Courageous Women of the Vietnam War

by Kathryn J. Atwood

  POST-TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER

  Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) occurs when a person exposed to a traumatic event, such as combat, continues to suffer severe stress connected to that event long after it has passed. People with PTSD can experience recurring nightmares about the past trauma, or they can unexpectedly find themselves reliving it during waking hours when an unrelated situation triggers the memory. PTSD sufferers will often try to avoid situations that set off such reactions, but they may react with rage or despair when they occur. PTSD has affected combat military personnel throughout history but was first given its name in the 1970s in connection to the postwar sufferings of Vietnam veterans.

  It took 10 difficult years, overcoming countless roadblocks, passing two pieces of Congressional legislation, and winning the approval of three federal commissions, but the Vietnam Women’s Memorial was finally unveiled on November 11, 1993.

  The dedication ceremony included a parade of Vietnam veteran nurses who Kay remembers were “overwhelmed by the number of people who lined the streets waving flags and shouting cheers.” Some male Vietnam veterans rushed out to thank the nurses, and Kay even witnessed some actual reunions right in the middle of the parade.

  In addition to working on the monument effort, Kay helped establish the Minnesota Association of Civilian and Veteran Women. While involved in these two projects, she crossed paths with many Vietnam War nurse veterans who were suffering from varying levels of PTSD, and she decided to do something to help them, starting a local group that met on the grounds of the Minnesota Veterans Administration Medical Center (VAMC). “The VAMC at that time put all Vietnam vets in an outbuilding as we were ‘too crazy’ to be in the hospital,” recalls Kay. But she persisted until the VAMC finally allowed her to initiate a PTSD program specifically for these women veterans. The Minneapolis VAMC is now one of the top centers of its kind, she says, and its exemplary women’s program is emulated by many other VAMCs in the country.

  She was also instrumental in founding the Minnesota Women Veterans Association, which now has several hundred members. And although currently fighting cancer, Kay continues to stay involved with Vietnam nurse veterans to this day.

  THE VIETNAM WOMEN’S MEMORIAL

  Excerpt from the speech given on November 11, 1993, by Diane Carlson Evans, captain, Army Nurse Corps 1966–1972, Vietnam 1968–1969, and founder and president of the Vietnam Women’s Memorial Foundation: “We have just unveiled the first monument in the history of the United States of America dedicated in our nation’s capital to American women who served during wartime. Welcome home daughters of America. Welcome home my fellow sister veterans. Allow the love and pride that fill this hallowed space to enter your hearts and souls today and forever as we continue on our journey in life.”

  The Vietnam Women’s Memorial in Washington, DC. Noreen Lake

  LEARN MORE

  “Catherine (Kay) M. Bauer” by Kay Bauer, in Vietnam War Nurses: Personal Accounts of 18 Americans, edited by Patricia Rushton (McFarland, 2013).

  Sisterhood of War: Minnesota Women in Vietnam by Kim Heikkila (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2011).

  JURATE KAZICKAS

  “What’s a Woman Like You Doing Out Here?”

  WHEN JURATE KAZICKAS told her parents she was headed to Vietnam to report on the war, her mother began weeping. “Everything we have done in life was to keep you from ever having to live through a war again,” she said through her tears.

  While growing up in New York City, Jurate had learned by heart her family’s World War II tale. Her father, Joseph Kazickas, had been an active and well-known member of the anti-Communist resistance in Vilnius, Lithuania’s capital. So when the Soviets entered the city in June 1944, Joseph fled in the middle of the night with his wife, Alexandra, and Jurate, their 18-month-old daughter.

  Their difficult and terrifying journey—most of it on foot—was filled with many close calls. For instance, during a long train ride, they surely would have been caught by Soviet authorities constantly on the alert for fleeing refugees if not for the kindness of German soldiers who hid the family under piles of bandages.

  The train’s last stop was the German city of Dresden, which the Kazickas family then left on February 13, 1945, just hours before the Allies began to destroy it. Jurate’s parents never forgot the sight of Dresden’s destruction, as from a distance they observed “raging fires that filled the sky.”

