Courageous Women of the Vietnam War

by Kathryn J. Atwood

  After being in the intensive care unit for 28 days, the man stabilized and was transferred to a different hospital. When Bobbi said good-bye to him, he placed in her hand his green beret as a gesture of respect and thanks.

  “From the day he first arrived at our door, the casualties never ceased—they began to increase proportionately to the escalation of the war effort,” Bobbi wrote later. She was convinced that part of the hospital staff’s success in saving lives was due to the helicopters, which were able to quickly transport the wounded out of battle zones.

  She also credited the excellent work of the Duong Duong team. But this hospital that gave Bobbi so much pride was often difficult to work in. For instance, the elevator constantly broke down, which meant they often had to use the stairways to transport patients between floors. Even when the elevator was supposedly in working order, it could be unreliable: once Bobbi was caught between floors and had to be pulled out by two corpsmen.

  “The demand for constant improvisation was indeed frustrating, but it was also rewarding to see just how resourceful we could be,” Bobbi wrote later. “Empty intravenous bottles and tubing became drinking containers and straws…. Howitzer shell casings of 105 mm made excellent, heavy flower vases.”

  During her off hours, Bobbi explored Saigon and discovered it to be a city of economic extremes: the wealthy lived in beautiful villas built by the French, while the poor lived on the streets. “At intersections it was common to see an elegant Mercedes sedan confront a lumbering cart pulled by a team of oxen,” she wrote.

  When Bobbi would sit at an outdoor café, absorbing the city’s sights and sounds, she found it difficult to believe there was a war being fought only five miles away. But the very place where she sat was becoming part of that war: the VC began targeting the Saigon cafés that Americans frequented.

  One Saturday night the medical staff at Duong Duong admitted several wounded American GIs, victims of a shoe box bomb set off in a Saigon bar. Describing the first victim, Bobbi wrote, “I have never witnessed greater destruction of a human body, except, perhaps, in the case of airplane crash victims.” He died within 10 minutes.

  Portrait of Bobbi taken by a local Saigon photographer. Bobbi Hovis collection

  But Saigon’s chaos was only beginning. One October evening, Bobbi was standing on the balcony of her living quarters, looking down onto the street. She saw a taxi pull to the curb. Out stepped a Buddhist monk, dressed in traditional robes and carrying a can.

  “He proceeded to a spot on the sidewalk and sat down,” Bobbi wrote later. “Pouring the contents of the can over his robes, he struck a match and was immediately engulfed in flames. Even though other monk burnings had occurred, I still couldn’t believe what I was witnessing.”

  Bobbi called some fellow nurses to join her on the balcony as she photographed the shocking scene. A large crowd had gathered, but soon police and ARVN soldiers arrived and cordoned off the area.

  Within 30 minutes, the street appeared as if nothing unusual had occurred there. “The abnormal was becoming normal,” Bobbi wrote. “The unexpected became the expected.”

  But on November 1, 1963, something began that was truly extraordinary, even for Saigon. After an uneventful morning, the senior corpsman, returning from lunch some distance away, had shocking news. “There’s all kinds of barbed wire strung across the street,” he said. “There are gun emplacements set up with .50-caliber machine guns and they’re all pointed right up the street at us.” Bobbi walked into the street. It was true. Troops were setting up guns and sandbags.

  By the time she returned to the hospital, she could hear gunfire. She saw “tree limbs snapping and flying in all directions. Lead was ricocheting off building walls.” Planes were dive-bombing the presidential palace. She saw one plane hit by antiaircraft fire. It went into a dive and disappeared.

  The long-rumored coup to overthrow Ngo Dinh Diem, South Vietnam’s highly unpopular president, had begun.

  Bobbi ran up to the hospital’s top-floor balcony so she could watch. She thought the balcony’s waist-high balustrade might offer some protection. A corpsman joined her. Fierce gunfire from AK-47s was being exchanged in the street below. All of a sudden, a bullet hit the balustrade right in front of them. It ricocheted to the ceiling and dropped at Bobbi’s feet, along with an intense spray of stucco and dust. She and the corpsman ducked and crawled back inside before creeping back out to the balcony to continue watching.

