She thought, “Jesus. I’ve never been much out of Fort Wayne. That would be interesting.”
Still, O’Neill was smart enough to weigh the recruiter’s claims against the practical realities of wartime, knowing she could end up in Vietnam. When she expressed her personal opposition to the war, his reply was classic. “You don’t have to worry about that,” he said. “There is a waiting list a mile long to go to Vietnam.” He reassured her that she would never find herself there. In the end, the thought of being able to pay her parents back, and the idea of international travel, won out.
O’Neill now compares this decision to those she made during her time in community theater, where she had a penchant for taking roles that were often counter to the person she was. For anyone who knew her, the notion that Sue O’Neill would join the military would have seemed almost laughable.
With less than a day’s thought, she signed on for the role of Army nurse. She called her father from Chicago. “Dad, guess what? I just joined the military.” Her father had served in a noncombat role in the Navy during World War II. She assumed that he would be proud of her and her plan for straightening out her “wayward” life. Instead, there was dead silence on the other end of the phone for several seconds. In those days, long-distance phone lines could be faulty, and for a moment she thought their connection had gone dead. But then he spoke.
“I guess you know what you’re doing.”
O’Neill’s next thought was “Oh, shit. I don’t know what I’m doing.”
O’Neill accepted her military payments for the first year. Occasionally, a form would arrive, and she would return it incomplete with a note claiming that she didn’t understand it. This seemed to work for a while, as she did not hear from anyone in the Army. At the end of her training, O’Neill took her certification exam from the Indiana State Board of Nursing. Awaiting her grade, which delayed her military service yet again, she stayed busy working as a counselor in a Jewish girls’ camp in New Hampshire. She recalls that being exposed to a class of very different young women was a learning experience. As they fantasized about their future weddings, set in their parents’ picturesque backyards, all Sue could imagine was a wedding in her Indiana backyard, complete with dogs and miscellaneous stuff.
Finally, at the end of summer 1968 she received her grades and orders assigning her to Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas. Up to this time, she had only traveled long-distance by car. This was her first airplane ride, and she spent the flight vomiting. She suspects that it may have had a lot more to do with apprehension about her unknown future than motion sickness. When they arrived, O’Neill and the others in her unit were issued uniforms and addressed by a series of officers. One sergeant in particular was a dead ringer for the recruiter she had encountered in Chicago. He stepped up on the stage and made a remark that would stay with her forever. “For you nurses, you might have been told that there was a waiting list a mile long for Vietnam. Well, that’s no longer the case. I say by the end of this year half of you will be in Vietnam.” He continued, “The other half will be on orders for Vietnam.” It was then that the reality hit. O’Neill remembers thinking, “Oh my God. I asked to go to Hawaii, and Germany, and the Philippines, Fort Sam Houston, or anywhere else, but not Vietnam.”
The historian Kara Dixon Vuic has described the military training that nurses received. It is striking to note that men and women inducted into the U.S. Army during the Vietnam era received the exact same training with the exception of twenty-two hours. In those hours, the men had weapons training and other combat-specific instruction. Women, by contrast, learned how to fire a .45-caliber pistol. Much more time was spent on uniforms and insignia, as the Army insisted that women be appropriately dressed.3
O’Neill, like many nurses headed for Vietnam, felt grossly underprepared for combat medicine. She had dealt with emergency room trauma in her nursing training. She knew what it meant—and looked like—when people died from traumatic injuries. But for the most part her experience with death was limited to the elderly. Now she would encounter peers as patients.
When that hit home, O’Neill paid a visit to the people at the base education office to explain to them that sending her too close to combat would be a mistake. She asserted that she knew nothing about trauma medicine and feared that if she treated someone in Vietnam, she would hurt the person. The desk officer told her about an opening in the operating room. In her previous training, O’Neill had spent a couple of weeks in an operating room and had found the work interesting. It was then that the officer let the other shoe drop. Of course, he told her, if you go into the operating room, they’re going to send you over there for sure. In the end, she figured that she would be sent no matter what.
“They’re going to use me over there anyway,” she thought. “At least I will know something.”
As it turned out, the operating room course was the best and most informative one O’Neill had ever taken. She felt she learned a great deal about pre-op and postoperative care, although many of the skills would be unnecessary in Vietnam. Soldiers were more often than not patched up and shipped out to secondary-care stations as quickly as possible. Still, she realized that what she was learning would be extremely useful upon her return to civilian life. As part of the training she was sent to work in the amputee ward, where she not only treated the physical wounds but also gained exposure to the emotional and psychological dimensions of such wounds. Again, this was more real-life drama than she had bargained for, but O’Neill knew the experience would serve her well. During her operating room training, O’Neill received her orders to Vietnam. She arrived there in May 1969.
When she landed in Vietnam, a clerk-typist asked where she wished to be stationed. She knew nothing about the country and cared little for hard facts about the conflict. She replied that she would accept anything. The typist suggested a place in the northern portion of South Vietnam called Phu Bai, where the Twenty-Second Surgical Hospital was located. She accepted.
