Bringing It All Back Home (14 page)

Because one of the things is if you were a nurse in Vietnam, you were golden. What they wouldn't do for you … People were just incredible. They treated you with the utmost respect. You [could] have anything you wanted.

One of her lighter moments in Vietnam, Furey recalls, was her arrival at the hospital. As the helicopter landed, the hospital staff charged out toward it with stretchers, prepared for what they thought were wounded soldiers. Instead, two nurses climbed out—with an enormous footlocker.

It took us a while to live that one down.

Nursing staff lived in hooches, temporary huts usually built out of plywood. Divided into cubbyholes or rooms, each hooch housed at least six individuals. The United States did not expect to need more permanent facilities, based on the premise that the American presence in Vietnam would be short-lived.

Furey requested an assignment to the postoperative intensive care unit. Ordinarily, this position went to nurses with more experience in-country. Generally, new staff worked in regular units for six months before transferring to the ICU. However, the hospital was short of nurses at the time and Furey had previous experience, so she rotated into the ICU rather quickly. Despite her training, she found herself unprepared. For one thing, she saw many young children and infants injured by the war.

I was stunned that we had a number of Vietnamese children and babies. Some of them had diseases, but some of them had been injured in the war. We took care of them. You know, you didn't expect this. You're expecting American GIs. You weren't really prepared for the fact that you're going to have to care for children.

Little could have prepared her for her first such experience, which was caring for a Montagnard baby who had been badly burned. The Montagnard, or Degar, are a tribal people indigenous to the Central Highlands of Vietnam. Some Montagnards worked closely with the American military.

Montagnard people carry their babies on their backs in what are really like shawls. They cook outside in big pots. This woman had been bending over a pot, and a baby fell into it and was burned on one side of its body.

Periodically, a medical team from the Seventy-First Evacuation Hospital would go out to the Montagnard villages in the Pleiku area on MEDCAP (Medical Civic Action Program) missions to provide basic health care. Occasionally, the medical personnel brought people from the villages to the hospital for treatment. Personnel from one MEDCAP mission had found the baby and brought it back to the hospital for treatment. The baby was admitted to Furey's unit, and Furey cared for her. The mother stayed with the child, at times sleeping just outside the hospital area.

In fact, we put up mattresses out there for them to sleep on, because when they had a family member in the hospital, they wanted to be there.

The American medical staff found that they could not save the child's arm. An interpreter explained to the family that the baby's arm needed amputation.

They were there the day of the surgery. The baby went in and had the surgery, came back without the arm. It had been removed at the shoulder. The mother and father came in to see the baby postoperatively, then they left [without the baby], and we never saw them again. They never came back.

I was stunned because they had been there. Someone had always been near, around the clock. What they told me was, in their villages, if you lose an arm, you are useless to the village, because everyone has to do their share of the work. For them it's easier to walk away and just leave the baby with us than to have to take the baby back and have to figure out how to deal with it in the village. Literally, we had the baby, and we ended up having to send the baby to an orphanage. This was like, one of those things that is like, “Whoa.” It's a culture shock, because you don't even … because they seemed like caring … I think they were caring parents, but it was just not something that they were capable of dealing with.

It was my first week there.

Furey remembers hearing about the Communist treatment of the Montagnards and how it helped form her perception of America's objectives in Vietnam.

They were often attacked by the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese, because they were considered sympathetic to the Americans. They were often targeted. The villages were ransacked, shelled. They were shot. The villages were overrun. We had a lot of Montagnard casualties. We took care of them. I just love[d] them to death. They were a very simple people. But they had terrible diseases. Their hygiene was awful. I went out with the MEDCAP teams occasionally to their villages. You always have somebody with some kind of disease or illness. We found people with plague and tetanus.

The most difficult cases often involved children.

I had one kid. It was just devastating to me. He picked up a white phosphorus bomb, which is something that they shoot off at night that lights up the sky. I guess this thing hadn't gone off. This kid picked it up off the ground, and it exploded. The thing about white phosphorus is it just burns and burns and burns until it gets neutralized by a specific chemical compound. It wasn't a compound that was readily available out in the field. One of the infantry units found him and rushed him into the hospital. This kid, this eleven-year-old kid … just, third-degree burns … it was awful … on his entire body. He died. He died … to see that, an eleven-year-old kid burned to a crisp. It was really awful. You are expecting to take care of soldiers. I never really thought about civilian casualties, or what happened to them, or who took care of them. I never really thought about kids. All of that was totally unexpected.

She went to Vietnam, however, to care for American servicemen.

The first patient I was assigned to care for was a young guy who had multiple injuries, like most of them did, and he had a spinal cord injury, a cervical spine fracture. So he was placed on a Stryker frame … But this patient, he had a crushing injury to his body—broke his spine, his lungs collapsed, he had all kinds of internal injuries, so he had all kinds of tubes attached to him. Chest tubes on either side, gastric tube. He had a Foley catheter, I don't know how many IVs, and then he had Crutchfield tongs attached to his skull. These are tongs that are screwed into the skull on which you can hang weights to provide traction to the spine. He had a cervical neck fracture, so the tongs were keeping his spine in the proper position. So I was charged to take care of him. So the nurse orienting me to the unit is going over everything, and she tells me, “You're going to have to turn him every two hours.” And I remember thinking, “Turn him? I don't even want to touch him.” I had never seen anything like this in my life.

So there you are. You've got Crutchfield tongs [screwed to his head]; you've got chest tubes coming out. You've got IVs. You've got a Foley catheter. And you've gotta flip this guy 180 degrees, in one movement, and I'm thinking, “You cannot do this, because how does all this stuff move and not get pulled out?”

I just remember thinking, “I can't do this.” I was overwhelmed. At that point in time, I wanted to run out of the room. But obviously that wasn't an option. But I was assigned to another nurse, and she walked me through this whole thing. She taught me how to do it all. What to look for. How to position the tubes, all of it. You put this here, you put this here, you place [that] back here, and then you flip. Ta-da!

Till this day, I'm always amazed that I actually learned how to do that and by the end of the week was able to do it by myself. I didn't need any help.

Furey says somehow she learned how to cope. Within two months she found herself teaching new nurses to do what she could not have done just months earlier. By the end of three or four months, Furey says,
I was untouchable. I was like a crackerjack. There was nothing hidden or thrown at me I couldn't handle.

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
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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.
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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.
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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.