  By 5:00 PM Bobbi and several other nurses received permission to return to their living quarters three miles away. The battle had quieted down, although Bobbi described it later as an “uneasy” quiet. She sensed that things “could explode at any moment.”

  As the evening wore on, the city was blacked out. The local radio station broadcast nothing about the battle. Bobbi wrote later, “The hourly news updates spoke of world events everywhere except where it counted—Saigon. Instead of timely, accurate information on the coup, we listened to the Top 40. It was ominous and ludicrous. I felt that at any moment the blackness would rupture.”

  At two in the morning, it did. Bobbi heard tanks rolling down the street while shells exploded all around. Their apartment building was “showered with flying tile, glass, and shrapnel. The shells came whistling in, the blast effect tremendous.” Still, the women watched from their seventh-floor balcony, taking cover in the stairwell on the fourth floor when the shelling became too intense.

  Bobbi then remembered that she owned a shortwave radio. She retrieved it and tuned in to London’s BBC, whose broadcaster was discussing the fighting in Saigon but providing no details. “Ironically, we who were sitting in the midst of the fighting were no better informed than the BBC announcer,” Bobbi wrote later.

  She and the others continued to watch through the moonlit night, observing from the balcony or taking cover in the stairwells. Because their phone line had not been damaged, they assumed there were only minimal casualties arriving at Duong Duong, or else they would have been called to work.

  By 3:30 AM the heavy firing died down. Bobbi heard “the clank, clank, clank” of tanks. She crawled out on the balcony and peered down over the railing. “There in the street below, I counted 27 tanks mustering right below our quarters,” she wrote. “Several hundred fully armed troops accompanied the tanks.” Bobbi was certain this must be their final assault on the presidential palace.

  Just before dawn, the sound of gunfire intensified until it was deafening. At that point, the nurse’s faces “were blackened with soot.” Their eyes burned from “acrid cordite fumes from the explosions of gunpowder,” and they all had “pounding headaches” from the noise.

  Then, at 6:30 AM, it was over. Bobbi saw a white flag flutter in the distance. She assumed—correctly—that it had been raised over the presidential palace.

  When daylight came and the nurses viewed their immediate surroundings, they were surprised their building hadn’t taken a direct hit, because the buildings around them certainly had. The roofs, Bobbi wrote, “had holes five feet in diameter. Rubble, roof tiles, and broken glass lay everywhere.”

  The local radio station finally had some relevant news: President Diem had been overthrown. Cheering crowds filled the streets. Businesses linked to the Diem regime were looted and burned. From their roof on the following day, Bobbi and some other nurses watched showers of pink, green, and yellow leaflets fall from military airplanes into the street below, announcing the takeover of the new government, the Military Revolutionary Council.

  A portion of the ruined presidential palace. Photo by Bobbi Hovis

  When the nurses arrived at the hospital, the only damage they noticed were bullet holes in a few walls. Bobbi was amazed to learn that no patients had been admitted with injuries related to the coup.

  Three weeks later, on November 23, 1963, Bobbi was enjoying a day off when she tuned her shortwave radio to the Voice of America broadcast. The station never emitted a completely clear signal, but she could hear an announcer repeatedly me
ntion the word “assassination.” Who had been the target? After hearing the name Kennedy more than once, Bobbi was horrified to realize that John F. Kennedy, the president of the United States, had been shot.

  The following day, she and her friends were profoundly moved to see thousands of Vietnamese students carrying pro-Kennedy placards in a solemn procession. A sudden deluge of rain didn’t stop them.

  Bobbi hoped the regime change in South Vietnam might shorten the war. But in her opinion, “the war effort was deteriorating from bad to worse.” On January 30, 1964, Ambassador Lodge spoke over the Armed Forces Radio Service. He warned American personnel to stay on duty or in their quarters; the streets of Saigon were too dangerous.

