At War in Vietnam
RICHARD C. ENSMINGER ET AL.

The readings that follow are from three participants. Richard C. Ensminger,from a military family, served in 1966-67 and again in 1969 as a Marine forward observer, losing a leg in combat. Roosevelt Gore, son of a sharecropping family, was an Army mortarman in 1967-68. Rose Sandecki served as the headnurse in the intensive care unit of an army evacuation hospital in Vietnam.
 

RICHARD C. ENSMINGER

I guess I saw myself as another John Wayne for my first few weeks inVietnam. I loaded myself down with extra grenades and ammo, but itdidn't take me very long to learn that all that ammo was too heavy in the heat. On the other hand, it was an Article 15 offense to discard it in the field, so I finally worked myself down to one or two M-26 fragmentation grenades, eight to ten magazines for my M-14, and threeor four canteens of water. Since I was a forward observer, I also carried a compass, a map case, a pair of binoculars, and at least one meal of C-rations. My helmet was decorated with bottles of Texas Pete hot sauce for the C-rats and bug juice to keep off the B-52 mosquitoes. We didn't wear underwear; it would rot off you because we were lucky to get abath every two weeks.

I was always humping, always on the move. All of us worried a lot about ambushes. For that reason, we never had a set time for a patrol to go out. Sometimes we'd go in the middle of the day or late evening. If we set a schedule, Charlie got to know about it. He would know when we were out, where we were, and whether we followed the same trailt wice. Yoll learned this from guys who had been over there for a while.They knew how to stay alive.

When I first got to Cam Lo, the old-timers who had been in Vietnam for a year wouldn't have anything to do with me. They knew I knew my job, but their attitude troubled me at first. We new guys stayed together and little by little moved into the group. It was an initiation. I had to prove to them that I wouldn't get them killed. It was something that everybody went through. One marine warned me, "I'll tell you once:you mess up and you're on your own. Mess up twice and I'll kill you."He was a lance corporal, the same rank as me.
"Are you kidding?" I said.
"No, I'm not. I'll kill you in a moment's notice. You're not gonna get me killed." I figured the best way not to screw up was to stay in the back and watch everybody else. New guys in the back of a line couldn't trip bouncing betties or step on mines. But if a new guy took the point, people started getting very nervous.

Most marine grunts were good for only six to eight months of combat. It took from three to six months to learn the basics of staying in one piece. Then, for the last couple of months before a guy's DEROS(end of Vietnam service), we just left him alone for the most part becausehe had the short-timer's attitude. This was when most of our courtsmartial and of flee hours came up. Short-timers didn't want to go out in the field; they were afraid some guy would screw up their chances of going home. Second lieutenants sometimes did that. They were a dimea dozen in the marines. A second lieutenant who screwed up twice was a dead man, and not necessarily because of the enemy. He might get killed by his own men.

A lieutenant who came in and said, "Hey, I don't know what'sgoing on" and looked to his sergeants to help him along usually did all right. But one who marched in and announced that he was going to run the show, that he was the boss out there in the bush if he made it, he was damn lucky. His sergeant might turn around to him and say,"Nobody can hear you. Stand up and tell 'em." Charlie would pick off that lieutenant as soon as he did that. The sergeants, now they were the ones we paid attention to. Some of those guys were amazingly brave:  they would walk rice paddy dikes under fire and never get a scratch.

I could usually have gunfire coming in on Charlie within a minuteor a minute and a half of asking for it. If gunfire had to be cleared through the Danang Intelligence Center because of friendly troops inthe area, it might take half an hour, which was entirely too long. Sometimes Danang would even deny gunfire because friendly troops were out there. Of course they were. We were the friendlies who neededfire on an enemy position. When the first round slammed in, Charlie would always look around in surprise. If the round was close enough, he'd scramble around and try to scatter. If the second round was on target, I'd tell the gunners to fire for effect. Then I'd see bodies flying apart, vegetation being torn up, the earth just erupting,  all hell in one moment.   I've been on the receiving end of it,  so I know what the enemy's feelings must have been.

