army hospital in Frankfurt. And then Wayne's mother had come over when Todd was born. I had his room all fixed up, I had to get everything, I had to get a bed in there for her. I really didn't want her coming there but her--his father had died the year before and we had had to go back for that.

So anyway, then she writes--she goes home, [unclear] we get a letter from her middle of January, says, "Oh, I'm married--I'm remarried." Didn't say anything to any of us. Marries this old guy who had worked with her husband in this company--a food company--and--what's his name? We got--He picked us up on the way back [at McGuire Air Force Base--MS added later.] It's July, it's hot, we're coming from Germany where it's usually not that hot. It's a hundred degrees in New Jersey. He gets lost on the way back. We get in their house, and they have AC [air conditioning], and we walked in the house and it's stupid hot. "Mom, turn on the AC."

"My husband doesn't like AC. We don't use the air conditioner."

TS:[chuckles] Well, let me ask you a couple questions about--You actually answered quite a few of these. But you talked a little bit about your relationships with your supervisors and superiors and your peers. Overall, do you think that it went pretty well for you?

MS:Well, I think it did. I think--Not with Colonel Johnson. I had been nominated for the Bronze Star and she messed that up, because the NCOIC over the hospital told me that I [unclear] so I didn't [unclear]. I did get one for my second tour and Colonel Douglas put that through. And some of the men--they had the--Welcome Home Vietnam Veterans [Day] two years--in 2011--two or three years ago--and I was at something at Snyder[?] and there was a guy standing there and I said something about I had the Bronze Star.

"How do you have a Bronze Star?"

I said, "For winning the hearts and minds of Vietnamese patients and for mass casualty situations." It's not for valor.

TS:Right.

MS:It's just a plain Bronze Star.

TS:Right.

MS:And a lot of people have--and I threatened Wayne to put it on, but we never put things on cars; we weren't that way. But I do have a Vietnam Veterans sticker on the back of my car now. And obviously everybody will think it's my husband's anyway. Nobody will think it's mine. My husband's buried in the Sandhills [North Carolina] and I was out there one time and the funeral was getting ready to start, and I was waiting for it to be over. This guy--and there were people waiting there and this guy walked up and I said, "My husband's buried over there. I'm waiting for--"

And he said, "Oh, thank you for his service."

And I said--He saw my sticker and I said, "Well, that's mine, too." I said, "You can thank me for my service too." [chuckles] Anyway.

TS:Do you feel like you have to do that sometimes to remind people that women were in the service as well?

MS:Yes. Yes. Also, we have a memorial ceremony and one year they had a black reserve chaplain, an older gentleman, and his wife was there, and he kept mentioning all the men buried out here, all the--I went up to him afterwards, I said, "Sir, I enjoyed your speech but there are many women buried out here. And Colonel Mary Berry[?] is buried right in front of my husband and she was in--Korea and Vietnam. There are women from Vietnam and Iraq--Iraq and Afghanistan buried here also."

He said, "Oh, I didn't know."

Most younger officers now will say "men and women"; he was an older officer. His wife was standing next to him and she said, "I never met a woman that was in Vietnam before."

And I said, "Well, now you have."

TS:Now you have. That's right.

MS:And I ran into that one more time and it really--we had the Vietnam Veterans Memorial thing here. Part of it was a play and it was called "Truth or Consequences," it's written by a Vietnam Veteran, and there are different parts in it. So they had the men up on the stage, and the woman who was supposed to be the daughter of a Vietnam Veteran backed out--there was a woman, a wife--and he was going to interview her, so they asked me if I'd do it. I said, "Sure." So I told Mr. --he's from California, [unclear]--

TS:It's okay. You might think of it in the transcript.

MS:Pardon?

TS:You might think of it later.

MS:But anyway--Pryor--Pryor was his last name. He started doing avant-garde plays in his basement, like [The] Vagina Monologues and things like that.

TS:Right.

MS:But then he moved to Downtown Fayetteville so that's where we're having this thing. But I showed--I--I showed him all my pictures, talked about Vietnam. We sit down at the table to go over the play. He starts going through the play, and he said, "Now we'll give the medals to the Vietnam male veterans."

I looked at him, I said, "Mr. Pryor, I don't care about your damn medal, but damn it, if you're going to give one to them, you're going to give one to me." [chuckles] I was so mad.

TS:Yeah?

MS:He's getting a little senile anyway.

TS:Did you get your way?

MS:Well, he inter--he said, "We'll do it afterwards." So they interviewed me, and part of this play was four, five, six soldiers in a trench [unclear], and a NCO brings a new guy up there. And of course, his hair is a little longer [unclear]. And he gets in the trench and he said, "What is that smell?"

And they said, "Well, there's a dead VC out there in the water. And our medic went out to get him and he's not here anymore, and our NCO went out to get him and he's not here anymore, so he's going to hang there for a while."

But part of that dialogue, FNG is used a lot. Do you know what that means? You've never heard of that? Also, der--they pronounced it "DEROS." I always heard it pronounced "DE-ROS."

TS:Okay.