  Days later, leaflets appeared all over Saigon with this message: “Two Americans a Day.” Frightening rumors circulated: poison darts aimed at American necks, bounties for the capture of navy nurses. Bobbi and the others began to wear civilian clothing to and from the hospital.

  On the night of February 16, 1964, Bobbi and two friends intended to see a film at the Capital Kinh Do Theater, but a last-minute dinner invitation caused them to change their plans.

  The VC targeted the theater that night. Hearing the explosion, the nurses raced to the hospital. Duong Duong was in chaos, crammed with wounded civilians, their frantic family members, reporters, investigators, and military police.

  Gurneys were rushed into the emergency and operating rooms six or seven at a time. “I had never seen so many casualties at once,” Bobbi wrote later.

  After working for 36 hours straight, she left the hospital and stopped at the theater, now a mess of “twisted metal, shattered glass, huge slabs of ceiling plaster.”

  Then she saw something that left her “limp” and sent “a cold chill” down her spine. The seat where she usually sat—ten rows from the back on the aisle so she could be easily located in case of a hospital emergency—was completely blown away.

  On the night of April 4 an American helicopter pilot still wearing his flight suit was admitted to Duong Duong on a stretcher. Bobbi took his pulse. He didn’t have one. In the dead man’s pocket she found a photo of a pretty young woman and two little girls. Bobbi’s eyes filled with tears. During the past seven months of nursing casualties, she had never reacted in this way. She knew she had reached a “saturation point.” These Americans, she wrote later, “were among the best of our young soldiers, volunteers who had chosen to serve in Vietnam.” It seemed tragic that they were now dying on foreign soil.

  Bobbi put that emotional moment behind her and worked to the end of her yearlong tour of duty. Days before her October 10 departure, she and the other homeward-bound medics were given a surprise going-away party. But the biggest surprise came when General William Westmoreland, commander of the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV), and General John L. Throckmorton, deputy commander of MACV, walked into the party to personally thank the medics for their service.

  On November 1, 1967, Bobbi retired from the Navy Corps. During her 20-plus years of service, she received multiple awards, including many for her year in Vietnam. Her most recent award, a Distinguished Citizen Medal from the Daughters of the American Revolution, came in October 2014.

  But while she appreciates the honors, Bobbi maintains that the work itself was always her best reward: “The care of these patients in the war was my main purpose in life and doing it was great satisfaction for me.”

  In 1992 she used the letters she wrote to her mother during her year in Saigon as the basis of a memoir.

  Bobbi was the first woman to fly a navy jet and logged nearly 1,500 hours in military hospital planes and helicopters, as well as 250 hours in private planes. She remains active to this day, flying a biplane once per year as a birthday present to herself.

  LEARN MORE

  Americans at War by the Naval Institute Press, www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVYsET0OZPk.

  An interview with Bobbi about her service and time in Vietnam.

  “Around Annapolis: 1st Navy Nurse Corps Officer to Volunteer for Vietnam Honored by DAR” by Aries Matheos, Capital Gazette, October 31, 2014, www.capitalgazette.com/neighborhoods/ph-ac-cc-around-annapolis-1031-20141031-story.html.

  Station Hospital Saigon: A Navy Nurse in Vietnam, 1963–1964 by Bobbi Hovis (Naval Institute Press, 1992).

  Part III

  1965–1968

  LYNDON B. JOHNSON’S AMERICAN WAR

  ON MARCH 8, 1965, 3,500 US Marines landed near the shore of the central Vietnamese city of Da Nang, the first American combat troops to arrive in Vietnam. There to secure the Da Nang air base, the marines were a visible symbol of America’s increasing resolve to support the government in South Vietnam against the Communists.

  Meanwhile, the Northern government in Hanoi was making determinations of its own, mobilizing its economy and people for the war effort. Although Hanoi officials would deny it for years, tens of thousands of North Vietnamese Army (NVA) soldiers had already been moving south by way of a network of jungle pathways collectively known as Ho Chi Minh Trail. Along with the NVA soldiers came weapons, supplies, and ammunition, which would also support the soldiers of the People’s Liberation Armed Forces (PLAF)—known by their enemies as the Vietcong (VC)—in the South.