If a forward observer gets spotted by the enemy,  his life expectancy is about fifteen seconds. The same is true for snipers and scouts. I knew that before I went to Vietnam. As soon as Charlie saw you, he was going to try to kill you. I had a close call like that on Operation Prairie. I caught some Charlies in the open, but I didn't know they had small flanking units all around them. When they passed by a firebase,  I called in81mm mortars, maybe a hundred rounds pumped out from four tubes.We started taking automatic weapons fire from the side while I was on the radio, telling the mortar crews what was happening. Before it was all over, my radio operator and three or four other grunts got hit.   It wasa damned scary business.

I got wounded nine months into my first tour, in February of 1967,when a firebase basically got overrun during Operation Independence.It was a shrapnel wound. Charlie mortared the place on a cold, rainy night, dropping maybe forty or fifty rounds before he came at us.  I believe he knew that firebase backwards and forwards. Before it was over, I burned out the barrel of an M-60, the 60mm mortars ran out of ammunition, all the LAWs were fired and not one radio worked.   I wasdown to fifteen rounds for my .45 pistol when Charlie finally pulled back. If he'd hit us again, all of us would have been dead.

We fired a lot of 60mm illumination rounds and pop-up flaresduring the attack. Everybody carried two or three pop-up flares. To fire L' OnL', you pull the  tile cap off and put it on the rear L`nL1. Then you hit the cap and a little parachute flare shot about two hundred feet in the air. The flares let us see the enemy fairly well;  I could tell that some of them were moving quickly, but others, for some reason, weren't. They were firing their weapons mostly from the hip. I'll tell you, I was scared to hell and back, but I think I fought to the best of my ability. There was always some fear in my mind that I was going to screw up, that I would let down one or two guys that I'd gotten close to. It was like walking a log across a river: one wrong step and you're going to fall in. The fear of screwing up was there all the time.

There were always some guys who looked for any excuse to avoid combat. One of them lives here in Watauga County. The way he tells it, he would put on his flak vest, his helmet, and his body pants which I never saw anybody wear in Vietnam and then he'd drop an M-26 grenade on the ground and walk fifteen feet away. That gave him enough shrapnel wounds in his legs to get medevaced out. This guy never really got hurt, but he picked up three Purple Hearts. He boasted to me one day that's how he got out of Vietnam.

I came back to El Toro Marine Air Station in California, where Itook a shower, picked up my seabag and gladly took thirty days' leave, with fifteen days of grace travel to my next duty station. When I went to Vietnam, I weighed 235 pounds. I weighed 175 pounds when I came back, all solid muscle and red clay dirt. I rode a military bus down to San Diego to catch a flight to Miami, where I planned to unwind for a while.I had on my short-sleeve khakis, which were very wrinkled because they had been in my seabag for thirteen months, and my combat boots.  I had slapped some black polish on them,  but I really didn't care what anybody said.   I was home.

As I got off the bus and started to walk up a ramp at the San Diego airport, a woman who looked to be about fifty years old jumped out of the crowd and pointed a .22 pistol at a marine twenty guys in front of  me.

"You woman and child killer!" she screamed. She put six rounds in that marine at point-blank range.

When I heard her first shot, I hit the ground and rolled back under the bus. It was an automatic reaction.  I had to find a place to hide. The marine who was shot had wounds in his stomach and side, but none of them was fatal. The woman was lucky to live through what happened to her, too. Some of the other marines threw her over a fence eight feet high. I understand the fall broke both her legs and several ribs. All of us who witnessed the shooting were held up a day because we had to give statements to the police and navy criminal investigators aboutwhat had happened. I simply wrote that I crawled under a bus.