  The family eventually wound up in an American-run displaced persons camp in Germany where GIs showered curly-headed little Jurate with candy, calling her Shirley Temple. Finally, in 1947 Joseph, Alexandra, and Jurate sailed across the Atlantic Ocean to New York City on the USS Ernie Pyle, named for a famous World War II reporter who had lost his life while covering the war in the Pacific.

  Now, with the grown-up Jurate determined to go to Vietnam, Alexandra was afraid her daughter might share Pyle’s fate and could not understand what compelled Jurate to actively seek out war. Jurate would never be quite sure herself what had drawn her there, but she thought perhaps her family’s story, instead of giving her an aversion to war, had made her feel it was an essential part of who she was.

  Vietnam had first piqued Jurate’s interest in 1965. While traveling alone through Asia on a hiking vacation, she met some American GIs on leave in Bangkok, Thailand. They all spoke about the “crazy, terrifying world” they had just left, their war against a frustratingly “unseen enemy” who hid in “lush jungles, rice paddies, and villages.”

  Jurate immediately headed for Saigon, a city she found fascinating, an odd mixture of American and Vietnamese culture where the sounds of war could be heard in the distance. Writing later, she said, “Something was planted in my soul during that day and night as I careened through the bustling streets…. I knew that I would return one day. A new and mysterious world was beckoning.”

  Jurate at the fire support base with the soldiers of the 1st Battalion, 12th Infantry Regiment. Jurate Kazickas

  Back in New York, Jurate energetically researched the war. But when she felt ready to go, she couldn’t find a news outlet or magazine willing to send her: they wanted a war correspondent, and Jurate had no publishing credentials. So she decided to go as a freelancer, paying her own travel expenses. When three news organizations agreed to at least consider her work if she produced anything, Jurate was granted official accreditation with the US military.

  In June 1967 she hopped off a marine helicopter with her camera and heavy rucksack onto a landing zone in north-central Vietnam. She was to accompany a group of marines who had just left their combat base in Khe Sanh. On a secret patrol, they were headed toward the Laotian border, six miles away, where they planned to disrupt a suspected enemy supply route of the North Vietnamese Army (NVA).

  Jurate didn’t dare let the young marines know how exhausted she found the first day’s march up and down hills, through bamboo, 10-foot-high razor-edged “elephant” grass, and a river full of leeches. She even pretended not to notice when one of the men strapped extra ammunition weighing seven and a half pounds around her already heavy pack. “Hardcore!” they laughed admiringly as Jurate marched up the next hill without comment or complaint.

  The marines might have played tricks like this on her, but Jurate found the young men endearing. “Watching them kidding around with one another, sharing letters from home, proudly showing off pictures of their sweethearts, I was always struck by how young and vulnerable they were,” she wrote later. “The thought that some of them might never come home from Vietnam was too terrible to contemplate. But I knew it was true. And so did they.”

  During a rest stop, one of them—who called Jurate Sam, claiming her real name was too difficult to remember—asked, “What’s a woman like you doing out here?”

  She replied, “I’m a reporter, and this is the biggest story of our times. I want to experience what’s going on here so my reports will be accurate and truthful.”

  When another young marine, listening to t
heir conversation, heard that Jurate was a freelance reporter and hadn’t been specifically assigned to Vietnam, he cried, “You mean you came over here on your own just to get shot at? Wow! Sam, you’re nuts!”

  Then, more seriously, he continued, “What do you think about all this? You one of those peaceniks that tell everybody we should get the hell out of this place?”

  Jurate was still forming her opinion on the war, but at that moment she said no, she was not a “peacenik.” “My country was taken away from me by the Communists,” she explained. “I know what it is like to be denied freedom.”