  Although the Vietnamese population knew exactly where the fighting was, the same could not be said for most Americans at the time: few could even locate Vietnam on a map. Nevertheless, Americans did understand that Communist-controlled nations, such as those in Eastern Europe and China, did not have the freedoms enjoyed in democracies. Despite US senator Joseph McCarthy’s chilling anti-Communist crusade throughout the 1950s—which destroyed the careers and reputations of thousands of Americans and caused a cloud of fear and suspicion to fall over the country—US citizens realized that nations implementing Communism were oppressive, totalitarian regimes intolerant of dissent, frighteningly similar to the Fascist states the United States and its allies had defeated during World War II. And most Americans were willing to support a war that fought the ideology they considered to be the world’s new threat: a poll taken in 1965 revealed that a majority of them approved of sending combat troops to Vietnam.

  The marine landing at Da Nang, though a dramatic moment, wouldn’t be nearly enough to keep Saigon from falling to the Communists. US general William Westmoreland, commander of the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV), told President Lyndon B. Johnson that he would need 180,000 men total for defensive measures in South Vietnam. To do more—that is, to mount successful offensives called search-and-destroy missions against the VC hidden in the countryside—he would need an additional 100,000 soldiers.

  If the United States was, as it claimed, only present to support the South in its fight to remain free of the North, why did the military need such large numbers of American fighting men? Because the Southern military commanding the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) was ineffective and unable to convey the same nationalistic zeal that was inspiring its enemies. Southern military officers seemed to be interested more in bickering with each other than in fighting the VC. Most were granted positions based on a corrupt reward system, not on skill or experience. ARVN soldiers, required to serve for the duration of the war, were given little motivation to remain loyal to their corrupt leaders, and they deserted by the thousands—often temporarily, to care for their families or receive treatment for battle wounds.

  COMMUNISM

  Communism is an ideology in which a society’s economy—that is, its wealth and means of producing goods—is directly controlled by its citizens. The idea grew out of the French Revolution, when, in the late 18th century, poverty-stricken peasants successfully rose up against wealthy aristocrats. But German political philosopher Karl Marx was the first to detail the idea in writing, during the mid to late 19th century; in western nations, the industrial revolution had made business owners wealthy at the expense of their overworked and underpaid employees, many of whom were school-age children.

  Marx and his assoc
iate Friedrich Engels envisioned a classless society in which everyone would labor to the best of their abilities and be provided for, whether or not they were able to work. Communism, as originally intended, has been practiced by some utopian, religious, and tribal societies throughout history. But the nations that have claimed to establish Communist governments—beginning with the former Soviet Union—have ultimately been responsible for a tragic number of human rights abuses. Why? These nations’ economies have never been managed by the people of those nations. Rather, power has always fallen into the hands of leaders who establish autocratic regimes supported and enforced by a privileged ruling class of loyal Communist Party members. These leaders and party members not only control the economy but also severely limit freedom of speech, religion, and political opinion. Citizens of Communist nations who attempt to exercise any one of these freedoms contrary to the dictates of their government—or who are even suspected of doing so—are imprisoned, forced into labor camps, or executed. To date, the number of people murdered by their own Communist-controlled governments exceeds 100 million.

  As more Americans came to Vietnam, they radically altered the character of the South’s capital city. Saigon retained its French architecture, but its identity was becoming increasingly American. Shops and businesses were created to cater to the foreigners, and Saigon’s economy became as dependent on the Americans as the Southern military was.

  Despite the shaky foundation upon which the United States was building this war, a general spirit of optimism ran through the US news broadcasts about the conflict: the search-and-destroy missions against the VC were as effective, reporters said, as Operation Rolling Thunder, the bombing campaign against the North that had begun on March 2, 1965. It was only a matter of time, proclaimed the reports, before the United States would receive offers of surrender from North Vietnam.