I believe in God and country. When I went to Vietnam, I believed it was my duty to go over there and fight for my country. I came back as a corporal E-4 with a Purple Heart and a couple of unit citations.I knew I had done something worthwhile, but I wasn't prepared for the demonstrations against the war here, for the people who downgraded me for being in the military. As I saw it, there were three groups of people in the United States: the older people who didn'tcare about the war, the kids who didn't understand it, and those who were totally against Vietnam, against everything we were doing over there. The situation eventually got so bad that we were told to stayaway from the civilian population as much as possible to hold down
friction
I went on to Miami Beach to spend thirty days with a couple of sergeants, but I cut it short after only six days. I was twenty years old, but I was supposed to be twenty-one to walk into a bar. I was old enough to fight for my country but I couldn't get a beer. That wasn't all. If I walked up to a girl and asked her to dance, she'd take one look at me, like I was something with a bad smell, and wouldn't have anything to do with me. I had been back from Vietnam for only a weekand already I was feeling like an outsider. And I was getting angry. I let my weight shoot up to two hundred pounds, I wore all my campaign ribbons, and I let people know I was one mean mother. I remember walking in one bar in Miami and some people said they wanted me out of  there. I told a dude who shoved me that if he did it one more time, I'd gladly take on him and everybody else in the place. Another veteran was in there, a fellow who had lost an arm in Korea.
"I'll be more than happy to back you up," he said. The place settled down fast.

I went on to my next duty station at Quantico Marine Base in Virginia for training in crowd and riot control. In the fall of 1967, a big antiwar demonstration was being planned at the Pentagon, and a bunchof us at Quantico were trucked up there for security.  I was one of several marines put on top of the building.  I had a pump shotgun,  bodyarmor, and a helmet. Our shells had rubber bullets in them, but somebody high up must have thought it would be a bad idea to issue ammo to men who had served in Vietnam.   Maybe they were afraid we would get mad enough to shoot somebody.

I had to work one more big demonstration, this one in front of theCapitol. This time, about fifty marines were called up from Quantico.We were issued full riot gear: helmets with plastic face shields, bodyarmor, gas masks, and shotguns with five rounds of rubber ammo.Some marines in the line behind me had tear gas guns for backup protection. The people in front of me called me a babykiller, they called my mother every name in the book, and they did the same for my sister.  I didn't like crowd control duty and had asked to get out of it.   I tried to make it clear to my sergeant that someday a protester would come up to me and say the wrong thing and I'd shoot the bastard.

"You can't do much harm with a rubber bullet," he said. Well, I stood in that line and took the verbal abuse, but when a man spit in my face,  I showed him what a marine with a shotgun could do. I got an Article 15 for my trouble and a transfer to other duty.

l volunteered to go back to Vietnam after a little more than a yeari n the states. I didn't feel comfortable going outside a military base.  Somehow, I felt I wasn't wanted in American society.   And I was getting tired of the petty, spit-shined mentality of the stateside marines.   InVietnam, I could do what I was trained for.   Maybe I was also getting a bit paranoid - officers and authority were making me nervous. When I got back to Danang in April of 1969, the base had grown tremendously  .It was now a big city of metal buildings.   Naturally, a few things hadn't changed. I still had to go through Dogpatch, two miles of whorehouses outside the base, to get to a staging area where I got orders for the3/ 5th Marines.

As I see it flow, think I wanted another tour in Viehlam to help keep marines from getting killed. It had become more important to me to keep Americans alive than to kill NVA. I was a sergeant by this time, and I figured I would be sent out to a rifle company as a forward observer, which was a good way to accomplish what I wanted to do.  But Vietnam had changed and the marines had, too.   We had draftees now. On my first tour, we were all volunteers.   Now there was a drug problem that I hadn't seen before.   Marijuana grow in every creek bed in Vietnam. Grunts were getting stoned on it, on hash and other drugs - you name it, and you could buy it.   I could see this was a different warfrom the first time around, and I made up my mind not to trust the men screwed up on drugs. I would do my duty, but I intended to come out alive.

When I flew out to my company near An Hoa, south of Danang,  I j mped off the chopper in the middle of a firelight.. In a way, my arrival was a sort of metaphor for my second tour.   Lima company never stayed in one place; it was always on the move. No rest, no sleep. After onlyt wo weeks in the bush, I was numb, worn out. All I wanted was a hot meal and twenty-four hours of sleep. I saw a lot more killing and mutilation during my second tour. For one thing, I was closer to it.During my first tour, I spent some time with the Combined Action platoon program on hamlet security, but now the war seemed like one endless search-and-destroy mission. Since I was one of the few forward observers in my battalion, I spent almost all my time in the bush. I would go back to the rear with a company, then turn right around and go back out with another one.