For the most part, doctors and nurses seek to remain unaffected by the cases that come before them. Giving excellent medical care requires distance, an ability to remain focused on the complicated tasks required to treat a patient, to save a life.
The first fatality that stuck in my mind was a kid. We didn’t have many things going on at all at that point. They brought him in on a chopper, and he was put on a gurney outside the operating room while we made sure that everything was prepared. I was supposed to take his history. He looked okay, like he wasn’t really hurting that badly, so we chatted a little bit. I asked him where he was from. He said, “Montana,” and I kind of joked with him, I said, “Oh, I didn’t know they had people over there.” And he laughed and he said, “Well, they had me there,” and all this … And then we brought him in.
We went to take him off the gurney, and he started to tank. He was turning gray, and at that point I had just readied all the scrub stuff. He had a chest wound and it was a little tiny hole in front, and we moved him and I was starting to shave his chest and the doc came through scrubbed and he said, “We don’t have time, we don’t even have time to gown,” because he recognized [the nature of the wound]. They were starting to put him under, and they’d been alerted to the fact that his vital signs were going to nothing all of a sudden.
I was kind of a deer in the headlights. They said, “Just throw some Betadine on it and get me scrubbed,” and so I threw on a pair of gloves and helped [the doctor] glove up. We didn’t even have our gowns on at that point. We threw him into the surgical suite, and he started immediately cracking the kid’s chest and just doing a straightforward front-type procedure. We got in there and it was a mess. Blood everywhere.
I was doing some circulating and working on getting the blood hung at all four extremities, and it was just massive amounts of blood we were putting in. We had this one kid. He was kind of the Black Power kid. He was a strange kid, not at all sociable with anybody, even the other black [operating room] techs, because he
held himself above them. He supposedly had a checkered past as far as the clerks knew, and the clerks know everything. So we had this kid who was trained as an operating room tech, but he just didn’t do anything. He kind of stood there. Because I had nothing better to do with him, I said, “Oh, great, he might not participate, but at least he can pump.” So I showed him how to work the pumps that would squeeze the blood in, and I gave him one and I said, “You keep squeezing that until there isn’t any more, and we’ll hang up more and we’ll put that one in your hand.” And we were doing that; we were kind of punching one into his hand, taking it out, putting the next one in.
And [the tech’s] eyes were just huge above his mask. It was like he was doing this as an automatic thing. I still remember being able to see the veins in his arms as they stood out against the clenching muscle. He was very lean, and as he pumped the things, he was putting a lot of effort into it. At one point I turned my back to get more, and all of a sudden there was this bang. The blood bag had exploded all over the surgeon, all over the walls, all over everything. So we sent him out.
In the meantime, they were working with the kid from Montana. They were trying to put sutures through his heart. But what had happened was the bullet, and it was a single bullet, had gone in, and it had done what bullets are supposed to do. It spun, it threw off shrapnel and turned his own bone into shrapnel, and it shredded his heart.
The surgeon was working the guy; the anesthesiologist was working like crazy. We were all just trying to get this kid to live. The surgeon would keep picking out the heart, kind of reaching under it and trying to suture it, and it was shredded. The suture would come up bloody.
And the surgeon just kind of gave up. I remember him kind of laying the suture right on the chest. It was like, what can you do? The guy’s just had somewhere between twenty and forty bags of blood, and this isn’t working.
I can still see that suture, on a suture holder, like a big pair of scissors almost.
Everybody just kind of left. It fell to me and one of the other techs to scrub the place down. It was just silence. You couldn’t say anything.
Later … I thought about it. It’s almost metaphorical. You just work your ass off, you work, you work, you work. And this guy who I’d had this small personal interaction with, who I’d talked with and I’d heard the last thing he ever said, and it was like, how could he die? We were working so hard. How could he possibly die when we worked that hard on him, especially from something as little as what he had. But he did.
Everything out there is serious after that.
O’Neill spent the remainder of the night scrubbing down the operating room, removing the traces of the exploded blood bag. She remembers finding dried blood behind her knee when she finally showered.
After that, it was turning to dusk. I went by, and they were bringing down the flag. They used to call it putting it to bed. They’d bring down the flag and they’d fold it and they’d take it off and put it away until the next morning, and I just remember thinking, “This is all for that flag? What does that mean? I mean, is this like some bizarre sports thing where you follow your team’s emblem?” It made me … it just made me so angry. It made me so angry. It was so futile.
I think after that I really understood what people meant by “don’t mean nothing,” because it was like, it really didn’t matter what you did. It came down to futility. It was just everything that I had felt about the war before. This was big-league. It wasn’t the sort of thing where you go off and hold signs and stuff like that. This was the real deal, and it was even worse than I thought it was because it was far more futile. It didn’t mean anything, and yet it meant entirely too much. It was just crazy.
Even in the brief time that I was there, I’d been exposed to a lot of people’s different opinions about it, and it turns out I wasn’t the only one who looked on this whole thing as being unseemly, unnecessary, and wasteful. But to see that graphic waste happening in that sort of form just devastated me.
