Hell Hath No Fury (36 page)

Reference: Jane Robinson,
Mary Seacole: The Charismatic Black Nurse Who Became a Heroine of the Crimea,
2005; and Mary Seacole,
The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands,
1857.

US MILITARY NURSES AND DOCTORS

1950–Present

Korea

Occupied by Japan in World War II, Korea had been divided along the 38th Parallel at the end of the war, with Soviet troops occupying the North, and US forces the South. The president of North Korea, Kim Il-Sung, claimed the whole of the country, but elections in the South produced a government that was friendly toward the United States, and by 1949 both Soviet and US troops had been withdrawn. In June 1950 the North Korean People's Army (KPA) invaded the South.

At that time only one US Army nurse, Captain Viola B. McConnell, was stationed in Korea. For her work in helping to evacuate seven hundred Americans to Japan, she received the Bronze Star. Within weeks the KPA had occupied all of South Korea with the exception of a small area around Pusan in the southeast, where a multinational force dominated by the Americans had been assembled under the banner of the United Nations.

US combat troops had begun to arrive in South Korea at the beginning of July, and with them came some sixty members of the
Army Nurse Corps
(ANC, see Chapter 8). Within a few days, twelve nurses moved forward with a mobile army surgical hospital (MASH) to treat critically wounded casualties before they were evacuated to army hospitals or US Navy hospital ships.

By 1951, there were 540 army nurses in Korea, the majority of them veterans of World War II who on demobilization had joined the reserves (see
Keil, Lillian Kinkela,
Chapter 8). Members of the ANC served throughout the Korean Peninsula: army nurses supported combat troops defending the Pusan perimeter; they were present during the amphibious landings at Inch'on in September 1950; and they accompanied advance troops across the 38th Parallel to the Yalu River on the Manchurian border. They also supported the UN forces in their withdrawal south to the 38th Parallel after the Chinese launched a counteroffensive in November 1950.

Conditions sometimes recalled those that had confronted army nurses in World War II during the Allied landings in Italy. The thirteen nurses of the MASH that arrived shortly after the landings at Inch'on took over a civilian hospital where they endured conditions as primitive as those in which the GIs for whom they cared had fought and died. The nurses wore fatigues, combat boots, and steel helmets, which they used as washbasins, and lived in tents or shattered buildings. No army nurse was killed by enemy action in Korea, but Major Genevieve Smith, on her way to take up the post of chief nurse, died in an air crash.

In 1950, the number of navy nurses had been drastically reduced from World War II levels and there were only just under 2,000 regular and 440 reserve navy nurses serving on active duty. In August 1950, the hospital ship USS
Consolation
arrived in Korea and the USS
Repose
and
Benevolence
were taken out of the reserve fleet. During a trial run in the San Francisco harbor,
Benevolence
sank. There were fifteen navy nurses on board, one of whom died in the incident. In September 1950, eleven navy nurses died when the aircraft in which they were traveling crashed in the Pacific en route to the Korean theater on September 19, 1950. By 1951 the hospital ship USS
Haven,
with thirty nurses on board, was on station rotating with other ships between Korea and Japan.

The ships were a new type of mobile hospital, capable of performing different functions in different locations. They supported the Inch'on landings and aided the evacuation from Hamhung in December 1950. Two senior navy nurses, Commander Estelle Kalnoske Lange and Lieutenant Ruth Cohen, were awarded the Bronze Star for their work on the hospital ships.

Convalescent patients were sent to Yokosuka, in Japan, where 200 nurses worked in a hospital that had replaced a small prewar dispensary. By July 1951 the number of navy nurses in the theater had reached 3,200, all of them women, as men were not then permitted to join the Navy Nurse Corps.

The
United States Air Force
(USAF, see Chapter 6) came into being on September 18, 1947, and its nursing service underwent a baptism of fire in the Korean War. It went into action almost immediately, in the air evacuation of casualties. On December 5, 1950, the USAF's Nurse Corps assisted in the evacuation of about 4,000 patients after the Chinese intervention in the war. Flight nurses had to load between 30 and 40 patients onto each aircraft, calmly and efficiently arranging them to care for their wounds or illnesses. Extra litters often dotted the floor, making movement extremely difficult. Nurses had to cope with the rigors of flying at altitude, where the noise of the engines muffled cries for help and wounds and bodily functions displayed markedly different characteristics from those presented on the ground. Nevertheless, thanks to the interventions of the army's MASH teams and the efficiency of air evacuation, fewer than 2,000 of the 78,000 men who were wounded in Korea lost their lives. By the end of the war, the 2,990 air force nurses in Korea had evacuated some 350,000 patients.