I was so tired I started to act by instinct alone. I was lucky to get four hours of sleep a night. I know now that I was doing a lot of stupid things: I'd see two VC running out there and call in a fire mission, instead of letting my snipers and scouts handle them. I'd just blow the hell out of an area. I was even calling in false reports. I was out for blood. The one mistake in my life that I'm sorry for, that I still have nightmares over, came one day I was with Lima company. We took some small-arms fire from a village.   Right away, I called for mixed air and ground bursts of artillery fire that flattened the place in less than five minutes.... It was a godlike display of power. After it was all over, I walked through a burning, smoky ruin of straw and bamboo huts. I could see parts of human and animal bodies scattered allaround, and I noticed that the air was saturated with a sharp smell of gunpowder and urine. At this time, every marine unit in my battalion was supposed to meet a quota in VC and NVA - it was a meat quota. A lot of civilians who got killed were called VC. In fact, the village that I shot up became a VC village: four hundred confirmed kills, women and children. Lima company met its meat quota for two months with that one village alone.

I justified what I had done by thinking about marines that I had seen get shot and lay wounded, unable to move to safety, while the VC kept shooting at them. Sometimes the VC would shoot at a grunt even after he was dead. Seeing such things had a hardening effect on all of us. I think a lot of marines felt we were still fighting for a reason in1969,  but we weren't sure what the reason was anymore. The wtar hadbecome a sort of perpetual-motion killing machine. We killed them andt hey killed us, and nothing seemed to change.

. . . I took over the platoon of fifty-four marines and led them towarda hamlet a short distance away.  There was enough bamboo in the area to limit our line of sight to about a hundred meters. The NVA were waiting for us in a classic L-shaped ambush along a creek bed outside the hamlet. They let the point squad walk into the hamlet before opening up on the rest of us.  I believe we were hit by an entire company of NVA supported by a weapons platoon because those people laid down some fire on us.   I was one of the first men to get hit,  in the back of my left leg, and I'm sure it was my radio operator who did it.   I felt a sharp, burning pain i nmy leg and swung around and saw the RTO frozen to his rifle, which was still firing. His head was gone. A round had taken it off and blood was spurting up from his neck like a water fountain. He must have had his M-14 on automatic and his trigger finger touched it off when he was hit. It put seven bullets in my leg. To this day, I don't know who he was or where he was from.

I can remember somebody dragging me into a bomb crater or someother kind of hole. My leg felt like it was on fire. I reached for my backpack and got out a shot of morphine to get some relief from the pain. By that time in the war, almost everybody was carrying little tubes of morphine. I popped off the cap, squeezed a bit of the fluid out,  and stuck the needle in my leg. I still had some idea of what was going on around me - all hell was breaking loose. About twenty feet away, a gook in a spider trap was popping up now and then to spray the area with his AK-47.   I shot at him with my M-14.   A lot of marines were getting hit. A corpsman jumped in the hole to give me another shot of morphine and fell back in when he tried to leave. His guts were blownout.   I could hear men screaming for their mothers,  for God,  for death.  Those who got up to help others got shot themselves.  The ambush probably lasted less than an hour, but it seemed like days. I heard choppers coming in and the next thing I knew, a marine was trying to help me. I was certain he was an NVA, so I pulled out my .45 pistol and tried to shoot him. I was doped up on morphine, and somebody told me I was one of  four survivors of the ambush. I still had my wounded leg,  but my right arm was in traction. I was also in a body cast except for my right foot. I had dislocated my shoulder and still had four or five bullets inside of me, not to mention some four hundred tiny pieces of shrapnel.

Later, I was told that I was trying to operate the radio when I was in the hole. How it got there, I have no idea. Radio operators back at battalion headquarters heard me trying to call in artillery fire, but I wasn't giving the right coordinates. They couldn't talk to me because I never let go of the key on the microphone. According to what I was told, I was calling for variable time fuses, which would have thrown shrapnel down on me and everybody else. I figured three-fourths if not more of us were already dead and that l was going to die there, too.  Why not take everybody out?

