Bringing It All Back Home

by Philip F. Napoli

  Eight nurses were killed in Vietnam; their names too are inscribed on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. The possibility of enemy attack was real. When rocket attacks occurred, the medical staff would place mattresses on top of the patients who were too ill to be removed from their beds, and the staff members stayed with them. Putting on flak jackets and helmets, they would crawl across the floor from bed to bed, in the dark, to monitor the patients until the attack was over. Furey recalls:

  Was that frightening? Yeah. But after a while, it was just part of what you did. You didn’t even think about it.

  These experiences changed her forever. Looking back, Furey says:

  You really didn’t appreciate it until you got home: that your entire emotional makeup was changing by virtue of the fact that you are really removing yourself from your old reality. The way you evaluate pain and suffering was changing, the way you acted, the responsibility you took on. All of that and more, which would later affect you so dramatically.

  The historian Elizabeth Norman’s book Women at War: The Story of Fifty Military Nurses Who Served in Vietnam includes statistical data compiled by the Naval Support Activity Da Nang Hospital during the 1968 Tet Offensive. The statistics supply context for Furey’s remarks:

  • From January to June 1968, the death rate in the hospital was 2.92 percent.

  • The greatest number of deaths were due to rifle/pistol injuries, followed by artillery/rocket/mortar injuries.

  • The average time a soldier spent in Vietnam before injury was 5.3 months.

  • The average time from injury to admission was 2.8 hours for men who could be saved.

  • The average time from admission to surgery was 1.9 hours for men received alive.

  • The average length of hospital stay for soldiers in Vietnam was four days.

  • During the Tet Offensive the hospital had 2,021 admissions and 8,430 wounds.

  • Extremity wounds accounted for 68.2 percent of all recorded injuries. Penetrating wounds of the head, thorax, abdomen, or a combination were found in 61 percent of all deaths.4

  The unremitting nature of the work is clear.

  At times, the tension would cause someone to snap. When that happened, hospital personnel would step in and care for their own. For Furey, this happened on one occasion when the Seventy-First received an unusual influx of casualties. Furey found herself unable to think rationally, overwhelmed by the desire to help and to heal; finally, she gave in to a feeling of intense frustration and failure.

  I’d been in-country [for a while], and there was a mass-casualty situation. There was a big firefight. You were just getting casualties. They were lined up in the hall. They sent me this expected patient through triage. Expected patients were patients who came in through triage, and it was decided that their injuries were such that they could not be saved. Nothing could be done for them. So basically they would put a tag on them that said, “Expected,” and they would bring them into our unit, and we would basically provide comfort until they died. That was what our job was.

  We kind of put him down at the back of the unit. ICU is like a big Quonset hut. There were fifteen or sixteen beds on one side, fifteen or sixteen beds on the other side, and there was like this half wall separating the two sides. Otherwise, it was a big open ward. I’m in charge of one side.

  I went up to this patient, and the truth of the matter is he did have a small entry wound right here. [Furey pointed to the center of her forehead.] So I decided, I just decided that they were wrong in triage. That the patient was not going to die. I proceeded to just focus in on [the fact that] I was going to take care of this patient.

  I always said it probably was like a fugue state. The first thing I did, because he had this bloody saturated dressing on the back of his head, I went and got a dressing kit and I got the gloves. I took off the field dressing. As I did that—this is kind of graphic, but I’m trying to make a point, okay?—half of his head, literally, came off in my hand, blood poured out all over me. What did I do? What I did was just place the mass of tissue and bone that was on the dressing back on his head. I put it back, and I didn’t even respond. I just put a new dressing on over it.

  So here I am, covered with blood, and I decide I have to get him blood, give him blood. Well, you don’t give blood to an expected patient. Blood is a valuable resource in a war zone, and you don’t use it on someone who is not going to survive. In the meantime, the corpsman is trying to get my attention because we have these other patients coming in. I’m not responding. I tell the corpsman to go get me blood. He says to me, “Lieutenant, this is an expected patient. You shouldn’t give him blood.”

  I said, “I want you to go get him some blood. He needs blood.” Well, he wasn’t going to get me the blood. I decided I’d go get the blood. So I went to the refrigerator. I got the blood. By that time, he’d gotten a nurse from the other side, who happened to be a very, very close friend of mine.5 In fact, he had gone to school at CI [Central Islip State Hospital on Long Island], and I had gone to school at Pilgrim. We knew each other. We went through basic training together. Jude came over. He looked at me and he said, “Joan, you can’t give this patient the blood.”

  I said, “Yeah. He just…”

  He said, “Joan … he’s an expected patient.”

  I was saying something like, “No. They’re wrong.”

  “Joan, give me the blood, and walk away from this patient.”

  Now, he told me later, “The look you gave me … if looks could have killed…” I gave him the bag of blood. I just walked away. I went over to wash my hands. He came over to me as I was washing my hands.

  I turned around, and I said to him—I just looked at him and I said, “You know, Jude, I feel like I’m Lady Macbeth. I’m never going to wash the blood of Vietnam off my hands.”

