The Archive / Season 1, Episode 3
The Nurses of Vietnam
THE ARCHIVE Season 1, Episode 3: "The Nurses of Vietnam"
[ARCHIVAL NOTE: The following accounts are compiled from journals, letters, and oral histories of American military nurses who served in Vietnam between 1962 and 1973. Approximately 8,000 women served as nurses during the conflict. Eleven died in service—eight from hostile action. Their stories remain largely untold. We present these testimonies in their voices, as they experienced them.]
[TESTIMONY ONE] Lieutenant Sarah Mitchell, Army Nurse Corps Assigned: 3rd Field Hospital, Saigon Tour: March 1967 - March 1968
From her journal, April 14, 1967:
I've been in-country for six weeks. I thought I was prepared. Nursing school, trauma training, all those courses on battlefield medicine. I wasn't prepared for any of this.
They brought in seventeen casualties today from some place I can't pronounce. Ambush, they said. The boys came in on choppers, still covered in mud and blood and things I don't want to think about. One of them was holding his own intestines in his hands, trying to keep them inside. He was nineteen years old. He kept saying "I'm okay, ma'am, I'm okay, just patch me up." He died on the table.
The surgeons move from patient to patient without stopping. There's no time to stop. One finishes, the next begins. We nurses prep and clean and hand instruments and hold pressure on wounds and sometimes—too often—we hold hands while someone dies.
I'm supposed to be strong. We're all supposed to be strong. But I cried tonight, alone in my hooch, wrapped in a towel that smells like sweat and antiseptic. I cried until I couldn't cry anymore.
Then I got up, washed my face, and went back to work.
That's what we do here. We break, and we put ourselves back together, and we keep going. Because the choppers keep coming. The wounded keep arriving. And if we stop, they die.
[TESTIMONY TWO] Captain Rachel Torres, Navy Nurse Corps Assigned: Naval Support Activity Hospital, Da Nang Tour: June 1968 - June 1969
From a 1994 oral history interview:
People ask me what it was like. I never know how to answer. How do you describe a place where everything you learned about nursing gets thrown out the window? Where there are no clean rooms, no proper supplies, no time to follow procedures?
In the States, we'd prep a patient for surgery. Clean them, shave them, do blood work. In Vietnam? You cut off their clothes with trauma shears, pour saline on the wound, and pray.
The worst were the burns. We got a lot of burns. Napalm, phosphorus, things I'd never seen in any textbook. Skin that came off like wet paper. Boys screaming through gritted teeth because morphine wasn't enough for that kind of pain.
I remember one boy—couldn't have been more than eighteen—with burns over sixty percent of his body. He was conscious the whole time. Talking to me while I debrided his wounds, which means basically scraping off dead tissue. He talked about his girlfriend back home, his little sister, his mom's apple pie. He talked and talked and talked, and I realized he was doing it to stay sane. To have something to focus on besides what I was doing to him.
He died three days later. Infection. They almost all died of infection, the burn patients. But I remember what he said before he went: "Tell my mom I didn't cry."
He hadn't. Not once.
So I went behind the supply tent and cried for him.
[TESTIMONY THREE] Major Linda Washington, Army Nurse Corps Assigned: 12th Evacuation Hospital, Cu Chi Tour: August 1969 - August 1970
From her personal letters, October 1969:
Dear Mom,
I'm sorry I haven't written in a while. There's not much to say that I'm allowed to say, and what I'm allowed to say, I don't want to.
I miss home. I miss your cooking. I miss going to church on Sundays and having nothing more dangerous to worry about than whether the Johnsons' kids would behave during the service.
Here, Sundays don't mean anything. Neither do Mondays or Wednesdays or any other day. The wounded don't take breaks. The dying don't check calendars. We work when there's work, which is always, and we rest when there's no work, which is never.
The other nurses keep me going. We've become like sisters—closer than sisters, really, because we've seen things together that no one else would understand. We laugh at inappropriate times, cry at inappropriate times, and sometimes we just sit together in silence because there's nothing left to say.
One of my patients today asked me why I'm here. Why I volunteered, when I could be safe at home.
I didn't know how to answer him. I said something about duty, about wanting to help, about feeling called to serve. But the truth is more complicated than that. The truth is I'm here because someone has to be. Because these boys—these children, really—deserve someone who cares. Because if not me, who?
That's not a satisfying answer. But it's the only one I have.
Tell Daddy I love him. Tell the kids I'll bring them something from Saigon when I come home.
If I come home.
Your daughter, Linda
[TESTIMONY FOUR] First Lieutenant Amy Chen, Army Nurse Corps Assigned: 24th Evacuation Hospital, Long Binh Tour: January 1970 - January 1971
From her journal, March 15, 1970:
I delivered a baby today.
I know that sounds strange—what's a baby doing in a war zone? But she was a Vietnamese woman, a civilian, caught in crossfire and brought to our hospital because there was nowhere else to take her. She was seven months pregnant and bleeding badly. I thought for sure we'd lose them both.
But we didn't. After six hours of surgery and complications I won't describe, she delivered a tiny, perfect little girl. Three pounds, two ounces. Smaller than any baby I'd ever seen, but she was breathing on her own, crying her tiny cry, alive against all odds.
The mother survived too. She didn't speak English, and I don't speak Vietnamese, but when I put that baby in her arms, she looked at me with tears streaming down her face and said something I understood without translation.
Thank you.
It was the first time in months I felt like I was doing something other than watching people die. The first time I remembered why I became a nurse in the first place. Not to witness suffering, but to ease it. Not to be helpless, but to help.