I was shipped out to a hospital in Japan for a while, and then onto Bethesda Naval Hospital. I kept my leg for twenty-two months. The doctors kept saying, "We'll save it. You're  going to walk again." Then one day they walked in and said it had to come off  four inches above the knee.

I prayed to the Lord that I wouldn't lose my leg, but for somer eason I couldn't fight off the infections in my bones and blood. I wasi n a clean,  isolated room at Bethesda with blood going into me, IVs and heart monitors hooked up to me, but the doctors didn't know why I wasn't healing. Anybody who came in to see me had to wear a bibbed gown and a face mask.

I was released from the marines after recovering from the loss of my leg. I was taking six shots of morphine a day until I left Bethesda,when they gave me a six-month prescription for 180 tablets of Demerol a month. The VA gave me Percodan, a sleep medication. I had so much painkiller I hardly knew what was going on. That was the start of a drug dependency that took years to get under control.   I went to stay with my parents, who were living in Greensboro, North Carolina, at the time. they couldn't understand  why I slept so much during the day. My father, in particular, was puzzled by my tendency to fly off thehandle, why I couldn't stay in a room any length of time, why I wastaking two or three showers a night to get the sweat off me.

A lot of my emotional and physical problems came out of my second tour in Vietnam. In my nightmares, I relive calling in artillery on the village and seeing my buddies get killed in the ambush. I know of one survivor who killed himself. If the others remember as much about it as I do, they would be better off dead, too. I've been in and out of hospitals maybe sixteen times with kidney, lung, liver, and prostate problems. I've developed diabetes, which means headaches, failing eyesight, and failing hearing. Something made me sterile in Vietnam and I believe it was Agent Orange. I sprayed Agent Orange around some ofthe firebases with a backpack pump like the ones used to fight forestfires.

I have been so depressed at times that I've thought of suicide. I'ma forty-two-year-old man living in the body of a sixty-year-old. I really believe my health is failing, that I am slowly dying. A couple of weeks ago, I was told that I have a bad blood flow from hardening of the arteries. No one in my family has ever had that. No one has had diabetes or a nervous condition.

I have very few friends.   I don't make friends easily because I can't get close to people. I spent five months at the VA hospital in Augusta, Georgia, in 1985 for treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder, but I'm still described as somebody with "a nervous condition with bad personality disorders." Maybe so. I've had a lot of jobs and ended up getting fired from most of them. Probably the only people I can really relate to are the members of the Disabled American Veterans chapter in Boone.

You know, I believe the war started out as a just cause that ended up being a very political affair. A lot of people made a lot of money off it; some of them are still making money off it. In one way, I'm proud that I served. I'm a true marine who went and fought for my countryand for a way of life and I'm proud of that.   But I'm not proud of whatI did over there.
 

ROOSEVELT GORE

I finished Palmetto High School, a segregated school, in June of 1966.  In August, I got my draft notice two weeks after I went to work for a factory in Mullins that made household furniture.  I don't know how many whites was being drafted in Marion County at the time, but l do know a lot of blacks was being called. My father was very proud that I was going into the army. He wanted me to make a career out of it. I knew something was going on in Vietnam, but I didn't pay much attention to it. Two of my Palmetto High classmates had joined the marines and got killed over there, but Vietnam was still a long way off.  I was more worried about my mother, who was very sick with heart disease at the time.

I went down to Fort Jackson for basic training and will never forget my drill instructor, a white guy who must have weighed two hundred pounds. He didn't like blacks. He always picked on blacks, maybe because we was from the South and he considered us to be illiterate. He used to kick us and spit on us' call us "riggers" and say, "All you black son-of-a-bitches are going to Vietnam." He liked to order me to get down on all fours and pick up cigarette butts with my mouth.  Sometimes I've said, if I could see that guy again. . . but that's all in the past now.

He was a staff sergeant, big and intimidating with that Smokey the Bear hat that the Dls wore. Everybody in my outfit hated this guy but nobody knew what to do about him. We was so afraid we hardly even mentioned his name. As new as I was to the army,  I thought all the sergeants and officers was going to be like him. All through basic I  kept wishing I'd never been drafted. AIT at Fort Jackson was much better, though. It was more professional and I don't remember any racial harassment.

