Courageous Women of the Vietnam War

by Kathryn J. Atwood

  Ten days later, the Americans attacked the same group of medics at a different location. No one was injured, but it was frighteningly clear someone had betrayed their location. They had to move again.

  The evacuation took place on June 14. Left behind were Thuy, three other female medics, and five seriously wounded soldiers too weak to be moved. They were told to wait until an escort came; it was too dangerous for them to even venture outside.

  They waited. One of the wounded fighters, a 19-year-old commando, told the women to run if the enemy came. They were down to their last meal, and still they waited.

  Finally, help arrived. Thuy, the other medics, and their patients were evacuated safely.

  A few days later, Thuy was walking on a trail with a soldier and two other Vietnamese people when she finally came face-to-face with a group of Americans. Her body was later found by some local villagers. She had been shot in the head.

  Her diaries fell into the hands of Fred Whitehurst, an American working for military intelligence. Assigned to destroy enemy documents, Fred was about to throw Thuy’s diaries in a fire when his Vietnamese interpreter, ARVN sergeant Nguyen Trung Hieu, who had read the diaries, stopped him. “Don’t burn this one, Fred,” he said. “It has fire in it already.”

  As Sergeant Hieu read the diaries to Fred evening by evening, Fred was powerfully moved. Although he knew he should have turned them in, he kept them when he left Vietnam in 1972.

  In 2005 Fred located Thuy’s family and gave them the diaries. Later that year, they were published in Hanoi as one volume, becoming a bestseller. Young Vietnamese people particularly liked the book; they had learned about the war from textbooks and war diaries that described the war in a formal, grandiose style. In contrast, Thuy’s diary presented the unpretentious voice of a warm, intelligent, and occasionally self-doubting young person caught up in the horror of war. Older Vietnamese Communists, who perhaps wondered if the long, destructive war had been worth it in the end, were uplifted by this patriotic young woman’s words:

  What agony! Must I keep filling my small diary with pages of blood? But, Thuy! Let’s record, record completely all the blood and bones, sweat and tears that our compatriots have shed for the last twenty years. And in the last days of this fatal struggle, each sacrifice is even more worthy of accounting, of remembering. Why? Because we have fought and sacrificed for many years; hope has shone like a bright light burning at the end of the road.

  WOMEN’S CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE COMMUNIST CAUSE

  Vietnamese Communist leaders called the Vietnam War a “struggle for national salvation.” As such, every able-bodied person had to be mobilized, women included. An estimated 1.5 million Vietnamese women were involved in some type of active combat during the war, 60,000 of whom were officially part of the Northern Vietnamese Army. The rest fought in local militias or guerrilla units, many participating part-time in this effort because they were still responsible for food production.

  Vietnamese women combat veterans received little recognition until 1995, when the Vietnam Women’s Museum in Hanoi opened. The museum celebrates women warriors throughout Vietnam’s history but places equal emphasis on the traditional female role of motherhood. These two ideals clashed tragically following the Vietnam War when thousands of women veterans were unable to have children: some women had lost their health during the grueling years of combat, and others couldn’t find husbands because too many men their age had been killed.

  A militia unit armed with World War II–era German machine guns, most likely captured by the Soviet army. Vietnam Women’s Museum, Hanoi

  In 2007 Thuy’s diary was translated into English and published under the title Last Night I Dreamed of Peace.

  LEARN MORE

  Even the Women Must Fight: Memories of War from North Vietnam by Karen Gottschang Turner, with Phan Thanh Hao (John Wiley & Sons, 1998).

  Last Night I Dreamed of Peace: The Diary of Dang Thuy Tram, translated by Andrew X. Pham (Harmony Books, 2007).

  Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered from All Sides by Christian G. Appy (Penguin Books, 2004).

  Portrait of the Enemy: The Other Side of Vietnam, Told Through Interviews with North Vietnamese, Former Vietcong, and Southern Opposition Leaders by David Chanoff and Doan Van Toai (Random House, 1986).