I don't know what will happen to that mother and baby. I don't know if they'll survive the war, if they'll find somewhere safe, if that little girl will grow up to have a life worth living. But for one moment, in the middle of all this death, I helped bring something new into the world.
And that has to mean something.
[TESTIMONY FIVE] Captain Maria Santos, Air Force Nurse Corps Assigned: 93rd Evacuation Hospital, Bien Hoa Tour: May 1971 - May 1972
From a 2003 oral history interview:
The evacuation flights were the hardest.
We called them "Nightingale" missions—flying out the most serious cases, the ones who needed surgery or equipment we didn't have in-country. You'd load forty, fifty, sometimes sixty patients onto a C-141, and then spend twelve hours in the air trying to keep them alive long enough to reach a proper hospital.
I remember one flight—can't tell you the date, they all blur together—where we had this kid with traumatic brain injury. Fragment from a booby trap. Half his skull was held together with surgical wire. The doctors said he probably wouldn't survive the flight.
He survived.
I spent the entire twelve hours next to him. Monitoring his vitals, adjusting his oxygen, talking to him even though he couldn't hear me. Telling him about my hometown, my family, my favorite foods. Telling him he was going to make it because I needed to believe he was going to make it.
We landed at Travis Air Force Base, and he was still breathing. They rushed him to surgery. I collapsed in the terminal and slept for fourteen hours straight.
Three months later, I got a letter. From him. He'd survived. He'd recovered. He was learning to walk again, to talk again, to live again. He wrote to tell me that he remembered my voice—not the words, but the sound of it. He said it kept him anchored when everything else was slipping away.
I still have that letter. I read it whenever I start to wonder if any of what we did mattered.
It mattered. Every hour, every flight, every patient we kept alive long enough to get home—it mattered.
[TESTIMONY SIX] Lieutenant Colonel Patricia Hayes, Army Nurse Corps Assigned: Various locations, 1966-1973 Tour: Three consecutive tours
From her memoir, published 1998:
I did three tours. By choice, God help me, by choice. I kept extending because I couldn't bear the thought of leaving the nurses who came after me without someone who knew what they were walking into.
And I couldn't bear the thought of going home.
That's the thing they don't tell you about Vietnam. About any war, maybe. The going is hard, but the coming back is harder. How do you return to normal life after what you've seen? How do you make small talk at dinner parties when you spent the morning holding together a boy whose legs were gone? How do you care about traffic and TV schedules and whether the grocery store has your favorite brand of coffee?
I saw nurses come home and fall apart. Marriages ended. Careers imploded. Some turned to alcohol, some to pills, some to silence so deep they disappeared inside themselves. Nobody talked about PTSD back then—nobody admitted that nurses could suffer from it too. We were supposed to be caregivers, not casualties. We were supposed to heal, not be wounded ourselves.
But we were wounded. Every death we witnessed, every boy we couldn't save, every scream we heard in the night—those left marks. Invisible marks, but marks all the same.
I've spent thirty years trying to help other nurses understand that what they're feeling is normal. That guilt and grief and rage are natural responses to unnatural situations. That asking for help isn't weakness—it's survival.
Eight thousand women served as nurses in Vietnam. We came home to silence. No parades, no recognition, no acknowledgment of what we'd done or what it cost us. Just a world that wanted to forget the war and everyone who fought it.
But we remember. And now, finally, we're starting to tell our stories.
[TESTIMONY SEVEN] First Lieutenant Mary O'Brien, Army Nurse Corps Assigned: 91st Evacuation Hospital, Chu Lai Tour: September 1971 - September 1972
From her personal letters, final entry:
To whoever finds this,
If you're reading this, I didn't make it. Rocket attack, probably, or maybe a sniper got lucky. Either way, I want someone to know who I was.
My name is Mary Catherine O'Brien. I'm from Boston. I was twenty-four years old. I became a nurse because my mother was a nurse, and her mother before her. It's what O'Brien women do.
I volunteered for Vietnam because I believed I could help. Because all those boys going over there needed someone to take care of them. Because sitting home while they bled and died felt wrong.
I don't regret coming here. Not even now, writing this letter in case the worst happens. I've saved lives in this place. I've held hands while people passed and whispered words of comfort into dying ears. I've been present for moments of courage and compassion that I'll never be able to explain to anyone who wasn't here.
If I die, I want my family to know: I wasn't afraid. Okay, I was afraid—anyone who isn't afraid here is crazy—but I was also proud. Proud to serve. Proud to be here. Proud to be part of something bigger than myself.
And I want the other nurses to know: Keep going. Every shift, every patient, every day you show up and do your job—it matters. You matter. We all matter, even when the world doesn't notice. Even when no one says thank you. Even when we come home to silence.
We know what we did. That's enough.
Mary Catherine O'Brien First Lieutenant, Army Nurse Corps September 1972
Archival Note: Lieutenant O'Brien survived her tour and returned home in September 1972. She kept this letter, unsent, for twenty years before donating it to the Vietnam Women's Memorial archive. She worked as a civilian nurse until her retirement in 2005 and spent her later years advocating for recognition of women who served in Vietnam. She passed away peacefully in 2019, surrounded by family and fellow nurses she had served with over fifty years earlier.
The Vietnam Women's Memorial in Washington, D.C. was dedicated in 1993. It depicts three nurses and a wounded soldier, honoring the women who served. At its dedication, one veteran nurse said: "Finally, someone remembered that we were there."
Eight thousand women served. Their stories deserve to be told.
THE END