I saw my first real combat a couple of months after getting to CharlieCompany. We was on a patrol when a VC hiding behind a tree with an AK-47 pinned down the whole company. My platoon sergeant got shot through the arm, and a medic, a white guy from Columbia, was killed with a round through his neck. Ted Burton was trying to put a bandage on the sergeant when I lobbed a hand grenade at the VC and trashed him out from behind the tree. A machinegunner killed him with a hundred rounds from his M-60. That VC looked like hamburger meat when he got through with him.

I was always the point man, maybe because I was black, until we went out on one patrol and set up for the night. We got attacked and the E-4 that was in charge of the squad, a white guy, cracked up. I got everybody back, no casualties, wounded, or nothing, because I was a pretty good soldier by then. I got my sergeant's stripes the next morning.

The worst time I had in Vietnam came on the night of November 2,1967. I didn't know if I was going to make it or not. All three companiesof the 1/18th was on Operation Shenandoah 11 in the rubber plantations around Loc Ninh. The intelligence people said a regiment of NVA andVC was in the area, so my company set up a perimeter in a field away from the rubber trees. The birds was so noisy after dark that I was sure somebody was moving out there. I tried to sleep, but I couldn't.  About two o'clock in the morning, the birds got real quiet and thats when Charlie cut loose on us. A couple of patrols was run back to the perimeter by VC with flamethrowers.   Rockets, mortars, and .50-calibermachine-gun fire started to come from everywhere.  I was in charge of the mortar squad and it didn't take us very long to start throwing it back at Charlie. They was about fifty yards away, so close we used only one or two charges on the mortar rounds. We was dropping them almost on the perimeter. We pumped a lot of rounds out there. Matter of fact, we fired so many illumination rounds we ran
out of them for a while. When the illumination rounds was up, I could see the VC. They was dressed in green shirts and pants and helmets, and they was coming at us in a human wave.

I was standing up in a sandbag mortar pit directing fire. Another sergeant, a section leader named White, was outside the pit for some reason when a 82mm mortar round exploded about three feet in front of him. I heard the round that got him come whistling in. It was a real shame because White was scheduled to go to Hawaii on R&R to meet his wife. When the mortar round hit,  I saw a flash of white light and felt a tremendous explosion, so loud that I have a ringing in my earst o this day. I felt something hit me in the stomach and butt, something that didn't hurt so much as burn.
I hollered, "Medic!" Dave Simpson came running up to me. He picked out some slivers of shrapnel and put bandages on my wounds."You've got your Purple Heart," he said.  I went right back to directing mortar fire.  I guess I was a gung-ho soldier. The attack went on most of the night. Before it was over, we had to call in airstrikes on the perimeter to help keep Charlie back. The jets dropped bombs so close to us some of our own people got hurt.

We didn't lose many people that night, but I counted 142 Vietnamese on the perimeter after the sun came up. They was about my age or younger. Most of them was torn apart and dead, but a few wass till alive, moaning and groaning. I noticed that quite a few of them was carrying marijuana. The wounded ones tried to talk to us, but I didn't know what they was saying and I didn't care. They would look us in the face and stick out their arms, reach out to us, but I'll tell you I had no sympathy for them. None whatsoever. I wouldn't let them grab me or touch me in any way.

Somebody brought in a backhoe and scooped out a deep trench.We threw the Charlies into it, dead and alive. The wounded ones wasn' tgoing to live very long, anyway. I knew it was a violation of the Geneva Convention, but what we did that morning has never bothered me. I wasn't in command. It was kill or be killed in Vietnam, and this time we had done the killing.

I didn't hear much news from the states while I was in Vietnam. To tell you the truth, I wasn't very concerned with civil rights and everythiing else that was going on back home. I was more concerned about staying alive. After six months, though, l did begin to wonder what we were doing in Vietnam. It seemed like the more Viet Cong we killed,the more we had coming at us. I don't know how the Vietnamese civilians in our area felt about us, but some of the things I saw probably speak for themselves. The biggest thing that bothers me has to do with some of our soldiers who would use their rifle butts to hit Vietnamese kids on the side of the head. The kids was begging the GIs for food, asking for a piece of C-ration candy or whatever, and the guys would just knock them out. I don't think anybody cared.