  LYNDA VAN DEVANTER

  “Why Do They Have to Die?”

  LYNDA VAN DEVANTER WAS in her last year of nursing school in Baltimore, Maryland, when the war in Vietnam began to press into her consciousness.

  “Those guys look so young,” she said one night to her roommate, Barbara, as the two watched the news about the war.

  “Most of them are no more than eighteen or nineteen,” Barbara said.

  Lynda began to research the war. She read that the United States was attempting to save South Vietnam from a Communist takeover by the North. “There were brave boys fighting and dying for democracy, and if our boys were being blown apart, then somebody better be over there putting them back together again,” she wrote later. “I started to think that maybe that somebody should be me.”

  So when an army recruiter came to the nursing school in January 1968, both Lynda and Barbara were ready to sign up.

  “Are you crazy?” asked Gina, their friend and fellow nursing student. “You go in the Army, they’ll send you to Vietnam. It’s dangerous over there.”

  “I want to go to Vietnam,” answered Lynda simply.

  “But what if you get killed?” Gina asked.

  “The sergeant told us that nurses don’t get killed,” Barbara said. “They’re all in rear areas. The hospitals are perfectly safe.”

  “I think you’re both nuts,” Gina said. “Leave the wars to the men.”

  They ignored her advice, and after graduation Lynda and Barbara drove off to Fort Sam Houston, Texas, for their basic training. One activity they practiced repeatedly in training was what to do in a “mass-cal” (mass casualty) situation, when the hospital would be suddenly overwhelmed with wounded men.

  During a mass-cal, the nurses would have to use something called triage. They would quickly assess each wounded man, then take one of three actions: (1) send him immediately to surgery; (2) have him wait his turn for surgery; or (3) ease his pain before allowing the inevitable to happen.

  “Essentially, we were deciding who would live and who would die,” Lynda wrote later. It was a difficult concept for her since she had become a nurse to save lives. But her instructors made it clear that if precious time was spent on one hopeless case, those with survivable wounds might lose their chances.

  On June 8, 1969, 1st Lieutenant Sharon Lane, a 26-year-old nurse from Ohio, became the first (and only) US Army nurse killed in Vietnam as a direct result of enemy fire. She had been sitting on a bed in her hooch—living quarters—when a VC rocket exploded nearby, sending shrapnel in every direction.

  A few hours after Sharon’s death, the plane carrying Lynda and 350 men began its descent into South Vietnam. When the plane began “jerking wildly,” luggage fell from the overhead racks. Terrified, Lynda looked out the window. She could see explosions.

  “Men,” said the voice of the pilot over the intercom, “we just came into a little old firefight back there and it looks like them V.C. ain’t taking too kindly to us droppin’ in on Tan Son Nhut. So we’re gonna take a little ride on over to Long Binh and see if we can’t get us a more hospitable welcome. Keep your seatbelts buckled and we’ll be down faster than you can say Vietnam sucks.”

  Lynda was slightly reassured by his casual manner and then by their smooth landing in Long Binh. “But if there had ever been any cockiness in me before this trip began, there sure wasn’t any now,” she wrote later. “In its place was a cold, hard realization: I could die here.”

  She spent the next few days at the 90th Replacement Detachment at Long Binh. Describing the area later, Lynda wrote, “Coiled barbed wire dominated the countryside, snaking its way up and down the roads, around the villages and through the fields. Gu
ard towers rose high in the air, dwarfing all other structures. In each one, a soldier silently watched for Viet Cong, his M-16 rifle always at the ready.”

  After being introduced to the nurses already working at the 90th, she asked them if the area was safe, given that everything looked so battle-ready.

  “Safe?” laughed one. “Honey, whoever fed you that line should be horsewhipped.” She told Lynda that many nurses had already been wounded. She continued, “The V.C. don’t care whether you’re a nurse, a clerk, or an infantryman. All they know is that you’re an American.” And what made the situation particularly difficult, she said, was that the VC were essentially impossible to distinguish from the rest of the population.