Vietnam

The flood tide of Japanese conquest in 1941–42 sounded the death knell of the European empires in Southeast Asia. The French, more stubborn than most, hung on in Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam until May 1954, when their departure left a Vietnam divided between the Communist North and a notionally democratic South.

The North's growing infiltration of the South, combined with a Communist insurgency in Laos and Cambodia, prompted the United States to step up its support for South Vietnam's president, Ngo Dinh Diem. In the late 1950s it progressed from training the new republic's army to deploying military advisers in the country, and by 1962 the arrangement had been formalized with the establishment of the Military Assistance Command (MAC). Within three years the number of US advisers had grown to twenty-seven thousand, and in March 1965 President Johnson's decision to commit combat troops to the war was symbolized by the landing of US Marines at Da Nang.

The first US Army nurses had arrived in 1956 to train the South Vietnamese and provide care for American military advisers. By the end of 1963 there were 215 nurses in the theater, working in mobile army surgical hospitals and evacuation hospitals in Vietnam and Thailand. Thereafter numbers began to rise.

Between 1963 and 1973, of the approximately 2.6 million US military personnel who served in Vietnam, some 5,600 were nurses in the army, navy, marine corps, and air force. Judith Baker Williams, an army nurse who served in the Sixty-seventh Evacuation Hospital in Qui Nhon, recalled:

Our battlegrounds were the Emergency Room, Operating Room, Post-Op, Intensive Care Unit, and Surgical Wards. We served our country with pride. We were the youngest and most inexperienced nurses ever to have been sent into a war zone, but nothing could have prepared us for what we saw and what we had to deal with. But we met the challenge; the survival rate for the seriously wounded was 83 percent, the highest survival rate of any war.

Military nurses in Vietnam had routinely to deal with men seriously wounded from vicious
punji
sticks, booby traps, claymore mines, and high-velocity bullets. The speed with which helicopters were able to convey wounded soldiers from the battlefield to a hospital placed an immense strain on medical personnel, who had to make instant triage assessments of each patient's chances of survival, often while under rocket and mortar attack.

In 1963, four of the navy nurses stationed at the US Naval Station Hospital in Saigon were the first military women to be awarded the Purple Heart after they cared for the victims of a car-bomb attack in spite of sustaining injuries themselves in the blast. The navy hospital that opened in Da Nang in 1966 was a regular target of rocket attacks and was shelled during the 1968 Tet offensive. In 1969 its operating rooms were in use around the clock.

USAF flight nurses were stationed in Saigon, and clinical nurses were placed in other locations in Vietnam and Thailand. The USAF hospital at Cam Ranh Bay was far from the fighting, and the greater part of its work was not focused on combat wounds, allowing many nurses to work regular shifts and to do voluntary work among the local Vietnamese. Air-evacuation duties were assigned to two teams: the Military Airlift Command, with sixty-seven nurses who escorted patients aboard Lockheed C-141 Starlifter aeromedical transport aircraft bound for the United States; and the Pacific Air Force (PACAF), which deployed fifty-four flight nurses on Lockheed C-130 Hercules multi-role transports flying to the Philippines, Okinawa, and Japan. When operating in areas that had not been secured, the nurses were armed and trained to fire an M-16 machine gun. For loading patients under enemy fire at Da Nang, First Lieutenant Jane A. Lombardi was awarded the Bronze Star.

Between 1965 and 1970, of 133,000 patients treated by US military nurses, only 2.6 percent died. Seven female army nurses died in the conflict. First Lieutenant Sharon Ann Lane, who was killed at work by an enemy rocket attack, was awarded a posthumous Bronze Star.

A number of advances in military nursing were made during the Vietnam years. In 1964, Margaret E. Bailey became the first African-American nurse to be promoted to the rank of lieutenant colonel and in 1970 was made full colonel. In 1964, married women were allowed to receive direct appointments into the regular army, and two years later male nurses were authorized commissions. In 1970, a married, pregnant officer was able to stay on active duty. In 1972 Alene B. Duerk, a veteran of World War II, Korea, and Vietnam, became the first navy nurse to be promoted to the rank of admiral.

