Bringing It All Back Home (6 page)

At the end of our discussion, Eggers came to a realization:

I never thought about that, but here we are in the middle of a rice paddy, and I had a choice to go forward or back, and I went forward literally into a hail of machine gun bullets rather than go back. That was a conscious choice because I saw this dry spot and I figured I could get up onto it and be able to direct fire.

Leadership always presents difficult choices. And although Eggers's decision would lead to an injury and the death of PFC Semler, he felt it was the best decision to make for the platoon. His decision to be in the military was the right way to serve his country. For Eggers, every choice has its cost, but if it's the right one, the cost is well worth it.

Eggers argues that we never understood the enemy in Vietnam.

I think our presidents were in some way responding to generals who wanted notches on their rifle butts for further promotions. We were responding to the defense industry; they had to try new things like the concept of helicopter warfare.

Nevertheless, he asserts that politics aside,
I trained more young men to go over there, and I trained them the very best I could.

Knowing what he does now, Eggers says he respects people who made the decision to resist service and flee to places like Canada, but that was not his nature. He couldn't have done it in 1965, and he would not do it today. For him,
war is obedience to orders; war is accomplishing your mission. The old phrase goes, “Ours is not to reason why. Ours is to do or die.” And that's what we did. All of us did.

3

FUTILITY: SUE O'NEILL

Soldiers—men and women alike—tell their Vietnam stories through the lens of their political and social viewpoints. Some came to see the American odyssey in Vietnam in terms that Richard Eggers might reject—as an effort that was pointless at best, barbaric at worst. While morale remained high throughout the armed forces during the first half of the war, after 1968, writes the historian James Westheider, “morale, cohesion, and discipline throughout the U.S. military establishment began to deteriorate.”
1
Susan O'Neill's recollection of her time in Vietnam would bear out this assertion. What she remembers best is the futility of the war. But like Eggers, she found that the experience of serving a larger cause, in her case as a combat nurse working to save lives, shaped the remainder of her life profoundly.

For women as for African Americans, the 1960s was a time of widespread cultural change. Efforts were made to integrate women in the workplace more readily, to pay them more fairly, and to reform policies regarding sexual harassment and domestic violence. The decade also saw the development of the first reliable oral method of birth control, giving women command of their reproductive systems and therefore more influence over their futures. Like any other institution, the American military began responding to these changing realities. Recent writing on the history of American nurses during the Vietnam era argues that “the war both advanced the position of women and nurses in the army and preserved their subordinate status at the same time.”
2
Female nurses gained new experiences and achieved dramatic gains in professional status while still occupying a second tier within the military bureaucracy.

Because women were not subject to the draft, all women who served in the U.S. Army volunteered. For O'Neill—née Kramer—military service was not a civic duty but rather a matter of expedience. She felt a strong financial obligation to her family, who had strained to put her through years of private Catholic schooling.

O'Neill became a New Yorker later in life than many of the other men and women I interviewed, having moved to the city to be close to her children in the past decade. She was born in 1947 in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Her mother was a stay-at-home mom, and her father worked in a factory; they were devout Catholics. While she had an older brother, O'Neill quickly became the “responsible” child, obligated to take care of her three younger siblings. Her parents were not well-off, but nevertheless wanted their children to acquire skills that would help them earn a good living. Unable to pay for college, they committed to making trade school educations available for all five children.

Her nursing career actually began early in life. The O'Neill children were divided between two bedrooms, with the girls sharing one room and the boys another. One of her younger sisters was often sick during the night, vomiting on the others in the bottom bunk. O'Neill would dutifully march into her parents' bedroom to announce that her youngest sister had been sick again. Often her mother would tell her to simply clean it up. A middling student, O'Neill did not work very hard at her academics during high school. However, given her parents' commitment to practical professions, along with a strong desire to leave Fort Wayne, she decided upon nursing school. She had no intention of becoming a secretary, and technology did not interest her. When she graduated from high school in 1965, she thought,
“Well, I can clean up after my sister, I can be a nurse.”
So she chose nursing school.

O'Neill enrolled in a three-year program at Holy Cross School of Nursing in South Bend, Indiana, which at the time was known as a service school. Students worked in hospitals in exchange for their education. While they still paid a tuition, it was much lower than it would have been otherwise, and it provided specialty training that sent students to institutions in other cities. Consequently, she spent time in both Louisville, Kentucky, at the Our Lady of Peace mental hospital, and Indianapolis, at the Riley Memorial Children's Hospital, where she trained in pediatrics.

One of Sue's good friends at school, Judy Kuchar, came from a conservative military family. Her father had been in active service, and her brother was enrolled in a military academy. Kuchar planned on following the family tradition and would eventually volunteer for the Army after completing nursing school. Despite this connection, serving in the military was, Sue says, the furthest thing from her mind. She was spending her time singing in South Bend, Indiana, coffeehouses, doing community theater, and working on the 1968 presidential campaign to elect Eugene McCarthy, an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War.

When Kuchar decided to enlist, she made plans to travel to Chicago to sign up for the Army Nurse Corps. Tempted by the idea of a visit to a big city, O'Neill decided to go along for the ride but had no plans to enlist. She soon found herself in a room full of enthusiastic recruiters. According to O'Neill, the recruiters weren't exactly picky. She jokes that they were passing a mirror under her nose to make sure she was alive. That was the extent of the examination they gave her.

The recruiter turned to O'Neill and said, “Well, what about you?”

O'Neill's response was rather blunt.
“You've got the wrong person
,
”
she told him.

But the recruiter went on, appealing to her one vulnerability—her wish for financial independence. He explained that if she committed herself to joining the Army Nurse Corps, the military would give her a monthly stipend in her last year of nursing school. This tapped into her—as she terms it—
Catholic guilt.
She felt she owed her parents for her expensive education. She quickly figured out that she would be able to pay her parents back for at least one year of tuition. Further, as some recruiters did at the time, he tempted her with visions of international travel. “You could go to Japan; you could go to Germany. We have all these places you can go, including Hawaii,” he told her.

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.
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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.