  Lynda’s destination was the 71st Evacuation Hospital in Pleiku Province, near the Cambodian border, an area of heavy combat. Lynda had heard that the casualties were “supposedly unending.”

  Her first shift shocked her: “There were only fifteen wounded soldiers who needed surgery. I saw young boys with their arms and legs blown off, some with their guts hanging out, and others with ‘ordinary’ gunshot wounds.”

  Lynda would remember her first few days in the operating room as “a blur of wounded soldiers, introductions to new colleagues and almost constant surgery during our twelve-hour shifts.” And what surprised her most was that everyone kept saying this was a “slow period.”

  She began assisting a surgeon named Carl, who had a deserved reputation for saving lives in a near-miraculous manner. Carl could talk for hours on almost any topic and did so while performing surgeries. But when he became tired, the topic he returned to again and again was that his young patients were being shot to pieces for nothing.

  Lynda begged to differ, telling him that “the war was a noble cause to preserve democracy,” something she believed was certainly worth fighting and dying for.

  “You really believe that?” Carl asked her quietly.

  “Of course I do,” she replied.

  Lynda Van Devanter. Buckley family and personal archives of Lynda Van Devanter

  “Is that why you always wear that rhinestone flag on the lapel of your fatigue shirt?”

  “I think we should be proud of our country, Carl, and proud of our flag.”

  “So do I. But I’m afraid this time, we may find that our country is wrong,” the surgeon said.

  A week after arriving at the 71st Evacuation Hospital, Lynda attended a party at the Bastille—a large hooch that served as the hospital’s social center. Less than an hour into the party, she heard an explosion. The room went black. Lynda dove into a corner, shaking with fear. A loudspeaker outside blared, “Attention all personnel. Take cover. Pleiku air base is under rocket attack. Security alert condition red.”

  Lynda was shocked to hear casual conversations: people discussing sports and patients. And as the flashes of the American return fire lit up the room, Lynda could see people dancing. She didn’t understand why they weren’t terrified.

  When the siren stopped and everyone walked out of the party, she asked one of the medics, “How do you know it’s over?”

  “Don’t worry,” he replied. “Once it stops, that’s it for the night. It never starts again. That’s the way the V.C. work. It’s all just harassment. They need target practice and we’ve got a nice red cross they can aim at.”

  Apparently the VC had also taken aim near Lynda’s trailer. On her return from the party, she discovered an enormous crater only three feet away. The trailer’s walls were covered with holes made by pieces of hot shrapnel. Inside, Lynda noticed with a chill that the explosion had caused an enormous light fixture to fall from the ceiling onto her own cot.

  That night she experienced a mass-cal for the first time. Describing it later, she wrote:

  The moans and screams of so many wounded were mixed up with the shouted orders of doctors and nurses. One soldier vomited on my fatigues while I was inserting an IV needle into his arm. Another grabbed my hand and refused to let go. A blond infantry lieutenant begged me to give him enough morphine to kill him so he wouldn’t feel any more pain. A black sergeant went into a seizure and died while Carl and I were examining his small frag wound. “Duty, honor, country,” Carl said sarcastically as he worked. “I’d like to have Richard Nixon here for one week.”

  Over the next three days, Lynda snatched bits of sleep whenever she could. She rarely knew if it was day or night. But when the mass-cal was over, Carl gave her the greatest compliment she could have wished for: “You’re a good help, Lynda.”

  As they walked to the hooches, Lynda could hear the sound of guns and helicopters in the distance. She wondered how long it would be until the wounded of that battle would be brought to the 71st. The thought made her shudder.

  Both too tired to sleep, Lynda and Carl talked for a long time, both “trying to sound philosophical about … death.” Lynda finally broke down, crying and shaking. Carl tried to comfort her and wound up crying too.

  “Why do they have to die, Carl?” Lynda asked.

  “Who knows?” he replied.

  “I don’t understand,” she said.

  “Nobody does,” he said.