MS:Date of return from overseas assignment [Date Estimated Return From Overseas], which everybody knew their--he started interviewing me and I said, "Before you start to interview me I think we should let people know what FNG means." It means "Fucking New Guy." And I knew that and I told them that's what it means. I don't usually talk like that but that's what it means--"Fucking New Guy"--and it's still used in the military.

TS:Right.

MS:Right.

TS:[chuckles]

MS:Anyway. And that got everybody laughing.

TS:Right, sure.

MS:And part of it was also "Rockets in the Morning" about the guy who's shaving outside on the airfield, and he watches two rockets come in. One goes over and one hits a plane the mechanic is working on, and watches the body fly through the air and through the flames. But it's different little [unclear], and then they give the medals to the male veterans, but I wasn't upset because I had gotten mine already. But I was so mad at him after I'd sit there for an hour, and showed him my pictures and everything, and he does that.

TS:Right. You think that sometimes women are just overlooked?

MS:They are. They are. And that's why--Even the lady that's the 82nd Airborne Division historian--what's her name?--when the guy that--Joseph Galloway [author of the book We Were Soldiers Once and Young], the reporter that wrote [unclear] soldiers [unclear] was at the PX [unclear] got him to sign it, and I said I was in Vietnam, too. She was standing there with them and he got--he said, "Gosh, I'm going to get [unclear]."

Anyway, she was sitting there and she said, "We're going to have a thing for women in the military day here at the Officers' Club. Would you do that?" I said--So I did it. I had all my pictures and stuff and did it. Well, she wrote a--It's called Women Warriors and they're distributing it at the ASOM [Airborne and Special Operations Museum] museum here, and they had it, and I told them--we had a coffee out at the garden club--that a lady with a PhD, whatever, is the curator here, and she talked a lot about Black Hawk Down that they have now, that exhibit here--from Somalia when the Black Hawk crashed--

Actually, I need to tell you, our name is Shugart--S-H-U-G-A-R-T--his name was Shughart--[Randall David] "Randy" Shughart--they were our neighbors. They aren't--They weren't in the phonebook. He was with Delta [1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta, also known as "Delta Force"], she was a nurse--Stephanie was a nurse at Cape Fear [Hospital]. [unclear] nightmares [unclear] one of my EMTs walked in and said, "Do you have anybody in Somalia?" This was in October of '84, '83.

TS:Ninety.

MS:Was in '90? Ninety-four, '93. And I said, "No. Todd is at the Academy, Wayne is here." There was a Dr. Shugart who was with the mental health--teenage mental health clinic. We're the only Shugart in the phonebook. I went to sleep and my phone--I had to work that night--it was ringing off the hook all day long, and I didn't want to take it off because it would just sit there and buzz and I wanted Todd to be able to call. "Mrs. Shugart, the Times would like to talk to you."

I said, "No. It's not me but I don't think she wants to talk to you." By then they had moved them somewhere else [unclear].

TS:Right.

MS:And so, later on I did meet Stephanie and she moved back in our neighborhood after all this, and she was at a--Delta Force does a thing every year for the children. It's a auction; usually sports items, and Wayne had been at SOCOM [U.S. Special Operations Command]--aviation.

TS:Yeah.

MS:He was invited. And we went to Southern Pines, and Stephanie and her girlfriend were there and they ate dinner with us, and the other girl--Gordon; Gordon was the other one--she's a big, blonde haired--Stephanie was so quiet. She didn't do any of the talking during [unclear]; Mrs. Gordon did it all. Anyway, Mrs. Gordon comes over, and Wayne had met her, and she's comes over there. We have the pamphlets there showing the roll-on/roll-off warships they're naming after Gordon. Stephanie had been out to California, and how nice everybody was. They had named one of them Shughart.

[In 1996 the United States Navy named a sealift ship, USNS Gordon, in honor Gary Gordon, who was awarded the medal of honor posthumously. In 1997, the United States Navy named a roll-on/roll-off ship USNS Shughart in honor of Randall David Shughart, who was awarded the medal of honor posthumously.]

Anyway, Mrs. Gordon comes over and she's showing off this big diamond. And she's engaged to a Special Forces captain. Poor taste. Here she is at something for--I don't care. They can get remarry but why be there for something that's in honor of your [late] husband--

TS:Right.

MS:--showing off your new diamond.

TS:Right.

MS:And Stephanie finally did remarry, and got it [unclear].

TS:The period that you were in, in the sixties, the Women's Movement was going on too. Were you influenced by that at all?

MS:No, other than the fact I wanted to be in the military.

TS:Because you were talking about the things that you possibly could do besides nursing; your options were a little bit limited.

MS:Right.

TS:Did you feel like the women's movement helped with that?

MS:It did help some, although sometimes I thought they got a little too strident sometimes.

TS:In what way?

MS:Well, just "We want to--We want to be able to fight with the men." They're still fighting to be in some of the units, they're fighting to be on submarines, where they have to sleep--[unclear] on submarines. The navy has decided they will put women on submarines. I think that's just asking for problems.

TS:So you think there's some things women shouldn't do in the military?

MS:Pardon?