  Jurate, the men, and their company commander, Captain Franklin Delano Bynum, had to part company too soon. Captain Bynum had insisted Jurate have a personal escort before he agreed to take her along. His unfortunate choice had been an out-of-shape staff sergeant desk clerk who couldn’t keep up with them and eventually pulled a muscle. Captain Bynum ordered an evacuation helicopter for the sergeant and insisted that Jurate leave with him. She protested: she had kept up with the marches and had been promised a five-day patrol. But her objections meant nothing in the face of marine regulations.

  She knew she had gained Captain Bynum’s respect, however: as her helicopter flew away and the marines nearby turned their heads away from its dusty downdraft, the captain faced it, stood at attention, and saluted Jurate good-bye.

  A few days later, she received word that he had been killed, and she couldn’t bring herself to write the story of his company and their patrol. She felt responsible for his death: surely her evacuation helicopter had alerted the area’s NVA soldiers to the company’s location.

  Back in the relative safety of Saigon, Jurate pondered her next move. She felt lonely. Although there were male journalists in the city, she usually avoided them, never feeling quite comfortable with what she called that “journalistic fraternity.” Most of her male colleagues seemed to share the attitude of military men toward female reporters, and Jurate was asked more than once, “What the hell is a woman doing in a war zone?”

  But she did not let the implications of that question stand in her way. A few months later, in August 1967, she accompanied the army’s 101st Airborne Division. Their mission was to search an area filled with enemy fortifications that had been heavily bombed the night before.

  Although Jurate didn’t think anyone could have possibly survived the air bombardment, clearly someone had: shortly after the Americans entered the area, they came under NVA sniper fire.

  The Americans—and Jurate—dove into some nearby trenches. She could hear the sound of bullets flying overhead.

  At one point during the two-hour-long firefight, she emerged from the trenches to witness a scene that moved her deeply. An American soldier named Rob had been shot in the back and was lying on the ground. He couldn’t get up. He called out to his friend Daniel. Daniel ran through the rice paddy toward Rob, zigzagging to avoid enemy fire. He found Rob and pulled him to safety.

  Jurate had interviewed Daniel earlier, and he had told her he had come to Vietnam hoping he might save a life. She wrote later, thinking of Daniel, “War, for all its brutality and horror, nevertheless offered men an opportunity like no other to be fearless and brave, to be selfless, to be a hero.”

  She was also impressed with the deep platonic love she often witnessed between fighting men. One day she was observing a close-range firefight between the NVA and the 173rd Airborne Brigade on a hill when an NVA rocket exploded in the midst of the Americans. Hot shrapnel flew in all directions. Wounded Americans screamed in agony.

  Specialist Jerl Withers, tears in his eyes, tried to help the wounded and begged them to stop screaming, saying they were encouraging the enemy.

  “Don’t worry, man,” he said, holding one severely wounded soldier while attempting to bandage his head. “You’re going to be all right. You’re going to be home soon, right? Can you hear me? Say something, man. Say something. Please God, please help.”

  “The moment was so intimate, so raw, so tender, it took my breath away,” Jurate wrote later.

  There were so many serious casualties the medics couldn’t get to them all. Jurate put her camera away and asked if she could help. A busy medic pushed some bandages toward her and gestured to a group of wounded men.

  Later that night, back in her clean Saigon room, Jurate’s mind was filled with the “terrifying visions” of the day. Her emotions were in turmoil: “Without the companionship of the men when I was out in the field, the sadness and loneliness I felt during those midnight hours in Saigon was wrenching, as if I had lost every friend I ever had. I had no one I could turn to and talk to about my fear and confusion. I could not make sense of this war, nor did I know why I still wanted to stay.”

  Her doubts about her country’s role in the war were growing. “American soldiers were battling for possession of the same hill again and again, sacrificing so many lives for worthless terrain,” she wrote later. “Despite my loathing of communism and my belief that we could not walk away from the South Vietnamese who had asked for our help, I too began to feel the war was a terrible mistake, a sacrifice too great for any country, including my own, to bear.”