  But Lynda still felt proud of her country. Writing to her parents, she said:

  At 4:16 a.m. our time the other day, two of our fellow Americans landed on the moon. At that precise moment, Pleiku Air Force Base … sent up a whole skyful of flares—white, red, and green. It was as if they were daring the surrounding North Vietnamese Army to try and tackle such a great nation. As we watched it, we couldn’t speak at all. The pride in our country filled us to the point that many had tears in their eyes.

  It hurts so much sometimes to see the paper full of demonstrators, especially people burning the flag. Fight fire with fire, we ask here. Display the flag, Mom and Dad, please, everyday. And tell your friends to do the same. It means so much to us to know we’re supported, to know not everyone feels we’re making a mistake being here.

  Every day we see more and more why we’re here. When a whole Montagnard village comes in after being bombed and terrorized by Charlie, you know. There are helpless people dying everyday. The worst of it is the children. Little baby-sans being brutally maimed and killed. They’ve never hurt anyone.

  One harmless civilian who lived in the area was Father Bergeron. He was a funny, kindhearted French priest who was full of stories and did all he could to ease the suffering around him. Because of his selflessness, the 71st staff bent the rules for him. For instance, they were only supposed to treat civilians with war-related wounds. But when Father Bergeron brought them civilians with diseases, such as a young girl with congestive heart failure, they couldn’t refuse to help.

  Father Bergeron hated the war. “Let the old glory mongers and politicians fight their own wars and let the young men and women get on with their lives,” he would often say. He absolutely refused to take sides; his only aim was to help as many people as he could. Lynda assumed the VC loved him as much as the staff at the 71st did.

  Lynda, February 1970. Buckley family and personal archives of Lynda Van Devanter

  It became brutally obvious one day that this was not the case. The 71st staff learned that the VC had tortured and killed Father Bergeron before displaying his remains in the middle of a village “as a warning to any American sympathizers.”

  That night Lynda was assisting a surgeon working to save the life of an enemy prisoner. When the surgeon spoke of getting even by doing to his patient exactly what the enemy had done to the beloved priest, Lynda knew he was just venting and would never actually do anything so barbaric. But something welling up inside her almost wished he would. In that dark moment, she felt she might have gladly assisted him.

  Lynda had to work harder now to remind herself that she was “in Vietnam to save people who were threatened by tyranny.” But she found that belief increasingly difficult to maintain as she “heard stories of corrupt South Vietnamese officials, US Army atrocities, and a population who wanted nothing more than to be l
eft alone so they could return to farming their land.”

  In her letters home, she began to express her doubts about how the United States was handling the war: “It would be a lot easier if our government would just make up its mind…. We should either pull out of Vietnam or hit the hell out of the NVA. This business of pussyfooting around is doing nothing but harm. It’s hurting our GIs, the people back home, and our image abroad.”

  Yet in the same letter, she admitted to being proud of her work: “I don’t think there are many other places where you can feel as needed in nursing…. For the first time in my life, I feel like I have to keep going or people might not survive.”

  But the work was also taking its toll. “Holding the hand of one dying boy could age a person ten years,” she wrote later. “Holding dozens of hands could thrust a person past senility in a matter of weeks.”

  Lynda discovered that she could no longer cry, which made her work somewhat easier. “If you can’t feel, you can’t be hurt,” she wrote. “If you can’t be hurt, you’ll survive.”

  That all changed drastically a few months later when Lynda was in an officer’s club with some friends watching a United Service Organizations (USO) show. While in the middle of her second drink, she imagined she saw the faces and bodies of the wounded, dying, and dead men she’d seen at the 71st, all of them appearing in heartbreaking detail in her mind.

  “They were all with me in that room,” she recalled later. “I tried to force them out of my mind. For a moment I did. Then all the images came crashing back on me.”

  She became hysterical and was escorted back to her hooch. A fellow nurse stayed with her all night, holding her, rocking her. Finally, around 5:00 in the morning, she fell asleep.

  When she woke 24 hours later, Lynda felt numb. She threw away her rhinestone flag pin and went back to work.