In 1973, when the US military became an all-volunteer force, women made up only 2 percent of its personnel. Nevertheless, the way was now open for significant changes. For example, in 1979, Hazel W. Johnson, director of the Army Nurse Corps, became the first African-American officer in the entire military to reach the rank of general. In 1980, Captain Frances T. Shea became the first female navy nurse to command a naval hospital.

Global Operations, Kuwait and Iraq

In 1982 one female and two male army nurses were assigned to the United Nations peacekeeping force in Sinai. In October 1983, in Operation Urgent Fury, the invasion of the island of Grenada, the United States launched the first major military operation since the Vietnam War. Sixteen army nurses of the Fifth MASH and 307th Medical Battalion at Fort Bragg took part in Urgent Fury, and six received decorations. In 1984 a policy change permitted the deployment of up to two hundred nurses to support military units in the field. In December 1989, in Operation Just Cause, the US invasion of Panama and the toppling of its dictator, Manuel Noriega, army nurses of the 44th Medical Brigade, from Fort Bragg, were assigned to medical facilities in the theater.

In the 1980s, when the Cold War was at its height, US defense planners estimated that another thirty thousand military nurses, with experience across the medical spectrum, would be needed. The time when they might be needed seemed to have arrived in the wake of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 and the subsequent Persian Gulf War.

The planning and execution of the removal of Iraqi forces from Kuwait, in Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm, presented the US military with a series of new challenges for women. The successful mounting of both operations depended on the mobilization of reservists and the medical corps. Thousands of reservists, including female nurses, doctors, and surgeons, were deployed to the Persian Gulf. By February 1991, 2,265 army, 1,350 navy, and 336 air force nurses had landed in Saudi Arabia. They were to serve in forty-four hospitals, one of which, deployed on the Iraqi border, was farther forward than coalition troops when Desert Storm was launched on February 24.

In Desert Storm, medical personnel served in several different kinds of medical facilities: huge tents surrounded by sandbags; temporary, air-conditioned buildings quickly assembled from prefabricated materials; battalion aid stations nearer the front line, where injured soldiers were brought for assistance and evaluation of their wounds; and mobile army surgical hospitals (MASH units) located some fifty miles behind the front line and following the troops. Combat-support hospitals were located some hundred miles behind the front line and treated the local population as well as coalition military. Evacuation hospitals, established near airfields, provided care for soldiers awaiting aircraft to fly them for specialized treatment in Europe.

Medical care was also provided by the US Navy in the form of fleet hospitals and the hospital ship USNS
Comfort,
a former oil tanker and the third navy ship to bear that name. With 956 naval hospital staff, including 157 nurses, and 12 operating rooms,
Comfort
was capable of handling 1,000 patients.

In the buildup to Desert Storm, many chilling predictions were made about the use of chemical and biological weapons by the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and the inevitability of heavy coalition combat casualties. But in the face of overwhelming force, the Iraqi will to fight rapidly crumbled, and in the first hundred hours of fighting, some eighty thousand of Saddam's troops surrendered. Rather than dealing with mounting US casualties, medical personnel found they were coping with wounded Iraqi prisoners, accidental injuries, and medical problems caused by desert conditions, the most common of which was dehydration. One hospital treated eight thousand outpatients. In Desert Storm, the final death toll in all three US services was 148.

In previous conflicts, nurses usually remained well behind the battle lines. However, in Desert Storm at least one woman, Major Rhonda Cornum, an Army flight surgeon, went into enemy territory on a rescue mission. On February 27, 1991, Cornum and a seven-man flight crew flew by helicopter to extract an injured pilot who had come down some sixty miles behind the Iraqi border and had radioed for help. The helicopter was hit by ground fire and crashed in the desert, killing five of Cornum's comrades. The seriously injured Cornum became one of two US servicewomen taken prisoner during the Gulf War. Both her arms had been broken in the crash, and she was unable to fight off a sexual assault by one of her captors (for another American servicewoman in Iraqi hands, see
Lynch, Jessica,
Chapter 7). She and the other two survivors of the crash were released on March 6. She was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Purple Heart.