I told my folks about a lot of the things that was going on in my letters home, but it was a telegram that caused the most trouble. A day or two after the big attack in November, my mother got a telegram saying I'd been killed. She told me after I came back that the mailman got out of his car and walked up to the house with the telegram. He said he was sorry to have to deliver it. Of course, she knew right then what the telegram said. It was a big shock to her and she fell sick for a while, at least until the Red Cross could get the facts straight.
I finished my tour in February of 1968 and came back to Fort Flood Texas, where I went into a ground-surveillance radar outfit for my last six months in the army. It was easy duty after Vietnam, but after a while I came to hate life in the states more than I had over there. There was a lot of reasons, I guess, but one of the biggest of them had to do with an incident at Fort Hood. A couple of white guys and me tried togo to a dance at the enlisted men's club one night. Well, some soldier had married a Vietnamese woman and brought her back here. She wast aking up a cover charge at the door - I think it was a dollar - and when we walked up to her to pay our money to get in, she wouldn't take my dollar bill.

"Niggers can't come in here," she said, looking straight at me.   Her remark almost tore me apart. I could hardly believe what that woman had said.
"I just spent a year over there trying to help you," I said, "and you're going to turn white on me?" I was angry, terribly angry. All three of us walked off. I didn't do a thing about it, but I should have.

When Martin Luther King, Jr., was killed in April, it seemed to me that the real war wasn't in Vietnam,  it was in the United States.
 

ROSE SANDECKI

I had been in nursing about seven years, having graduated from a three year nursing school and then gone back to school to get my BS in nursing. I had a couple of job opportunities, but none of them were that exciting to me. This was in the spring of '68, and the war was really building up. I remember watching the news every night, seeing in full, glorious color the stretchers with the young guys on them, really torn up, coming off the dustoffs. I felt I had some talents as a registered nurse, a professional nurse, and probably could offer somethingto those young men over there.

I went down to the Navy recruiter and was told I was too old (Iwas twenty-six or twenty-seven). The Air Force told me I would have to spend at least one year in the States before they would train me as a flight nurse, to go over to Vietnam. I said, "I want to go as soon as I can ,while I feel like it, while I've got the spirit that has moved me." Only  the Army would guarantee that I could be over within a certain period of time. So much so that they had the recruiter on the phone from Buffalo to Washington, D.C., letting me talk to the individuals there with a guarantee that I would be in Vietnam within three months.  And that did happen indeed.

I went to the 12th Evac Hospital at Cu Chi. My first job was a headnurse, surgical intensive care unit, recovery room. I was a captain because I had seven years' experience in nursing and a bachelor's degree when I joined the Army. And in days of war they give rank out like candy. I had very little experience in recovery and no experience in surgical intensive care units. I had graduated from nursing school in1960 when ICUs weren't around. They were just starting to be though tabout. When I was told my assignment would be head nurse of this ward, I said, "No, I don't want that," because I'd never set foot in an ICU. I quickly learned you never say no in the Army; I had this job whether I wanted it or not.

I couldn't believe the numbers of people coming in, the numbers of beds and the kinds of injuries that I saw in front of me - I really wasn't prepared for that. This was in October of '68, it was what they called"post-Tet" - after the Tet offensive - but it was extremely busy. As headnurse, my job was basically to see to it that all patients were taken careof as efficiently and quickly and in the best care possible. The Medical Corps's motto was, and still is, I guess, "Preserve the fighting strength.  The idea of working in a military hospital is to patch up the  soldier so that he can go back in battle again.  It was the whole theme of what was going on over there. It wouldn't be unusual when guys would come in with multiple frag wounds, be treated, go to surgery and have the tissue around the injury debrided, then be sent to Japan where they would do a DPC (delayed primary closure) of this open wound, and then sent back to duty. As long as an individual didn't lose a leg, arm,or an eye, as long as they were walking, they would go back to the boonies. So my job as head nurse was to make sure the patients were taken care of - always helping. I mean, I didn't sit behind a desk and order the junior nurses or corpsmen around. I was pitching in with the rest of them.