  Late in 1967 Jurate’s attention again turned toward the marine base at Khe Sanh. US intelligence reported that 40,000 NVA soldiers were headed in that direction. The US military fortified the base with weapons, ammunition, and 6,000 additional marines.

  On January 21, 1968, NVA forces besieged the base, which puzzled the US military command. The mystery was cleared up on January 31, 1968, the Vietnamese Tet holiday, when the Communists attacked over 100 Southern cities and towns. The attack on Khe Sanh Combat Base had obviously been designed to divert manpower and ammunition from Saigon and the other Southern cities.

  After Tet the NVA continued its siege of Khe Sanh. President Lyndon B. Johnson became unnerved, fearing this battle might lose the war for the United States, as the siege at Dien Bien Phu had cost France the previous war.

  The battle of Khe Sanh became one of the longest and bloodiest single battles of the Vietnam War. Every combat journalist wanted to be there. But because it was surrounded by the NVA, trips in and out were dangerous and the press limited to a quota system: only 10 reporters were allowed on the base at one time. Most of these spots were filled with reporters officially associated with the wire services and television networks.

  But this was one situation in which being a female reporter had distinct advantages. Jurate already knew that just by hanging around an airstrip, she could often catch a ride from some obliging young helicopter pilot who liked the idea of having a female traveler on board—even if she didn’t have the proper authorization. “What are they going to do?” said one pilot when Jurate asked if he might get in trouble on her behalf. “Send me to Vietnam?”

  On March 7 Jurate arrived at the Khe Sanh base, ahead of a long waiting list of journalists. It had been quiet for several days, and she was recording marine interviews for a New York radio station. The marines were relaxed, and the battle seemed to be winding down.

  She had just clicked on her tape recorder when, as she described it later, “the unmistakable high-pitched whistling sound of an incoming artillery round shattered the air. Frantic voices all over the base shouted, ‘Incoming!’” The shell landed only 20 yards from where Jurate was standing.

  Someone grabbed her arm and ran her toward a bunker. Another shell hit, this one even closer. The explosion knocked Jurate to the ground, and she crawled the rest of the way into the bunker. It was pitch-black inside. Her legs felt numb. She touched her pants. They were sticky with blood. She felt her face. It was dry and covered with little bumps.

  After Jurate was evacuated to a nearby medical bunker, doctors removed a piece of shrapnel embedded in her back, dangerously close to her spine. She was relocated with others who had been wounded that day, and another doctor painstakingly removed each tiny piece of shrapnel embedded in her face.

  During her weeklong recuperation, Jurate wondered ane
w why war had such a powerful “subliminal pull” on her. “I seemed inexorably drawn to be on the front lines, to see and feel the drama of the battlefield…. Sometimes I wondered if perhaps I even wanted to be a soldier,” she wrote.

  But following her release from the hospital, Jurate knew her relationship to war had undergone a drastic transformation. She discovered that she could no longer function calmly under fire, later saying, “Getting wounded had jolted me to the inescapable truth that I was just as vulnerable as any of the thousands of other GIs who were casualties of this war.”

  When she returned to the United States, she felt torn by the antiwar movement. Although she too was “passionate about seeing an end to the war,” she didn’t join the protestors: she was deeply offended by those who chanted against and cursed returning American servicemen. She said later, “My feeling of patriotism was simply too strong to march against my own country.”

  She tried to forget Vietnam, locking up her “memories with a vengeance, not just the boxes of photographs, letters, and carbons of stories, but my nightmare images of firefights and the battlefield dead and wounded and the insanity of it all.”

  Working for the Associated Press, Jurate covered the Arab-Israeli War in October 1973 before becoming a White House correspondent during Jimmy Carter’s presidency, during which she covered the First Lady’s office.

  But during “one frantic night,” Vietnam came back to Jurate’s mind in a powerful way, and she “became obsessed about the fate of the men” she had interviewed during the war. She got in touch with one of Captain Bynum’s men, Anthony Benedetto, who had been 20 years old in 1967. He remembered Jurate. “We thought you were crazy to be out there with us,” he said.