  Over time, her frustration with the war rose. She had arrived committed to the vision that the U.S. mission in Vietnam was to save the people of South Vietnam from Communism.

  But it was clear to me that many of them were sympathizing with the North. As much as I didn’t understand then politically what was going on, you did get the feeling that we were not there because anybody really wanted us there. Yet we were having all our guys blown up. Just people getting all these devastating casualties and injuries, for what?

  By Thanksgiving 1969, her feeling solidified as staff at the hospital began to talk of participating in an antiwar protest that would attract public attention. Some thought of going to the mess hall and sitting silently, refusing to eat the traditional turkey dinner, but the base commander made it clear that soldiers doing so would be subject to disciplinary action. Anyway, Furey had no intention of participating in a public protest. Eventually, 141 soldiers stationed in Pleiku, including members of the medical staff, signed a letter to President Nixon denouncing American involvement in the war and proclaiming their opposition to it. It became big news as reporters arrived to cover the fast. Furey describes what happened next:

  That day a particular patient whom I had been caring for went very bad on me and had to go back into the OR [operating room] for emergency surgery. I followed him in there. We weren’t all that busy; I never would go in there, but I had gotten very attached to this particular patient. His name was Timothy. I don’t remember his last name. He had a pretty serious chest wound. When they opened up his chest, it was just awful what came out of it. It was just devastating to me that he had developed such an overwhelming infection. I think I just kind of snapped.

  Furey’s patient, quite possibly, was Timothy Ernest Badostain of Avalon, California, the only Timothy to die in Vietnam that Thanksgiving.

  So I said, “To hell with this. I’m gonna tell these people.” So I came marching out of the OR, and I said to the guy who was organizing it, “Are those television people still here? I have something to say.” That’s what provoked me. Just seeing one more needless death.

  Furey was the only officer who spoke to televisi
on reporters, and the story was carried by the nightly ABC network news. Articles about the Thanksgiving Day fast also appeared in The New York Times.6 While worried about the possibility of court-martial for participating, Furey can recall no disciplinary repercussions for soldiers involved. But, she says, the protest was not well received. At all. We even had patients who came in and asked, “Is this the antiwar hospital?”

  Thinking back on it, she is still proud.

  It made me feel good that I publicly took a stand, consequences be damned. I’m glad I did it. I still feel the same way.

  On December 7, 1969, after the storm had blown over, Furey sat down and wrote her mother a letter in an effort to explain her fast. Her mother was so touched by what Furey wrote that she had it published in a local newspaper—on the day Furey arrived back home from her year in Vietnam. The letter read:

  I took part because I am a concerned American, because I love my country and I love my people and I do not wish to spend the rest of my life watching us destroy each other—in Vietnam, in Africa, Egypt, Israel, Nigeria, Europe and the United States. I took part in it because it was a sacrifice—a very small one, granted—but it was represented as suffering for something better. I fasted for an end to war, for the end of destruction, needless death and bitter hate. Yes, I fasted for peace on earth and goodwill to all men. There is nothing left to do!7

  Gender had a large part in shaping the experiences of nurses who served in Vietnam. The nurse-patient relationship was clear, in one way: it was a nurse’s obligation to care for the patient and get him well enough to be moved to the nearest hospital facility. And yet the boundaries were not always clear. As Furey puts it: The fact is that there were very few American women in Vietnam, so we were magnets for attention.

  In telling her story, Furey reminded me that the nursing personnel in Vietnam were very young. The nurses Elizabeth Norman interviewed for her book were most often in their early twenties when they served in Vietnam.8

  Many soldiers wanted sexual interaction with the nurses. At first, Furey found the attention flattering. Then it quickly became overwhelming.

  Everybody wants your attention, and everybody wants to sleep with you. It’s not really what you’re necessarily about.

  It was not uncommon for romantic relationships to develop between nurses and soldiers, though not often with patients. The sexual revolution, discovered by the media in the early 1960s, meant that for many young women sex before or outside marriage was newly permissible. At times, these relationships were not as honest as they might have been under different circumstances.

  Furey recalls: I did fall in love with a pilot, which wasn’t uncommon, and since we were right next to the airbase, we had a romance, and then he was off to fly medical evacuations.

  In addition to being in love, Furey found the relationship convenient. A way to protect herself from all the male attention, a solid relationship marked her as off-limits. As she says, she hoped to create a situation in which I belong to him and everybody knows it. Maybe people will leave me alone.

  When he was off on piloting missions, they would write, maintaining their emotional connection.

  When I first met him, he told me that his wife had been killed in an automobile accident. When you are twenty-two, you don’t think people make that kind of stuff up. So I was head over heels in love with this guy.

  One morning, after the base had been under attack all night, she got a phone call. It was a colleague, who told her, “Joan, you need to know something before you get here.” I said, “What’s that?” She said, “Bill was brought in this morning, and he’s really seriously injured.”

  This was the guy. But this is an example of how crazy it was. So I was talking to her, and then there’s this silence on the phone. She says, “There’s something else you need to know.” “Okay, what?” She said, “He has his next of kin listed as his wife.”