When I look back on it, I was naive when I walked through those doors. I learned a lot very quickly, seeing the types of casualties and the numbers of them. They were all so young. Seeing this on a daily basis twelve to fourteen hours a day, six or seven days a week, I think that I became somewhat callous and bitter. You also learned that you became almost like a commodity because you were a woman. After working twelve-hour shifts with all the blood and gore, you would change into a civilian dress to go to one of the local officers' clubs. We were chauffeured in helicopters, with the guns on the side, that would take six or seven of us up to an officers' club. You couldn't sit still, just have a drink and relax. There would be one guy after another coming up and more or less doing his number on you: "I haven't seen a roundeye in six months. Would you dance with me?" You'd say, "No, I'm tired. I just want to sit and put my feet up." They wouldn't take no for an answer and would play this guilt thing like, "God, you don't know how bad I'm feeling. Just one dance, that's all." So you would dance and drink until two or three in the morning, then at six go back to the blood and guts of the war again. The initial two or three months was getting used to the pace of the twelve to thirteen hours of work and then the three or four hours of play. And it was a pressure kind of play because if you didn't go to the officers' club there was something wrong with you. If you stayed back in your hooch by yourself or stayed and talked to a couple of the other nurses, you were accused of being a lesbian,or you would be accused of having an affair with one of the doctors.You know, you are damned if you do and damned if you don't. After a period of four or five months, I decided that I really didn't care what people said about me. If I choose not to go to these clubs and parties,I'm not going to do it. . . and I probably became somewhat of a recluse.  So those are some of the changes that I went through personally inVietnam.

The way of dealing with the sheer amount of patients, the long hours in the hospital, was by putting up a wall, the emotional numbing that we talk about. I think it built up over a period of time. Each day I went in and the more I saw, the thicker this wall became;  it was sort of a skin protecting me from what was going on. Look at it from the point of  view of a patient: how would you, as a patient, feel if you had this hysterical nurse that was crying and sobbing because there is someone in there that is badly maimed or is going to die? We had to be effective for the next people that were coming in. Nurses are trained to take care of other people, not look at their own feelings and what is going on with them. That is part of the medical profession.

A story from Cu Chi, another example of the sort of rude awakening to my military naivete. I got a phone call on the ward from the chief nurse, saying, "You've got a patient there that is going to get an award.  Make sure that the bed has dean sheets, the area is straightened up, and the ward looks good." Which really turned me off to begin with: Let's clean up the ward because we've got VlPs coming in. Well, the VIP happened to be the general of the 25th Infantry Division along with his aide and an entourage of about twelve people. And this patient, when he came through the recovery room the day before, had remembered me.  This was his second visit to us. He had been there three months before with frag wounds, had been sent back to the jungle, and came back this time with both of his legs blown off - he was all of about twenty years old. When he was waking up from the anesthesia, he remembered me.  He started kidding me about how I had made him cough and deep breathe so he wouldn't come down with pneumonia. We were kidding around, and he said, "Don't you remember me, ma'am?" I said, "Oh, yeah." But I really didn't because there were just so many of them....The entourage was coming to give him an award because he happened to be number twenty thousand to come through the 12th Evac Hospital.  In 1968 there were twenty-four Army evac hospitals in Vietnam, and he was number twenty thousand  through one of twenty-four Army hospitals.We're are not talking about tile Air Force hospitals, tht Navy hospitals. . .but twenty thousand through one hospital. So, for this distinction, the general comes in and gives him a watch. They have this little ceremony, give him a Purple Heart and the watch.   I'm standing off in the corner watching all this, and as the general handed him the watch - "From the25th Infantry Division as a token of our appreciation"  - the kid more or less flings the watch back at him and says something like, "I can't accept this, sir; it's not going to help me walk." I couldn't really see the expression on the general's face, but they all left after this little incident.  I went over and  just put my arms around him and hugged him. . . and if  I remember correctly, I started crying. . . and I think he was crying.  I really admired him for that. That was one time that I let the feelings down and let somebody see what I felt.   It took a lot for him to do that,and it sort of said what this war was all about to me.