To O’Neill, the reality of war and her role as a nurse went beyond issues of politics. It simply made no sense and at the same time cost the young people on the front lines everything.
After O’ Neill had been several months at the Twenty-Second Surgical, the hospital was closed down, and she was transferred to the Twenty-Seventh Surgical Hospital in Chu Lai. She remembers treating a steady flow of casualties, many of them Vietnamese civilians. Later, she would transfer to a hospital at Cu Chi, the Twelfth Evacuation Hospital. She had been told it was the “worst hellhole in Vietnam,” but she did not find it so. It was extremely busy with casualties from both the American and the Vietnamese sides, but she found the work interesting and in some ways therapeutic. She had managed to find her emotional distance.
She returned home in 1970 and married a man named Paul O’Neill, whom she had met in Vietnam. They became involved with Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) for a time, and then together they joined the Peace Corps, going to Venezuela in 1973–74. The decision to join, she writes, “had much to do with Viet Nam. We both disagreed with the war; we both wanted to travel and use our skills in a different cultural setting, in a country whose people didn’t consider us the Bad Guys.”4
Today, O’Neill lives in Brooklyn. Life has given her the chance to play many roles, including mother of three, nurse, waitress, lounge singer, storyteller, author, reporter, photographer, and teacher. She lives a full life, writing, traveling, and creating, while always “pushing her pacifist agenda.”
In the introduction to her book of short stories, Don’t Mean Nothing, named after a phrase that was common in Vietnam, O’Neill explains the differences between her war and that of the soldiers whose lives she was asked to save. She also writes again about futility, the daily arrivals of the injured and the dying, all for a cause she had never believed in from the start:
There have been many novels, memoirs, and short stories published about Vietnam in the past thirty years. Most were written by men. Don’t Mean Nothing has little in common with these, because hospital personnel—and female veterans in particular—served in a war that was substantially different from the one fought by male soldiers. To begin with, the goal of “our” war, though considered supportive to “theirs,” actually contradicted it. Soldiers were trained—and expected—to kill the enemy. We were trained, and expected, to save anyone who came through the hospital doors, which often included the enemy. They lived with the guilt of killing; we, with the guilt of surviving. They lived surrounded by blood and death in which they had a direct stake; we faced a daily onslaught of maimed and dying men, women, and children dropped on us by helicopter from an alien world.5
4
WAR AND LIES: JOSEPH GIANNINI
The war transformed everyone who fought in it, to one degree or another. Joseph Giannini served as a Marine in Vietnam in 1967–68. Today he wants people to know what he saw and did and to understand it.
The first Gulf War rekindled his awareness of his military service. Giannini began to find ways to make people aware of the realities of war, as he understands them. He uses a wide variety of forms to do so today, including television, nonfiction story writing, participation in oral history projects, and public sharing of himself and his experiences.
In 2010, after the publication of Karl Marlantes’s book Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War, Giannini wrote on Marlantes’s blog, “We’re on the same mission: Take them In Country. Make them see, hear, feel and suffer.”1 “In-country” is an expression used among veterans to mean “in Vietnam.”
Giannini, JG to his friends, was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1943. The family moved to Plainview, Long Island, when he was seven years old, his parents deciding that the newly minted suburbs would be a better place to raise Joe and his younger sister, Florence. He graduated from Massapequa High School in 1961 and went on to attend Hofstra University, where he was on the wrestling team. He graduated in 1966 with a bachelor’s degree in political science. He got his draft not
ice at about the same time. He reported for induction at Fort Hamilton, in Brooklyn, in March 1966. Giannini made a snap decision that would color the course of his life. As he puts it, About thirty seconds before being inducted in the Army, I volunteered to go into the Marine Corps.
Giannini did his U.S. Marine Corps Recruit Training, often called boot camp, at Parris Island, South Carolina. While he found that he was well suited to the demands of Marine Corps training, he did not like the drill instructors’ methods for instilling Marine doctrine into the new recruits. As a college graduate, Giannini was given the job of “house mouse,” working to assist the drill instructors with minor tasks. But he found himself rebelling against the environment at Parris Island, drawing comparisons in a letter home between himself and Howard Roark, the main character in the bestselling novel The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. Like Roark, Giannini felt a need to repress his opinions.
Eventually, the effort to do so would fail, costing him his “house mouse” job and the small privileges that came with it. The importance of the letters Giannini both wrote and received during his time in the Marine Corps becomes apparent. He wrote home to his parents and sister several times at the end of March, highlighting for them the challenges he faced. He reported:
Discipline is kept very strict, anyone who steps out of line gets physically mauled by the Drill Instructors, they leave no visible marks … they sometimes seem sadistic and waste my time with trivial matters … This is “the epitome” of totalitarianism (collectivism). We do everything by the numbers. We aren’t allowed to speak to one another. The mental boredom is quite frustrating. Howard Roark would never survive in this environment … We never get out of platoon formation out of the barracks … We don’t go to the PX, either. Don’t need any money. No place to spend it.
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