Pain remembered.
With a dash of humour
About 210 Australian nurses travelled to South Vietnam between 1964 and 1972 to care for injured civilians during the war. Susan Hudson talks with a few who have received long overdue recognition for their work.
AFTER THREE DECADES, NURSING AND MEDICAL PERSONNEL WHO WENT TO THE VIETNAM WAR HAVE BEEN AWARDED LOGISTIC AND SUPPORT MEDALS TO HONOUR THEIR SERVICE.
The award ceremony, held earlier this year, gave those who went to Vietnam the opportunity to relive the experience with other volunteers. I was also fortunate enough to hear some of their stories.
The tour of duty was generally six months for nurses, although some spent a full year in Vietnam. Many returned for a second or even a third time.
The first Australian medical team sent to South Vietnam was supplied by the Royal Melbourne Hospital and set up at Long Xuyen in October 1964. The Alfred Hospital, Victoria sent their first team to Bien Hoa in Gia Dinh province in January 1966.
The first team to arrive at the provincial hospital in Bien Hoa had the job of preparing the theatres for surgery. Much of the work fell to four nurses: Canny Coventry, Barbara Phillips, Heather Beveridge and Daphne Amos.
'We arrived on a Friday, I remember, to a tremendous reception,' Daphne says. 'There was a band and speeches and afterwards we went out to lunch.
'But we were soon brought down to earth because in the afternoon we had to scrub everything. The surgical suites hadn't been used as a theatre before and had to be cleaned thoroughly. Afterwards we set up the instruments so that the team could begin operating the next day.'
Much of the surgical equipment that had been sent from the Alfred was pilfered on the Saigon River. One of the surgeons had to trek off into a village to buy a hacksaw, wood chisel and a hammer before he could begin any orthopaedic surgery. Medical supplies, particularly drugs and dressings, were always in short supply. The nurses sometimes drove thorough sniper-ridden territory to barter for things.
They worked in intensely crowded wards to care for adults and children, many of whom had dreadful wounds caused by exploding mines. It wasn' t uncommon for two or three patients to share a bed, and sometimes it was difficult to tell the difference between the patients and relatives.
The nurses worked during the day and were on-call every second night, both as ward and theatre nurses. They had two days off every three weeks.
When things were quiet at the hospital, surgeons, accompanied by off- duty nurses, would travel 50 kilometres to a leprosarium to perform plastic surgery. Hygiene and sterility were always an issue and the nurses had to apply some lateral thinking to maintain both standards and supplies. Sometimes theatre packs were put out on the grass to dry, where a local pig would weave its way delicately past the precious drying linen.
Canny remembers how visiting American Vice President, Hubert Humphrey, offered to supply a respirator. "We could do with more packets of gauze,' I told him.'
'Australian nurses were liked because we made do with what was there, ' said Von Clinch, one of the Alfred's former charge nurses. 'Our initial trepidation that we wouldn't be accepted by the Vietnamese people was ill-founded. They trusted us enough to bring their sick to our hospital and we were always very busy.'
The team at Bien Hoa was in danger of Viet Cong attacks and there was a constant flow of traffic through Bien Hoa Airport. Situated 45 kilometres north of Saigon, it was, at that time, the busiest airport in the world.
'And it was noisy, my God it was noisy,' says Dorothy Angelk. 'When I came home and went to stay with my parents in the country I couldn' t sleep because it was too quiet.'
Jenny Hunter also worked at Long Xuyen on the Mekong Delta, spending a total of 15 months in Vietnam. She recalls flying to Vung Tau once in an RAAF Caribou full of cabbages. 'Why it was full of cabbages I'll never know,' she laughs. 'But I went anywhere I could get a lift in my free time and didn't have any fears, I just wanted to see the country.'
The nurses also tried to look after their own health, but illness was unavoidable for some. 'One of our problems was the icy poles that the children would excitedly bring us,' Von says. 'We knew they were made from contaminated local water, but we couldn't refuse to eat them.'
This diplomacy was often rewarded by incapacitating bouts of diarrhoea and vomiting.
When the locals realised the staff liked fresh fruit they brought it in abundance. The Chinese cook kept live ducks and hens in the kitchen, but after becoming fond of them the staff would find them served as the next day's meal.
Despite the hardships, patients invariably recovered -- even the woman who had been scalped and brought to hospital with her head covered in maggots.
Of all their patients, the nurses agree that it was the injured children who had the greatest impact on them.
One was a 12 year old boy they called 'Number One'. He spent three months at the hospital after being severely injured by an exploding mine. As he improved he acted as an interpreter for the nurses and helped to comfort other children frightened by medical procedures.
'There were floods of tears when we left, and Number One came to the airport with flowers,' says Daphne. 'God knows where he got them from. '
'I came back to Australia feeling we were so lucky, overwhelmed at what other people have to cope with just to survive,' says Canny.
These women are now in their mid-50s. Reflecting on their experiences can be painful sometimes, but there is also laughter.
'Don't ask me to talk about the war and smile at the camera at the same time,' says Dorothy Angell, now a Professor of Nursing at Monash University. 'All you'll get is a sad expression.'
Everyone has come back changed in some way. Photos taken during the war show these women to be considerably thinner than they are now. Some had severe health problems which have lingered, although they agree it would be difficult to prove these things were caused in Vietnam.
After the war, Von suffered a severe thyroid condition and subsequently developed rheumatoid arthritis. Jenny was recently diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma, now in remission.
Daphne now has a hearing disability and other health problems. 'I found it difficult to settle back into a Western way of life when I returned to Australia and within a year I left for a job in the Solomon Islands,' she recalls.
Dorothy found media coverage of violent incidents difficult to cope with back home. 'If there was shooting on television I'd have to leave the room,' she says.
Jenny recalls an incident where grenades were lobbed through a hotel window, killing several journalists among other civilians.
'I've never been able to sit with my back to a window since and for a long time after returning home I tried to always keep an eye on what was behind me,' she says.
Most Australian medical and nursing personnel returned home by December 1972. There was no de-briefing, no official welcome. They simply returned to work.
Copyright 1995 by Royal Australian Nursing Federation. Text may not be copied without the express written permission of Royal Australian Nursing Federation.
Hudson, Susan, Pain remembered.., Vol. 3, Australian Nursing Journal, 08-01-1995, pp 27.
The only Australian Nurse that I know of who died in Vietnam-----Barbara Black Barbara died at Vung Tau, Vietnam in 1971.