  Furey was stunned.

  Her job required that she report for duty in the ICU, where she cared for a man she loved who had betrayed her. She remembers looking at his chart.

  I’m in love with him. I’m having this relationship with him. And I find out not only that he lied to me, but he’s lying on my side [of the ward] critically injured and I have to take care of him. I mean, you just get a little blown away with that kind of stuff. I can’t tell you how many women can share some more stories.

  Now, there were some people who ended up in very good marriages and relationships. But I think there were more people than anybody really knows who ended up having pretty devastating experiences in that regard.

  The experience was so devastating for Furey that she felt unable to deal with the social life of Seventy-First Evac anymore. She changed her schedule so that she could avoid interaction; going on the night shift permanently, she worked from 7:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m.

  She later discovered that the experience was not uncommon.

  Many more women than I think people would like to know left Vietnam thinking they were engaged to marry somebody, and then they never heard from the person again.

  The long-term consequences of betrayal—feeling deceived by the war, by lovers, and by the nation itself—run very deep for Furey.

  When I came back, people did not know I had been in Nam. They didn’t want to know. Unlike a man of that generation, no one questioned if a woman went to Vietnam. So you could really isolate yourself in a way; nobody would ever come near you with any question about that. I didn’t talk about it for thirteen years.

  Furey returned from Vietnam in 1970. She suffered from depression and experienced a great deal of emotional pain. She was extremely angry and confused. Nevertheless, like many Vietnam veterans, she worked to become professionally successful, acquiring bachelor’s and master’s degrees in nursing.

  Most of her anger centered on the American involvement in Vietnam. As she points out, 1970 was one of the peak years for antiwar demonstrations in the United States. By the time she left Vietnam, she had come to fully oppose our involvement there. She had seen so much, and it all seemed senseless. She considered joining Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

  At the same time, she felt that protesting somehow betrayed the very men she had cared for. This set off an intense emotional conflict.

  On one occasion, she attempted to—but could not—speak to an antiwar rally at a high school in Nassau County on Long Island. As she approached the podium, she wanted to tell the students about the reality of war. She wanted to make it clear that the devastation she experienced and saw firsthand could never be repaired. She understood the war in ways that even soldiers fighting on the ground could not. It turned out to be far more difficult for her to speak her mind than she had imagined.

  As I looked out, I started talking [and] I felt like if I said that, I would be betraying all these guys I took care of. I was just overwhelmed with guilt. I walk[ed] offstage.

  So despite her anger, she could not bring herself to join the antiwar movement in an active way. At the same time, she felt unable to connect with the civilians surrounding her in her new college environment. The pain and suffering she had seen and experienced isolated her from her peers and gave her a sense of alienation that made her feel surprised and hurt. Despite her feelings about the war, in a strange way she wanted to go back to Vietnam, to rejoin and serve again. She just didn’t fit in stateside.

  I’m twenty-three years old. My friends are all out partying, drinking, and having a good time. I didn’t see anything worth laughing about.

  Furey now sees that she suffered from some degree of post-traumatic stress disorder. She remembers beginning to have intrusive thoughts of Vietnam and drinking in order to make them go away and to help her sleep.

  Sometimes I would just be so angry and upset it would be the only thing that would calm me down. I can remember walking around my apartment with a glass of scotch, drinking.

  Furey recalls the difficulties of dating while studying at the State University of New York, Stony
Brook. Draft deferrals, allowing students to avoid service in Vietnam, were common.

  So all of a sudden this is a guy who had a draft deferment, and you’re a woman who was in Vietnam. Talk about a disconnect!

  In the meantime, Furey continued to work as a nurse, but her attitude had changed, and not in a good way.

  Things did not go well for her, primarily because she felt little compassion for her patients and their intolerance for pain. On one occasion, she needed to walk a forty-year-old woman down the hall who had just had her gallbladder removed. The woman felt pain and did not want to walk. Furey could sense her own temperature rising and remembers thinking, I used to get people up and walking after their bodies were blown in half almost. And you’re telling me you have too much pain? I had no use for that.

  At the same time she knew that her attitude was inappropriate and that she had no right to judge the patient based on her experiences in Vietnam. She realized that she had a problem; something inside her had changed.

  The crisis came soon after. One night she got called down to the ER to help after a group of drunken teenagers driving in a car struck a tree. For Furey, this was eerily familiar, reminding her of a mass-casualty situation in Vietnam. She found herself doing everything as she might have done it in Pleiku.

  We got everybody settled off to the operating room, off to the wards and whatever. After everybody had gone, I just pulled the curtain on me, and I collapsed into this wheelchair.

  She remembers thinking, I can’t do it. I cannot do this anymore.

  She realized that this was the very thing she had been fighting against, giving up nursing. And if she did give it up, what would she do? Her entire life had revolved around nursing. Mrs. Florczek, an old acquaintance who had served as a nurse in World War II, came in and opened up the curtain and found her sitting in the wheelchair contemplating quitting. Furey will never forget what she said: