Oral History interview with "BJ" A. Kramer, 2015

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WOMEN VETERANS HISTORICAL PROJECT
ORAL HISTORY COLLECTION
INTERVIEWEE: "BJ" A. Kramer
INTERVIEWER: Therese Strohmer
DATE: 22 April 2015
[Begin Interview]
TS: Today is April 22, [2015]. My name is Therese Strohmer. I'm at the home of BJ Kramer in Lillington, North Carolina, to conduct an oral history interview for the Women Veterans Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina of Greensboro. BJ, would you like to state your name the way you'd like it to read on the collection?
BJ: BJ Kramer.
TS: You want—You don't want it as [Robertajo]—
BJ: No, no, no, no. Nobody would know that anyhow.
TS: Just BJ? Okay, we'll put it that way then. Well, let's start out then, BJ. Why don't you tell me a little bit about when and where you were born?
BJ: I was born [13 November 1942] in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania, and I was second child to Joseph and Mary Kramer. We lived on a farm for first couple of years, and then had another girl named Fran, and we moved to Allentown, which we might as well have stayed on the farm because we lived at the edge of town and there was all farmer's fields around us so we were still farmers at heart. Then my younger brother Joe was born. And I went to Catholic grade school at St. Francis [of Assisi School]. I went to Catholic high school at Central Catholic of Allentown and—
TS: What did your folks do for a living?
BJ: My mom—My mom had many jobs. [chuckles] My mom was—she was the coolest lady in the whole world. She was just a mother when Mary and I and Frannie were born, and then when Joey was born she had to get a job, so she worked at Kay Jewelers for many years, and then she worked at Hess's, which was a department store, for many years. And then they begged her at St. Francis 2
Grade School, if she would start a kindergarten because she was so good with the kids. And she stayed at the kindergarten.
My brother Joe was in her first class, and she had a little graduation thing for them with white caps and gowns. I was still in high school, and I used to go down—I was still in grade school; I was in the eighth grade when Mom started teaching. Anyhow, she taught there for many, many, many years. Most of the kids, when she got done, were already married and had kids. And the only reason why my mom stopped teaching was the rule came out, in order to be a kindergarten teacher you had to have a bachelor's degree. And Father Walters, the principal, tried so hard to figure out a way not to do that, because Catholic schools are private, and they wouldn't do it. So Mom said, "Well, I'm too old to go back to school, so I'm done teaching."
So she stopped kindergarten and she went back to being a retail person at Hess, which was a big department store at that time in Allentown. It was the only department store at that time in Allentown, and she stayed there until she came down here.
TS: Okay. How about your dad?
BJ: My dad went to transportation school. He wanted to go in the army so bad, back in—what was it?—World War II in '41 or '42? I slept through it, inside Mom. Anyhow, he wanted to go in the army so bad, but he had flat feet so they 4-F'ed him [classification used by military draft board to indicate registrant not acceptable for military service.]. He became a Civil Defense worker, he stayed in Civil Defense for about fifteen years, and he decided that he needed to get into a little bit something more. And he always loved trucks, so he and a friend of his got a pickup truck and started to do garbage pickup around the neighborhood. And about ten, fifteen years later, he and my dad owned Follmer Trucking Company, which is one of the biggest trucking companies in—on the east coast, up and down the east coast. And that's how I learned to drive tractor-trailers. And I wasn't even sixteen. But—
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: Well, what was that like—Go ahead.
BJ: When—When they retired, neither one of them ever stopped working, except they never got money. My mom and dad got more pleasure out of volunteering and taking care—my mom used to—my mom did [American] Red Cross and Meals on Wheels down here and she was eighty-six at the time. She would go around on Meals on Wheels to these people who were disabled, but they were in their sixties or seventies, and my mom would say to me—because I'd drive her, she didn't drive—and she'd say, "I feel so wonderful taking care of these older people." [chuckles] I'd just laugh at her. My mom and dad were givers all their life; they 3
just loved to give, never to get. I think that's one of the most beautiful things they gave to us, was to have more enjoyment in giving than in getting. And it's true. It's very true.
TS: Yeah. What kind of things did you do as a kid, like, for play?
BJ: Well, we made our own play stuff. [chuckles] My favorite thing was taking my daddy's pocket watches apart and putting them back together. And taking the washer—the wringer washer and dryer apart and trying to put it back together, stuff like that. My brother Joe and I were the best of friends growing up, got in the most trouble that you could ever think of. Mary and Frannie were sort of ladies and they did the knitting and sewing. And Joey and I played the stickball. It has to be in the archives because you can see me—they won't be able to see me, but that's okay. I'm a very skinny, flat-chested individual, and my favorite pastime was in the back alley with the boys playing stickball. And I was fifteen years old at the time. It's not like I was a young little nothing.
Anyhow, the boys all took their shirts off, so I did too, because it was hot playing stickball in the sun and running around. And my mom would come out and she'd holler, "Robertajo, get in the house now!" And she'd give me a lecture about why do I have my shirt off. And I'd say, "Because it's hot and all the boys have theirs off."
She says, "You are not a boy. You are a young lady. Put your shirt back on." And this would go on and—days and days, forever and ever, until I don't know. I still take my shirt off once in a while, don't make a darn bit of difference[?]. [both chuckle]
My daddy always said that as I was growing up and he would watch me walk down the street he never knew whether I was coming or going. So one night when I was sleeping, and I was back from Korea at that time, he wrote "Front" on my chest and "Back" on my back. So that people could tell whether I was coming or going.
TS: [chuckles]
BJ: Anyhow, we made our own toys. I loved woodwork. I built a lot of our kid's toys. I could make—Nowadays you can buy them at the store and it doesn't mean that much to me, but I would be able to make fire trucks, and little—you'd have to say "fire truck" on it. We played in the woods. We played jokes on neighbors. We played—My mom was the most beautiful but naïve person we ever met, and so obviously the four of us picked on her an awful lot—
TS: What kinds of things—
[Speaking Simultaneously]
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BJ: —out of real love. Out of love.
TS: What kind of jokes did you play?
BJ: Well, my mom—I [chuckles] wouldn't even be able to start to tell you some of them, it would take us all afternoon, especially the one that's priceless.
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: Just one, BJ. One story.
BJ: One story?
TS: One story.
BJ: Okay. My mom and dad are very, very Catholic. Very, very German, religious, okay? Us kids were born Catholic and we sort of knew what it was about, but didn't understand that. Okay. They were always friends of Father [Francis] Walters, who was the parish priest from the time we moved to Allentown he was still the priest at ninety-six years of age. Anyhow, my dad worked in the church, he took care of everything that he could for Father Walters. And of the nuns everywhere; taught all the nuns how to drive, which was very spooky; I went on a couple of them.
Anyhow, the most—most terrible thing that we did to my mom was, Father Walters always came over for holidays, and sometimes just during the week if he had a hard time. He would come over and he'd knock on the door and he'd walk in and he'd say, "Mary, Joe, are you there?"
And Mom would say, "I'm in the kitchen," or whatever. And Father Walters would come in and they'd sit there with their coffee cups filled with a little bit of beer, or a little bit of wine, or whatever. We knew it. They didn't have to use coffee cups.
Anyhow, it was Christmastime. We always, always, had a Christmas tree on the left hand side of the house that we'd gone and cut—the left side of the living room—that we'd cut down. We had a fake fireplace on the right side. Always had the nativity scene with Jesus on the little black sled, and just beautiful little greenery all around it. And Daddy would bring in his big old spotlight from the trucks and he would put the spotlight right on Baby Jesus.
Anyhow, to make it short, Father Walters—Oh, my mom had a problem with her bladder. She couldn't help it, so what we got for her birthday that year was a little potty that she could carry around with her all the time. And we had done something [funny—BJ added later]—And my mom had to go to the bathroom real bad, and we had two bathrooms, because there was six of us, and when Mom had to go she had to go. And she started to run upstairs and Frannie said, "Beat ya! I'm in the bathroom." 5
And then Joe went downstairs and said, "I beat ya! I'm in the bathroom." Mom didn't know what to do so Bobby says, "Go ahead and use the—use your potty." And she was on the landing. Well, what she didn't know was that Mary Beth was in the other end of the room taking Polaroid pictures.
TS: Oh no.
BJ: The first time we had Polaroid pictures. Anyhow, that was the end of it. We all laughed and thought that was the funniest thing in the whole world. Anyhow, Christmas Eve came, and Mom knew that Father Walters was coming over for wine. So did the kids. And in front of the manger with Baby Jesus laying there, we had put Mommy's Polaroid picture sitting on the landing, with the spotlight on it. And Father Walters knocked on the door and he said, "Mary, are you home?"
And she said, "Father, I'm in the kitchen. I'll be with you in a minute."
And he hollered, "Oh my God, Mary," he said, "this manger, it's really pretty. It's a little different from what I usually see."
And Mom said, "Well, the kids had a lot to do with it." Now, Mom has no idea what Father Walters is talking about because she didn't know we'd put the picture there.
And Father Walters said, "This is a pretty good picture of you from the shoulders up," he said, "but the bottom I'm not sure about."
And my mom's in the kitchen, she says, "Father, I'll be in in a minute. All I've got to do is dry my hands. I have no idea what you're talking about."
And when she came in, Father Walters was—he was eighty-two at the time—he was laughing his butt off and he says, "Mary, that is gorgeous with you and Baby Jesus and you're doing something that things only happen in nature." And that was the end of us kids for Christmas with my mother.
TS: Oh no. [chuckles]
BJ: Yes.
TS: I bet.
BJ: Yes. But he still had his wine, and after we got done hiding for two hours she forgave us, and stuff like that. Okay?
TS: [chuckles] Alright.
BJ: We did a number on my mom. But she loved us. And I danced with my mom. My mom and dad loved to waltz. They loved to dance. They went every Saturday night to the mountains where the oldies, Benny Goodman and them, used to come and play. And all of us kids had chores, and I loved to dance, and I knew my mom loved to dance, and what I would do was turn on waltzes real loud when it came time for me to do the dishes. And I'd say to my mom, "Would you please dance with me?" 6
And my mom and I are waltzing all around and she'd say to the other ones, forgetting whose turn it was, "Better get them dishes done."
TS: [chuckles]
BJ: I never did dishes. I danced with my mom.
TS: Well, tell me a little bit about school. How was school for you?
BJ: All school? Or nursing school?
TS: Well, before we get there, like elementary and going through high school, things like that.
BJ: It was great. I carried straight A's. They had a thing called detention, which you would—if you were bad in school you had to do little division tables and multiplying tables, and then you had to erase the boards and clean off the erasers before you could go home. I usually got home at night by suppertime, if that means anything.
TS: [chuckles] So you got in detention. What kind of stuff are you getting in trouble about?
BJ: Putting garter snakes in Sister Rose Theresa's pencil drawer that she was so proud of, and when she never—she never looked. She just put her hand in and she pulled out the first garter snake and that was detention for three weeks. I thought it was a little unfair. For fighting with the boys and making them cry, which I thought was sort of stupid; I wasn't crying, they were, and they were supposed to be boys. For breaking from class and going in a farmer's field. For hitting Sister Edward Elizabeth with a fast pitch on her head and knocking her out during recess.
TS: Was that on purpose?
BJ: Well, it slipped out of my hands because the night before she'd really hurt my knuckles at piano practice with her knitting needle. And I kept telling her, "My little finger don't go all the way down there," and she'd keep hitting it, because in those days nuns hit your knuckles with knitting needles to get your attention. They were not disciplinary.
TS: So you were getting her attention with the—
BJ: I just wanted to make sure she really knew how to play baseball, and she didn't because she was knocked out.
TS: [chuckles] 7
BJ: Broke the windows in the eighth grade throwing ice balls instead of snowballs. Stuff like that. Just little stuff.
TS: [chuckles] Yeah. But you got straight A's. Did you—
[Speaking Simultaneously]
BJ: Yes ma'am.
TS: Did you enjoy learning? Did you like—
BJ: No.
TS: Not really?
BJ: No. I never did homework.
TS: No?
BJ: I just listened.
TS: Yeah.
BJ: And homework to me was stupid because it was just what I'd heard that day. And whenever—before we had supper and could go to bed we had to do our homework, so I would design.
TS: What kinds of things would you design?
BJ: I would build buildings and build watches and cars and stuff like that. I'd just sort of doodle around.
TS: Right.
BJ: And—
TS: Well, did you have—
BJ: My mom would get very angry at me, and she said, "If you don't get anywhere in this life it is not my fault, it's yours," because they believed in choices.
TS: Right.
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BJ: You have two choices in life and that's do the right thing and be proud of it, or do the wrong thing and be a big enough person to take whatever consequences you had, and follow through with them. And they also were [hard and learning experiences—BJ added later]—They were not pushy parents. My mom and dad weren't pushy. My mom and dad, when we were in high school—because all four of us were in high school about the same time—they sat us—we always had family talks, and they sat us down one night and my mom and dad both said that no matter what we chose in life, even if all of us chose to be garbage collectors, it was fine with them as long as we were happy doing it and we did it the best that we could. And that would make them very, very proud.
TS: Well, what kind of choices did you think that you had as a young girl growing up in the—let's see—in the fifties and sixties, really? What did you think you could do after you were done with high school?
BJ: Well, I wanted to be a brain surgeon, because I loved—I loved drawing. I could draw a brain when I was six years old, with a cerebell[um]—I mean, the whole thing, with the little knuckles and everything. I loved—The brain fascinated me. And taking things apart and putting them back together just fascinated me. When I took my SATs [Scholastic Aptitude Test], I maxed my SATs as a mechanic, which did not really impress Mom and Dad too much. [chuckles]
TS: No.
BJ: I sort of—I sort of looked around at a little bit of everything, and I'm vertically disabled, which means I'm the runt of the family, very short, and the jobs that I wanted, which was to be a mechanic and work on my dad's trucks and stuff, they'd laugh at me instead of letting me try something. And I can really change a tire on a tractor-trailer. I can drive a tractor-trailer. I knew how to separate a tractor-trailer. But back then you had to be a girl. That was not a place for a girl. And so, the only thing left where you could take things apart and put them back together was being a doctor. And my dad said, "I've seen the watches. I've seen everything that you have taken back and put back together, and none of them ever worked again. Do you really want to be a doctor?"
I said, "No. I'll be a nurse and tell the doctors what to do."
TS: [chuckles]
BJ: And so, I went to nursing school. It was a three-year program down at St. Agnes [Hospital School of Nursing] in Philadelphia, which was a gorgeous place. It was run by the nuns. It was a little hospital in South Philadelphia.
TS: When did you start that, BJ?
BJ: I started that in 1960, right after I graduated. And it was not a hospital like anybody knows today, because back in those days Philadelphia was not big as a 9
city. And it was in the Italian section, and it was an es—like an estate castle that this very, very rich man in Philadelphia donated to the nuns to have a place to teach the nurses and have the patients stay there. The floors were made out of marble. The stairwells, when you go upstairs, were all—the stairs were all marble. There were marble pillars every—I mean, it was phenomenal.
TS: Was it all in one building or was there several?
BJ: It was all in one building, was the hospital, and then the—I don't know how anybody's going to take this, but the man was very rich, he was an Italian, and he had workers. They weren't slaves, but they were workers. And so—
TS: Like servant quarters?
BJ: Servant quarters, okay. Thank you very much. That's a really nice way of putting it. In the servant's quarters is where we had the nursing school.
TS: Okay.
BJ: And I tell you, if you want to learn how to be cheap, get taught by the nuns.
TS: [chuckles] Why is that?
BJ: If they told you you had to bandage something and you'd cut off a half an inch of tape when you really only needed a quarter of an inch, that was worth a detention after school. We called it "campusing" at the time.
TS: You had to be very frugal?
BJ: Very frugal, but very precise.
TS: Okay.
BJ: They—The most wonderful things about the school that I went to, that I really feel that the nurses nowadays don't have, the learning, and therefore can't say—to say to a patient sometimes, "I know how you feel." And that is—We had a class called Nursing Fundamentals, and that's exactly what it was; fundamentals. We learned how to put in a Foley catheter; how to put in an IV [intravenous; within vein], how to do an EKG [electrocardiogram], how to put a tube down your throat, how to shave somebody for prepping, on each other, so that every procedure that we would potentially have to do to a patient, one of our classmates did to us. And believe me, you didn't want the one that you called "pinhead" two weeks ago, or something like that, to be the one doing it on you.
TS: [chuckles] Right.
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BJ: And the nuns used to tell us, "Unless you really feel what you're going to tell that patient how they're going to feel, you are not being truthful." And I will nev—I've remembered that all my life. And it was very easy to say to somebody who was very apprehensive about having an NG [nasogastric] tube put down, which is very uncomfortable—That means you're getting a tube down your nose, down into your stomach, okay? And they did a lot of that in the old days.
Anyhow, it was a very good feeling to say to this person before you even started, "This is what I'm going to do. I know how it feels because I have had it done to me, and I will tell you a secret. As soon as I say 'Now' you take a deep breath, you swallow, and you'll never know what happened." And that's what I learned from the nuns teaching us the goodies about these different tests, and how you—
TS: Right. Really hands-on kind of training.
BJ: Yes, totally. Everything was hands on, because we didn't have EKG techs, and IV techs, and all this. We did our own stuff.
TS: Right. So tell me—
BJ: And we were notified that we were mechanics of nurses, once they decided to get the degree nurses in, who saw movies of the things we used to do. We were mechanics, the diploma nurses. Anyhow, go ahead, I'm sorry.
TS: No, it's okay, BJ. Do you want to tell me the story of how you ended up getting recruited?
BJ: Well, that's very interesting. I really enjoyed being a nurse. I have to—I'll tell you how I got recruited and then I'll tell you what happened to me. Anyhow, I became—There was five of us from Allentown that went to Philadelphia, and my dad would drive us down every Sunday night and take us all home every Friday night so we could spend the weekends at home. It was only fifty miles, even though it was an eternity back then because you couldn't go faster with what you had.
TS: So you're all from the same area?
BJ: Yeah, we were all from the same area, and their parents would go to my house and pick them up and take them home. Anyhow, after about ten weeks in school—if you remember I mentioned "campusing," which was when you did something wrong, and so therefore you had to stay? Well, ten weeks into nursing school—because my dad always came up to say hi—he'd say, "Are you ever going to get a weekend off, or are you working that hard?"
And I said, "Pop, they really need somebody to cover the weekends here because they don't have a whole bunch of nurses and they've got a whole lot of 11
patients." And of course the girls told him on the way home what I did wrong and why I was staying there. It was because I was being punished.
TS: [chuckles] Right.
BJ: And punishment it was. That was not a lie about taking care of the patients, because "campusing" meant you didn't get your days off, so therefore you spent your weekends working on the wards in the hospital. Anyhow, one Saturday four or five of us got "campused" from Allentown, and my dad was called and—said, "Don't even bother coming down because nobody's going home." And we sort of went to the little Italian restaurant that we knew, and they treated us like their kids, and it wasn't such a big deal in those times. We had some pizza and lots and lots and lots of beer. And as we were walking up Broad Street to Mifflin [Street], we saw this handsome, beautiful, adorable, in a uniform, phenomenally-looking army man. I mean, he was gorgeous. We were drunk. He was gorgeous.
Anyhow, we decided to talk to him, Brenda figuring she could get a date, the other ones were figuring, well, maybe they can date him afterwards or whatever. Anyhow, we started talking to him, and he started telling us all about the Army Nurse Corps and how phenomenal, and how great it was, and the experiences. And us five drunks were just shaking our heads going, "Yes, Yes, Yes." And before we left him we signed our pieces of paper that said, "Yes, at the end of school we did want to go in the Army Nurse Corps for two years," because the army would pay for our schooling. We would be juniors and seniors and yet the army would pay for that and we would be E1 [private]s.
When we sobered up and saw what happened, we went down to him and told him we wanted to take it back. And he said, "Ladies, as far as I know, I thought you all were in for it." So we decided it was kicky[?] and yeah, we were in for it, so what did we do next? And he said, "Well, you're all under age, so therefore I won't tell your parents you were drunk if you figure out how to tell your parents that they've got to sign that you all can go in the army."
That was a trip because we were so drunk and we had no idea what the Army Nurse Corps was. We didn't even know it existed. All we knew was that this good-looking man existed. Anyhow, Mom and Dad signed for it.
TS: After he had talked to you and you had sobered up, did you start thinking about it and—
BJ: No.
TS: You're just like, "Oh."
BJ: No. We just knew that the army might call us. We figured maybe. Well, the army called us all right. As soon as we graduated, we had to do our state boards, and I missed a year because state boards are—were extremely hard in those days, and I was heartsick because I had maxed my entire state board except I—pediatrics was 12
my favorite. I loved kid; loved kids. And I missed my pediatrics score by one point. And it would be another year before I could —
TS: Take them again?
BJ: Take my state boards again. So I still got my E1 pay, and I was still an enlisted person, but I couldn't be considered commissioned in the Army Nurse Corps yet. Anyhow, so I worked for a year, and my mom and dad were so proud of me, because at the end of nine months I got fired for improper behavior, disrespect, and just sort of out of line.
TS: Where were you working?
BJ: I was working at Allentown hospital at the time. I was working on the ward that nobody wanted. I was working evenings and nights and I met this really nice nurse who was also okay for evenings and nights. Our patients were up on the eighth floor—seventh floor—because they were from the nursing homes, okay? They were not paid—paying patients, and they were very sick. A lot of them were diabetics, a lot of them were not really with us. And me and my friend felt so bad about the way these ladies—the ladies were on the one side and the men were on another ward, okay? And we were really depressed at seeing how the other shifts treated these people like they weren't anything. And so, we started calling them—rather than their last name, it was Lady So—and Lady Diane. I'll never forget Sarah[?] Brown. Sarah Brown was—she was a little black lady, she was ninety-two years old, and I just loved her to death. But anyhow, that's Sarah. But they did a lot of things against Sarah.
Anyhow, we started football games at bedtime. And football games at bedtime meant that they had to either be in a wheelchair, or if they could stand, stand at the bottom of their bed and their nightgowns would be the football, and they had to catch it in order to say that they were ready for bed. They loved the football games. And then we would—back then they had the old canvas carts with the wheels on them, for the old dirty laundry. We would take the dirty laundry out of them, put the old ladies into them and run them all over the hospital, up and down. Oh my God, they were so happy. They were so happy.
Anyhow, we had a little young doctor there named Doctor Rader[?], and Sarah Brown and I had had this relationship. She was more evil than I was. And we had this—there was this little doctor, I'll never forget him, Dr. Rader. He was a baby-faced, brand new doctor. And I said to Sarah, I said, "This guy's going to come in here," I said—and Sarah was a very dark black, skinny, teeth hanging out, gorgeous woman. I loved how her eyes sparkled. Anyhow, I said, "He's going to come in and examine you."
And she said, "When BJ?"
I said, "Probably around visiting hours."
She said, "Am I going to be okay?"
I said, "Depends on how okay you want to be."
She said, "You going to be here?" 13
I said, "Yes."
She said, "I'll be okay," and she just winked her eye.
Dr. Rader comes in. Visiting hours was no big deal on that ward because we very rarely had maybe one or two visitors. But anyhow, it just so happened that this one lady's children, who really didn't care about her, came in to visit her, and she was at the end of the hall. Dr. Rader went behind—through the curtain, went behind the curtain and he said—you could hear him, there's no partition or anything, just curtains. It was a long, open ward. And he said, "Mrs. Brown, I have got to do a little physical on you, and I'm not going to hurt you or anything."
And we heard, "Oh Doctor, that's okay." And the next thing you hear is, "Oh, oh, ooh, that feels so good! Over here, over here. No down there, now. Oh, oh my good—oh, you're—oh, you're so good! Oh, BJ. You ought to meet this doctor. Oh he—touch me right there. Right there, right there, right there."
And out from this curtain comes this baby-faced, tomato beet red—I walked up to him and I said, "What did you do to Mrs. Brown?"
And he said, "Honest to God, all I did was put my stethoscope on her back. I'll be back later for rounds," [laughs] and he ran—I mean, sort of stuff like that.
TS: [chuckles]
BJ: And on Saturday nights when Ellie[?] and I were both on—because Ellie would be on the men's ward and I would be on the women's ward—we had parties. The supervisors never came up to us because we weren't anything. And so, we would bring the men over, introduce them to the ladies, and we had ward parties for our entire shift. And then—
TS: I'm going to have to get you into the Army Nurse Corps. [chuckles]
BJ: I'll be in the Army Nurse Corps in one minute. I've just got to tell you that we conned one of the doctors—because everybody before us were giving these old folks sleeping pills.
TS: Right.
BJ: They didn't need sleeping pills. So we got orders for every one of them, even the diabetics ,because we took off the tray what we had to, in order for them to—every night we had "shot night," and every one of our patients, male and female, had a shot of bourbon, and went sound asleep until the morning. I won't say anything more.
TS: Did that have anything to do with maybe you not being able to stay there?
BJ: My mom and dad got a copy of the letter as to why—I told you I was fired because I was not professional, number one. I was disorderly, disruptive, I had no feelings for the patients and their care because I did not follow the hospital rules, 14
blah blah blah blah blah. And they put it all in the letter. My mom framed it. I still have it. She carried it with her forever for God's sake. She kept—She said, "That was the best firing letter I've ever read in my whole life. I'm so proud of you." That was my mom and dad.
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: So you took your boards—
BJ: And the most horrible thing was—the reason why I was fired was because Sarah Brown had never seen a white baby born, and I knew some of the kids in the nursery and I took her down to the delivery room so that little Sarah Brown, before she died, could see a white baby being born. And she just thought that was phenomenal. And I put her back in the linen thing, put the sheet back on, and got caught in the elevator with her in the sheet and the basket going back up to the ward, and where were we, and stuff like that.
TS: You didn't hide her good enough.
BJ: No. That was my—that was the hot spot of my firing. But Sarah Brown never forgot till the day she died that she saw a baby—white baby being born.
TS: Yeah.
BJ: And what more could you ask for in life?
TS: Right. No, there you go.
BJ: Okay, I'm done. Where do we go next?
TS: You took your boards, and you passed.
BJ: Yes ma'am, I passed. I surmounted all of them.
TS: And you owed the army how many years?
BJ: Two years.
TS: Two years.
BJ: Yes.
TS: Let's talk a little bit about that. Now, you're—you went to Fort Sam Houston [Texas]? 15
BJ: I went to Fort Sam Houston—
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: What was that like?
BJ: —for basic training. It was the most wonderful, exciting time in my life because back then they really did basic training. We had to walk for twelve miles every morning. We truly were—Yeah, we had some classes but we spent most of the time out in the field. We had triage-type stuff where people would teach us—they made fake patients and we had to triage them and get them ready. We learned how to operate with the DUSTOFF [military call sign for emergency patient evacuation of casualties; also a backronym for Dedicated Unhesitating Service to Our Fighting Forces]—at that time they called them DUSTOFF — the helicopters and the patients and stuff. We learned how to fly with a patient. We learned the military way, which—I mean, they had a whole bunch of rules and regulations, which I thought it was very great, I love discipline, but I also feel that for every rule there's a way a rule can be broken. But we learned. We learned. And—
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: Well, I've been around you—
BJ: —we did a lot of marching.
TS: A lot of marching.
BJ: A lot of marching on the quad. We marched everywhere on the quadrangle.
TS: Was there anything that was particularly difficult for you to do in the training at the beginning?
BJ: Be good.
TS: To be good. [chuckles] To follow the rules?
BJ: Yes ma'am. Yes.
TS: That was the hardest thing?
BJ: That was about the hardest thing. 16
TS: Was there anything that you really enjoyed?
BJ: Everything. Everything. Everything. Especially when we were out in the field, because we never—when we were out in the field for weeks, I mean, we were in the field; we were in tents, we were—just like camping.
TS: That's what you liked to do.
BJ: I love the out-of-doors, and we had to build—find stuff to build our own fires. We had—We would—When the sun went down they gave us our compass, our flashlight, drove us someplace blindfolded [sound of alarm clock ringing] and said, "Find your way home." Let me—just a minute.
TS: [unclear] wake you up. Okay. So you liked everything.
BJ: I loved everything.
TS: And now, when you were going through did you get to fill out, like, a dream sheet that said, "Here's the places I'd like to go," or anything like that?
BJ: Not back then, man.
TS: No?
BJ: No. You do now, but back then it was, "You are going here, you are going here, you are going here."
TS: Where did you end up going the first time?
BJ: My first time I went to—
TS: I've got your list here.
BJ: —Fitzsimons [Army Hospital] in Denver, Colorado. Worked in the emergency room, found out that was the love of my life, but I wanted to find—
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: The emergency room?
BJ: —other things also, but the emergency room was—that was it, man. All that trauma and stuff, and patching them up, and seeing them smile and laugh and be all cleaned up instead of—whatever. 17
TS: So it was, like, exciting?
BJ: It was exciting. And it kept your mind going, because every patient that came in was different. One was medical, one was surgical, one was having a baby, one was this, so you had to really think in your head all the time, what you learned in school and bring it in, bring it in, bring it in.
TS: Do you feel like your schooling prepared you for what you were doing in the army?
BJ: Oh my God, yes.
TS: Did it?
BJ: Yes. Those nuns prepared you for everything.
TS: Did they?
BJ: And my dream before I got out of the army, which I hoped would never come, would be the taking care of soldiers. I mean, soldiers at war, because that's why I wanted to be an army nurse. I wanted to take care of soldiers. And a lot of what we had at the time was just automobile accidents, and gunshot wounds, and dependents having babies. And I would never go in labor and delivery, I'll tell you that. Blechhh [makes vomiting sound]
TS: You didn't want to do that.
BJ: Oh my God, no. OB [obstetrics]? Man, I'd pass that on to the next nurse who came in before you ever thought about it.
TS: [chuckles] Gunshot wounds, yes. Babies, no.
BJ: That's right. You've got it, man.
TS: Well now, did you volunteer for your next assignment in Korea?
BJ: Yes, I did, because at that time Korea was the most remote, in my mind, because everybody was going to Germany, and Italy, and that's another big city, man. I ain't no city girl. Anyhow, so Korea came up, and I said, "That's where I want to go," so I went to Incheon, Korea at the 121st Evac [Evacuation] Hospital. That was an experience in itself, and anybody who is listening to this in the 2000s will never understand why it was an experience, because back in the sixties there was no Seoul, Korea. Seoul, Korea—Yes there was a capital, but Seoul, Korea consisted of one American restaurant that served spaghetti, a couple of Japan—Korean restaurants, and a little building that had all these markings on it, and that 18
was the mayor. They still had honey wagons, and I know—a honey wagon; nobody's even going to know what I'm talking about. A honey wagon is that the Koreans used cow dung pads to heat their buildings, and believe it or not, it does not stink. Anyhow, they'd pick up the circular pads, they'd stick them in their wagons when they're dry—which has a long—it's a square little box, big high wheels taller than me, and little handles in the front—and they'd stand in the middle of the handles and they'd just truck down the road picking up cow pads
Anyhow, it was an exciting experience that—it was people living off the land. We watched rice paddies grow. We were able to do anything. We were able to get off the compound, until the Gary Powers incident—the spy plane.
[Francis Gary Powers was a U-2 reconnaissance pilot for the CIA. His plane was shot down over Soviet airspace on 1 May 1960. Powers ejected, was captured by the Soviet military, and held prisoner for two years]
Then we were confined, even though I was supposed to go home the next day, we were confined for four more months. But anyhow, I loved the way of life. I loved their way of faith, even though it was Buddha. But it was a connection with the afterworld. They had no concept whatsoever of this life because it did not really exist. The afterlife is what they lived for.
My saddest situation was their treatment of the boys. We had a boy-san ["san" is a polite honorific attached to a person's name or title, coined by U.S. soldiers in Japan after World War II] who—a truck had run over his leg. It was smushed [smashed] so bad that we had to cut it off. The father would not take him home. We found a way of making—back then the only prosthesis we had in Korea was the type where—the pirate guy, you put something around the stump and you put a peg on it so he can walk and work and do whatever he wanted to. He was so proud of it. He was about thirteen years old, he was so proud of it. We had worked with him for, oh, I guess about three or four months and we got word that—from one of our mama-sans, because mama-sans took care of our washing and our uniforms and stuff like that. And they used to call me "skoshi" because "skosh" means little, and they'd never seen anybody so small, or a girl who cut her hair so short, because I couldn't stand putting them up in rollers and all that crap. I just wanted to wash it, dry it.
Anyhow, we got word through the mama-sans that they would like us to go to the funeral of a little thirteen-year-old boy. And I asked what his name was and they said it was Toshan[?]. And I said, "What happened to Toshan?" He went out in the rice paddies. Daddy had kept the stump away from him and said "Work." And he couldn't work in the rice paddy with one leg so Daddy killed him. So that is another culture.
The learning from the military and the experiences are phenomenal. How they believe in one thing so hard, and yet, to me—which to them is not cruel because you have to have a boy child. Boy child has to work, right? Or he's no good. And to believe one way so strong in the afterlife, and the other way so 19
strong in this life, about where you stand, and where you are, and where your worth is. Obviously women were always worthy, but they were forty-seven thousand floors down below the men because they were worthy for cleaning, cooking, making babies. The men were the breadwinners.
TS: Let me have you back up just a little bit. You talked about Gary Powers, and the timeframe on that for me—Gary Powers—what incident are you talking about? What happened, actually, to keep you—
BJ: He flew—They thought he was a spy plane—It did not affect Korea, it affected the world, because who did he fly over? China, Russia?
TS: Well, because Gary Powers, actually, I thought, was in '60, 1960.
BJ: No, no, no.
TS: So this was something later.
BJ: No, this was a later incident where—
TS: Somebody flew over.
BJ: It was somebody that flew over. All the forts and bases in the United States at that time, and it had to be—
TS: Well, who was president at that time?
[Speaking Simultaneously]
BJ: Sixty-three, '64.
TS: Okay. So that was—
BJ: I don't know. I don't even know who's president now. Who was president then?
TS: Well, you might have remembered [President John Fitzgerald] Kennedy.
BJ: Well, I know Kennedy; I know Kennedy's time. Kennedy was when I was in nursing school.
TS: Yes. Do you remember when he was assassinated? Where were you at?
BJ: Probably Kennedy was the one that was president at the time.
20
TS: Yeah.
BJ: John F. Yeah.
TS: But do you remember when he was assassinated?
BJ: Yes, I do. I was driving my '53 Ford home from work. I had a flat tire. I had my music blasting on the radio as I changed my flat tire, and they broke in to say that John F. Kennedy had been shot. At that time they didn't say he was dead. And I sat beside the road and cried my eyes out before I could go back to changing my tire, because I admired that man. He was the best president we ever had. And many people will probably disagree with me, but I think [William "Bill" Jefferson] Clinton was second, and other than that I don't think we've had a good president since Eisenhower and the rest of them way behind, because they were people-oriented, not—
TS: Right.
BJ: I think that if Kennedy—I think Kennedy was destined to die because I feel strongly that Kennedy was before his time. We weren't ready for a Catholic president. We were still into Catholic, Protestant, Baptist, Jewish, this type of thing. Same thing we're going back to, which is the worst thing we could be into. Anyhow.
TS: Well, you described some things that happened while you were in Korea. What were your living conditions like?
BJ: In Korea we lived in tents.
TS: You did?
BJ: Yes ma'am. And that's how I learned that cow dung don't stink because the summers were very, very hot. Now, the Koreans had not figured out how to air condition us. Obviously, the army didn't care. So you were sweating all the time. But in wintertime, and during monsoon season, you could freeze to death in those tents. And we had a mama—a papa-san that would come in, and we had four silver—they were like a silver base, and then like a funnel of tin that would come up and go across to the middle section of our tent—there was, I think, forty of us that were—thirty or forty of us that stayed in the tent. We had cots on both sides, okay? And this thing went down the middle. There was another pot in the middle and another pot at the other end.
They would come in and put these cow dung pods in there, and of course the first thing us American females did was run out the other end of the tent because when he lit that, we don't want to be there when he lights a cow dung. We stayed outside. He was laughing and laughing and laughing, and he kept coming out and saying, "No smell, no smell, no smell." And it was so damn cold we went 21
back in. He was right. There was no smell from that cow dung. Those three things kept that huge GP [general purpose] tent warm all night and all day. One cow dung patty, which is probably about two inches thick and about six and a half inches wide, will last almost twenty-four hours. It does not give off flame; it only gives off heat. They put a little bit of straw on the top for a flame to start it, and then it's just heat. There's no flame; it's just heat.
TS: Kind of like a charcoal?
BJ: Yeah, I guess so.
TS: Something like that.
BJ: Anyhow, it was so cold in Korea that in the wintertime you wore every bit of clothing you had, to include your field jackets and everything, at nighttime in bed with your army blanket covering you.
TS: Did you enjoy your time in Korea?
BJ: I loved Korea. I loved every place. I loved Korea because—I never got—I'm not good with languages so I learned to say "yeoboseyo" which means hi or goodbye, and I learned to say 'kamsahamnida,' which means thank you very much, and "skosh," which means very small. That's it. That's the end of my—
TS: [chuckles] Did you eat any of the Korean food? Did you enjoy—
BJ: I ate bulgogi and I loved it, which was rice—cooked rice with an egg on top with steak on top—until somebody opened their mouth and told me that that was not steak, it was dog. That was the end of bulgogi. I never got kimchi [fermented vegetables] past my nose, whether it be summer kimchi or winter kimchi. And if you went to—We didn't have bathrooms over there, you had slit trenches, and if you followed anybody into a slit trench that had just got done eating this stuff—or had a patient who had it for lunch—because they ate their own food as patients, and oh my God—
TS: It's not pleasant?
BJ: It's not pleasant. Matter of fact, the first time I emptied a bedpan on a beautiful—I loved those people. I loved everybody I met. There's always something neat about somebody that you remember, and I can't believe that I remember some of their names forty-some years ago—no, that was fifty, sixty years. Anyhow, she—I was a nail biter, all the way down to my knuckles. I bit my nails like you wouldn't believe. My mom tried everything. She put pepper on my fing—ever since I was a kid, I bit them all the way down to my knuckles. I emptied a bedpan one time after Kim Ho was done. When I took it to the slit trench I got something on my fingers as I swung it down, and my first, first thing was to put that finger in my 22
mouth to bite my nail and I've never bitten my nails since, because every time I think of biting my nails I think of Kim Ho.
TS: [chuckles] Well, it kind of took that habit away from you.
BJ: Yes, it did. It was a very good habit to take away.
TS: Well, after Korea, from what we talked about earlier, you went back to Fitzsimons. So that was like around '67.
BJ: That was—yeah.
TS: Sixty-seven. I didn't stay long at Fitzsimons. I worked on the amputee ward, and I loved it. Most of it though, again, was civilians at that time. We were starting to get some people in from Vietnam, but those people really weren't from Vietnam because we didn't have any military in there at that time; those secrets everybody keeps.
Anyhow, it amazed me to watch what the doctors, the ortho—it was considered, Fitzsimons at that time was considered an orthopedic GU[?] facility, and the way that they retrained the amputees—especially the legs, but they also did the arms—the legs, was to take them up on ski slopes and let them learn the extensor/flexor type thing. And taking them up on ski slopes was so safe because what are you going to do? Fall on a pound—powdered snow? You're not going to hurt yourself like you would a parking lot or gymnasium. And those guys, just to get the feel—you could tell every time a first-timer walked into the hospital after a day on the slopes. He was no longer an amputee, he was a ski individual. And I had a doctor that I really loved at that time, and I wanted to try out the operating room but I really didn't know much about the operating room except that—I have to go back to my school days. Can I do that real quick?
TS: Yeah, of course.
BJ: I could never in nursing school understand anatomy and physiol—anatomy, okay? I could never put stomach, gall bladder, spleen, intestines, bowels, and all this stuff into into—picture it in my body. I could not do that. It made no sense to me. And one of the nuns said to me, "If you want to learn anatomy, you either give up your lunch or you take your lunch with you, and I'll take you for the first time." And you know where I went? I went to the morgue. I watched autopsy after [sound of clock chiming]—There it goes. It's okay. It's my house; it's my clock. It can ring.
TS: It's okay. We can keep talking.
BJ: It was phenomenal how God put all that stuff just where it was supposed to be. And I learned every part of where everything was. I didn't throw up, not even the first day. I didn't eat my sandwich the first day, but I didn't throw up. But after 23
that I got to know the pathologist and I got to feel the organs and stuff like this. It just amazed me more than taking a watch apart and putting it back together again. Anyhow, that's how I learned anatomy. Had I not had Sister Philomena take me down and have me go to the morgue for my lunch to watch autopsies and to learn—and it took me quite a few lunches before I could still really get that into my body and know where it's at—I probably would have flunked out of school and I probably would have never been a nurse, because anything that doesn't make sense to me, until I can make sense of it, either drives me nuts or I have to get it away, and I would never have been a nurse.
TS: So you're pretty hands on [unclear].
BJ: I'm very hands on. Everything I do is hand—I'm not a—I'm not—My friend Pat who lives up the road is a nurse. That lady knows the heart as if she was God and made the heart. And every part of everything. She loves it. She understands it. Me? No. But she reads and reads and reads. I don't. I didn't read in school. I learned—Even today, everything I learn is by imagining in my brain, putting it on a paper at least thirty, forty, fifty times. It will take me two months to do one project because I change my mind too many times because the first one don't look right. Same—
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: So you just, kind of, have to organize it.
BJ: Same thing with learning. I learn by touch, by feel. I learn to put—If you gave me a bicycle and said, "Here's your instructions, written down. Put it together." I could not do it. If you said, "This is a bicycle. This one's together—or this is a picture of it together," I'd have it put together in five minutes.
TS: Right.
BJ: I have to visualize it.
TS: So then you're at Fitzsimons, but you said you didn't stay there long.
BJ: No.
TS: Why's that?
BJ: I volunteered to go to Vietnam.
TS: Why'd you want to go to Vietnam?
24
BJ: I wanted to take care of the soldiers. That's what I went in the Army Nurse Corps for—
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: Oh, like you said earlier.
BJ: —to take care of those soldiers. I told my mom and dad—my granddaddy at that time—my dad's dad—was the only one that knew that I volunteered to go to Vietnam and he was very proud of me. Everybody else felt so bad because I was "sent" to Vietnam. And I kept on saying, "I can handle it. No big deal."
TS: You didn't want them to know that you volunteered?
BJ: I did not want them to know at that time that I'd volunteered to go to Vietnam, only my granddaddy.
TS: How did they all feel about you being in the Army Nurse Corps?
BJ: They were proud of me. Every assignment I went to my mom and dad would pack up and come visit. Either moving in or moving out, they were always there. I have a picture that if you can take of it I'll—I never got rid of it. It's the picture of my mom and dad, and me in the middle with my little case, heading for basic training at the airport—at the Allentown airport going to San Antonio, Texas in a two-propeller job airplane. They're proud people. They're proud of all their kids. My mom and dad are sitting up there right now saying, "We love you all. We're proud of all of you."
TS: Well, tell me a little bit about Vietnam, maybe even getting over there. What was that like?
BJ: Well, getting over there was a trip and a half.
TS: Yeah, usually is. I have a lot of stories about getting there.
BJ: I don't have that many stories about getting over there as I could fill all of the today and all of tomorrow and the next day telling you verbatim about Vietnam, because it was—and I know this sounds very stupid—very cold, I guess, but it was the most rewarding, loving, learning, life-blowing experience that I've ever had in my life. And if anybody would say to me right now, "We know you're forty-two years old now" —which is what I am right—I'm forty-two—
TS: Always forty-two.
25
BJ: Always forty-two. That they would say, "We need somebody to go to Russia, or to go to Ukraine, and help those people," I'd be the first one on the airplane. As soon as I had somebody that I know would love and care for my dogs till I came back, if I came back. That's where it's at in the Army Nurse Corps. That's where I would be today.
TS: Taking care of soldiers.
BJ: Taking care of soldiers. Because one of the things that I learned very, very early on in the army—and a lot of my nurse—those that knew me in the nurse corps when I was in the army, knew my feelings, okay? And that was—My greatest professional respect was for the enlisted people. The officers, quote, "had the brains." That's a fallacy. The officers could direct you and tell you what to do. That's a fallacy. The nurses do all of this and they do that; that's a fallacy.
The workers in the United States Army, whether it be medical, tank, armor, or anywhere, is E-1 Joe Schmuck all the way up to E-9 John Smith—who I love to death and I have a picture of me and my rocket that did not go off, in front of our hospital in Vietnam. He was our first sergeant. I admire every enlisted person in the army. I can't—I'm not going to tell you I don't admire my nurses and the ANC [Army Nurse Corps] officers.
Back then, them ANC officers worked just as hard as their enlisted people did. We didn't have desks and computers and books. If you didn't—We didn't have the machinery that they have now. You could—You could listen to somebody say, "I took his EKG two hours ago and it really looked okay, but I have a feeling. Look at him in twenty minutes." and in twenty minutes you could look at this guy and say, "Boy, he's going down. We need a doctor now. We're doing something wrong," because you didn't rely on the machine. You had to rely on the touch, the feel, and the look of the patient, okay? And that's what us nurses did. We touched. We felt. We could tell long before a machine could that this one's going to get better, or not get better; he's hurting here, he's not hurting here.
And your corpsmen back in them times—we had 91A's, 91B's, and 91C's. The 91A is a 91 Alpha ["A" in the military phonetic alphabet], equivalent to—not even an aide in a hospital today. He would be less than that. A 91B would be equivalent to the LPN [licensed practical nurse] that you have today. The 91C—the aide that you have today. The 91 Charlie ["C" in the military phonetic alphabet] was the LPN of the Army Nurse Corps—of the army corps. Those were the guys that were out in the fields, the medics during the wars and the ambushes, and risking their lives, and going on the DUSTOFFs, and going with all the teams. And it—They were the ones that earned all our respect. I mean, we did a lot. Yes, we took care of our patients. Yeah, we had a hard job too, in that if you ever talk to an individual who has been in the field—I did. He told me. He was on my ward—or in my ER, and I did not know it when I was in Vietnam. But I met him years afterwards when I had retired. How these people remember you I don't know. But this guy did, and he wasn't the only one.
He said to me, "Yes, we go into firefights. We put our lives on the line. We see awful things as our buddies get shot up, yes." He said, "But then we go 26
back to base camp. We take a break, we take a shower, sit around shooting the bull. And then you go out again." He said, "We go out in spurts." He said, "You girls don't do that. You sit in the ER and on those wards, 24/7." He said, "When I came in that one day, "he said, "you were up to seventy-two hours because it was Tet [Offensive]—" And during Tet I turned twenty one and I figured Tet was—I thought the Viet Cong were having a birthday party for me, see, with all the rockets going off, which is my personal, private joke. But during Tet the DUSTOFFs never stopped. They never stopped, they never stopped. They just kept coming in and we didn't have that many people, and those in the OR [operating room] had to sleep. Us in the ER, between a little lull, could sleep in our chair. And I loved the enlisted people. Do you know what they did to me on my 70th hour? I'm an open mouth sleeper. They had a lottery going as to how many coffee stirrers—or tongue depressors they could put in my mouth before I woke up. And the guy that had twenty-eight was the closest because they had thirty.
[The Tet Offensive was launched on 30 January 1968 by the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese People's Army of Vietnam against the forces of the South Vietnamese Army of the Republic of Vietnam, the United States, and their allies. The offensive lasted several months and inflicted heavy casualties on U.S. and South Vietnamese forces.]
TS: [chuckles]
BJ: I was about to choke to death but—
TS: Well, let me ask you—
[Speaking Simultaneously]
BJ: A lot of it is good and a lot of it is bad but you had to have the good; you had to have the humor in order to put up with the bad.
TS: Can you describe a little bit about when Tet started? What was that like?
BJ: Well, normally every morning we got woken up at six o'clock with three rockets.
TS: Where were you at?
BJ: I was in Chu Lai, which was right below Da Nang. It sat right on the top of the South China Sea, and my dream was to come back, buy that property, and put a casino up there and make millions of dollars. I'm sure somebody beat me to it.
27
TS: Probably. When did you get to Vietnam?
BJ: I got to Vietnam in '68. I can't tell you the month. I'm sure it's in my records someplace.
TS: That's really the beginning of the year then?
BJ: Yeah, because it was before Tet started.
TS: Okay, so probably the very beginning of the year.
BJ: We—
TS: So you're woke up by rockets—
BJ: We were located—
TS: Okay.
BJ: I've got to give you a little bit of—
TS: Okay.
BJ: —of location, okay? Because it pertains to Vietnam and my life and a lot of others. We were located right on the sea, okay? We were located—Right to our left was MAG-12 [Marine Air Group 12], which was a Marine jet bomber base. To our right was Marine Corps MAG-13, okay? To our front was the South China Sea. To our rear was Americal headquarters [the U.S. Army's 23rd Infantry Division, known as the Americal Division], okay?
I did not go over with an active army group. I went over with the 312th Evac Hospital, which is a reserve unit out of Winston-Salem [North Carolina], and I have never served with a better—better group in all my twenty-four years of being in the army life. They were phenomenal. It broke my heart when they had to take their colors down, because they were only allowed there the year. I deployed when they deployed. And there was only four of us that were active duty, and we were sort of there so that somebody could say the active duty are helping them. We were there. We worked.
They were a reserve outfit. They had not been deployed before; it was their first deployment. I could tell you every name of every one of them. The chief nurse, Doris Cobb [Sue Walker—BJ corrected later], was probably in her seventies at the time, okay? She was a grey-haired, skinny lady, and more than a manager she was a grandma, okay? Didn't mean shit to us. We had two sisters that were in the supervisor—assistant chief and head supervisor slot and they were our disciplinarians, okay? I mean, it was a family that went to war. It was not—And I guess that's what even sadder in a way, is that I went to war with this family, not with a just a group of people that I didn't know and had to meet later on, 28
someplace else. And it was a family institution. And maybe that's why we can—we can shed our tears. I've met with them since. Most of them are gone. The last one that I read about in the army retired nurses thing was our OR nurse. They were just all fantastic. They were all fantastic. Their skills were out of sight. Their people, patient-mindedness was something like you've never seen in the world. They were just phenomenal.
Anyhow, we were in our world is what we were, because as soon as you stepped off that plane—and you would hear that from many, many people that were over there—as soon as you stepped off the plane in Saigon, there was no memories, no nothing whatsoever, of the United States. It was like you obliterated an entire sphere of your life. This was your life. And the most horrible aspect of your life was your last two weeks before going home, because most of the soldiers, all they thought about was going home. Their guard was down and that was when they got hurt or killed. It's amazing. And—Because you started thinking about stateside. Now, we got letters and stuff like that. It took them months to come over and stuff, but it was—it was like we were in another world. And you totally were in a-whole-nother world.
TS: When Tet started, how was it different from a typical day? I'm sure there was no real typical day.
BJ: I mean, there—there was no typical day in Vietnam.
TS: Right.
BJ: I can't tell you how Tet started. They say, "Tet, here to here." That's bull hockey. I mean, you just wound up having more DUSTOFFs coming in faster than what you did—
TS: The day before?
BJ: —normally, the day before. And then when Tet was going down, it was just the opposite way around. But you always had a full ER.
TS: But you didn't know what it—really until, I mean, looking back. You just dealt with it, and it was only in reflection where you really think, "Well, this was—"
BJ: That was Tet.
TS: Yeah.
BJ: Yeah. We didn't have a word for it.
TS: What kind of hours did you work in Vietnam? How long were you there?
BJ: I was there for two years. 29
TS: Two years. What kind of schedule were you on?
BJ: [chuckles] When you were awake you either took your helmet and your flak jacket [a sleeveless jacket made of heavy fabric reinforced with metal or Kevlar, worn as protection against bullets and shrapnel]—we always—since we were at [chuckles] China Sea we had a nice little beach there, and we learned very early on that in the summertime the first thing you do is you don't wear underwear. You wear your bathing suit over your fa—underneath your fatigues, so that if you can get a break for maybe an hour or two, somebody can cover for you, you run down to the beach, you jump in the water. And too many of them forgot to take the flak jackets and helmets off, and it was deep water, so you always had to go down in twos or threes so somebody could remind somebody else, "Get that off of you." And—
TS: Was this China Beach?
BJ: Yeah, the China Sea; South China Sea.
TS: So this is like the movie they made about China Beach?
BJ: No, no, no.
TS: No, I just mean it was like—
BJ: No, that was down in Saigon.
TS: Oh, okay. That was something different.
BJ: We were way up north.
TS: You were?
BJ: We were almost—We were right near the—Da Nang and Phu Bai were our next two hospitals. Phu Bai was on the DMZ [demilitarized zone between North and South Vietnam running south of the 17th Parallel] and that was a "MUST" [Medical Unit, Self-contained, Transportable] hospital.
TS: So what kind of—
BJ: We had wooden billets. We had no running water. We had outhouses. We—My—In 1970 we got water and we had a big party when the outhouse was done. The Seabees [naval construction battalion] had built the two-story billets for us. The room was about as big as this dining room. Two people, one cot, one cot. We shared a bookcase just that size for our clothing, and we had one locker for our gear. They tried to keep two people in at all times. First thing they had out in front 30
of our billets was these humongous—and I'll be able to show you pictures of it—humongous bunkers made out of sandbags. And whenever the siren went off, the name of the game was—we had what we called sappers. A sapper is a suicide guy with the dynamite or whatever attached to his belly. And then he would find out where everybody is and he'd land in front of them, and blow himself up, and the rest of you with him. We had a lot of sappers.
The name of the game was, you—somebody—If the sirens don't get a chance to go off, somebody would run to your door, knock on it and say, "Sapper, sapper, sapper." You ran out with your helmet and your flak jacket, you go in the bunker, you sit in the dark, and you have no concept what's going on, okay? I didn't even do it one time. I—My philosophy—I was on the second floor. I wanted to see that rocket come in, and if I saw it go by I had another day. If I didn't, God or whoever down there had me. I wanted to see it coming. That's the kind of person I am. And most of us nurses were like that.
TS: You didn't go down in the bunkers?
BJ: We didn't go in the bunkers. And the 23rd Med Group, who was medics, who used to walk the fields, were next to us, okay? As far—Compounds were like next door neighbor to this next door neighbor, okay?
TS: Not necessarily right next to each other.
[Speaking Simultaneously]
BJ: Not—Well, yeah—
TS: Kind of—
BJ: We're kind of next to each other, and we talk to each other, but—
TS: But there's some space.
BJ: You had a little bit of space between you.
TS: I understand.
BJ: They weren't in our compound.
TS: Got you.
BJ: Okay. Anyhow, 23rd Med Group, they hollered for incoming. All the nurses either went to the ward if the—we went to the ER because incoming meant you were going to have casualties, incoming meant we were getting hit, and they went 31
to the bunker because they were told, "You will protect yourself, and you will go to the bunker." Twenty-seven went in the bunker, and in that bunker waiting for them at two o'clock in the morning was a sapper. And every one of them died.
TS: That happened while you were there?
BJ: Certainly it was while I was there [chuckles]. How else would I know about it?
TS: Oh. I don't know.
BJ: No, I won't tell you anything I don't—I don't tell you anything that I hear from somebody else. I'm telling you this is me, I was there, I saw it, which ingrained more in my mind that I will never go in a bunker. I will never hide. And the all clear was when somebody came by and knocked on all the doors and said "All clear." Well, we sort of laughed at that one, too, because how many Vietnamese speak English? A lot more than the English can speak Vietnamese. So how do you know it's not one of them coming down saying all clear—bam, bam, bam, bam. You're all dead.
TS: Were you afraid then?
BJ: No.
TS: No? Even though you had these things in the back of your mind?
BJ: What was there to be afraid of? I was there to do what I wanted to do. If I got killed there I would have been the happiest dead person in the world. Just like Sharon.
TS: Just like who?
BJ: Sharon. We were hit four times. That's why I told you, you need to know the layout of—to understand what I'm telling you. It's almost quarter after four [4:15 p.m.], and when you get bored—we're never going to get out of Vietnam, I tell you that because that's my happiest time in my life—most rewarding time in my life. This is a ward. Oh, you're doing that wrong. This goes this way. This is a ward—
TS: So for the transcriber, BJ is drawing me a picture—
BJ: I am drawing a picture of a large H, okay?
TS: Okay. I see the H.
BJ: The two big spheres of the H are where the patients slept and where the nurses had a little desk. 32
TS: Okay.
BJ: The inside middle bar of the H is where your dirty linen, your medicines, your supplies and all of that was kept.
TS: Okay.
BJ: And I will give you a picture in my archive that you will see what the inside of a ward looks like, okay? And what—what would happen, you would have these lined up, all the way up a long row.
TS: Lots of H's next to each other.
BJ: Lots of H's, okay? And then, on the end of the H's was a big square here and a little rectangular there, okay? Obviously, I'm going to give you the rotation. This is the ER. The ER is located five feet off the helo [helicopter] pad, okay? So they came in over the water, landed right here. We had nothing but open bays here, open bays here. We got blown away from the propellers and everything but you didn't care about that, okay?
They brought the patients in here. We triaged them as best we can, and triaged them as best they can. First place were the most serious, they went right to the OR, which is right here. Second place would be surgical ward, so the surgical nurses could bandage them up more than—all we did was stop the bleeding, triage them, and do our thing, okay? The next ward down would be the medical ward. That was those that came in on a DUSTOFF but they weren't in a firefight, they were sick; they had pneumonia; they had rotten feet; they had rotten skin. Because I mean, you live out in the jungle, you're going to get jungle rot, okay? Or a heart attack for some of the older guys. They went to the medical ward.
This ward right here on the end was what we called the Vietnamese ward, not because we were—what do you call it?—we're not conspirators or whatever, but there had been an incident in two of the other hospitals where they were mixing them. The problem with mixing them is you don't know who is VC, which is Viet Cong, or who is VN—which is—or RVN, which is Republic of Vietnam, who we were fighting for, okay?
They had incidents where they came in with a group of RVNs, they were really VCs, and they killed the Vietnamese patients. They never killed or maimed an American. We never figured this out, but they always knew where the Vietnamese were, okay? So we—this was to save our guys. That was our job. But we still took care of the Vietnamese or the Viet Cong.
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: They had their own wing? 33
BJ: They had their own ward.
TS: Ward.
BJ: Ward, okay?
TS: Gotcha.
BJ: The first time that we were hit by a rocket, it landed out here [chuckles], which is—our doctors when they got bored or had some time off wanted to build a boat. And when they built the boat it floated for two hours. Well, we didn't tell the Americal general how long it floated; we just said it floated. There was a huge fight about our doctors being under the command of Americal and therefore the Americal commander owned that boat, okay? So there was a big fight—long fight—over whose boat it was.
Anyhow, the first rocket—where the boat, all put together was, which was also the—part of the dental clinic, went right in there and we put the boat into a cigar box, taped it shut, had a party, presented it to the general of Americal and said, "You're right. It's your boat." We just lost half of our dental clinic that time. That was our first hit.
TS: That was by the ward for the Vietnamese, too, then?
BJ: Yes, but it was—huh?
TS: Right outside that? Okay.
BJ: Okay. Yes, that's down at the back end. Anyhow, after we were there for three weeks and we already, I mean, had the rockets coming in every morning. And if they hit short for Americal, we got hit. If they hit long for MAG-12, we got hit. Not always on the hospital, but in the compound, or in the dirt, or in the water, or whatever. And if they hit long for MAG-13, then we got hit. So the first thing we did was take off that stupid target zero from the roof, which was this big red cross. We took that thing off the roof and we never put it back up again.
Second hit we had was our pride and joy. We, as a family, got together and built this. What do you have to have if you have your own little base? We had the 312th base. You have to have an officers' club, right? Right. So we had built an officers/enlisted get-together club. And we built this little building right—overlooking the sea, and that was our officers' club. Those dirty rottens hit our officers club four times. Four times we had to rebuild that. And the funniest joke about the whole thing at the time was somebody from the States sent us what was a famous movie at that time, Dr. Zhivago. Every time we turned on Dr. Zhivago, the rockets would come in and they'd hit the officers club or near it. So we decided we do not finish Dr. Zhivago until we came back to the States. And we did, we finished it up in Winston-Salem and we all saw Dr. Zhivago. 34
Anyhow, that's where we had our parties, and our farewells, and this type of thing, because you have to have—you have to have it. And ours, of course, was not an officers' club. It was an officers/enlisted club, because there was very few officers, a lot of enlisted. They did the work.
Our third time—Now, you have to look at this. Maybe you can draw it when we go in the archives. This is the last H, okay?
TS: Right.
BJ: The Vietnamese ward, all right? This is close to the end of Tet, all right?
TS: Okay.
BJ: And her name was [First Lieutenant] Sharon [Ann] Lane. She was the first army nurse to be killed in Vietnam. She is on the Wall [Vietnam Memorial] in Washington [D.C.]. She is from Ohio, and she came with a very strong feeling—I don't think I—we may have to—I have to tell you this, but restrict it, okay because—
[On the morning of 8 June 1969, the 312th Evacuation Hospital at Chu Lai was hit with rockets fired by the Viet Cong. First Lieutenant Sharon Ann Lane was struck and died instantly of fragmentation wounds to the chest. She was the only American nurse killed in Vietnam as a direct result of hostile fire]
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: What are—
BJ: I don't know what her family thinks of this.
TS: Let me pause, okay?
BJ: Yes.
[Recording Paused]
TS: Okay, you want me to start it again?
BJ: Yeah, because this is very curious. We're back at the H. This is the ward here. This is an empty ward because we—this ward was full, we had just had a 35
medevac [medical evacuation]. We medevac'd to Japan so that we can keep our beds empty for the incoming, you know what I mean?
TS: Okay. Sure.
BJ: So whoever can get shipped overseas goes.
TS: Somebody else has to do the care for them.
BJ: Right. Right. That's why we're called an evac hospital.
TS: I see.
BJ: We get them after the medics get them in the field, and then we ship them home to—usually to Japan. Anyhow, the rocket came—this is where the corpsmen were at the desk. We had thirty-eight patients on this ward; they're all Vietnamese. We had four corpsmen and Sharon on duty that night. At five o'clock in the morning it's quiet time for us, because we don't have breakfast till the rockets go off at 6:00 [a.m.] to make sure that the cooks are up and make us breakfast. So we always have an hour's reprieve[?] unless we have a chopper coming in.
So they were playing poker at the desk. They asked Sharon if she wanted to play, because she always played. And she loved the Vietnamese ward, okay? She said, "This morning I don't feel like it." So she left this area, came across the H, came right here—
TS: Your corner on one of the wards—
[Speaking Simultaneously]
BJ: —on an empty bed to sit and pray, because she was going to do her morning prayers early, okay? The rocket came in—
TS: Oops. You're on your—
BJ: —hit in the middle—Huh?
TS: You were just on this thing here.
BJ: Oh, that's my [unclear]—God, don't ruin that.
TS: There you go.
36
BJ: The rocket came in this way—I'm sorry, it came in this way. It took out the H. It hit right in front of where—right in front of where the guys were playing poker, okay?
TS: Okay.
BJ: They had a little bit of shrapnel but they weren't hurt. The Vietnamese patients we had—like I said, had about thirty of them—we had no deaths, but we had a lot of amputees. We had a lot of major injuries, okay?
TS: After the rocket?
BJ: After the rocket, okay? And we had all run, because we knew the ward was hit, and everybody is in here doing their thing, doing their thing.
TS: Helping out the—
BJ: Helping out the guys because they were hurt, and the patients. And all of a sudden, I said to [Corpsman—BJ added later] Jimmy Johns, "Where's Sharon?" Of course, we don't call each other lieutenant, captain, all that crap over there, it's first name. He said, "As far as I know she went to pray." I came over and I looked this way and I saw nothing. I came over this way and she was sitting here. Sharon Lane, on an empty ward, where everybody was injured here—the rocket went here—
TS: Right, it went in the opposite side.
BJ: Came over here, where that rocket went that way so nothing should have come—nothing was in this ward. No shrapnel, no nothing. Sitting here, right side of her jugular had a two and a half inch piece of shrapnel. She died immediately. Now, you tell me that—that that doesn't wake you up and say to you, "When it's your time, you're going to go." You can't make it. You can't break it, when it's your time.
TS: Was there a lot of other shrapnel in the room or just—
BJ: That's what I said, there was no shrapnel anywhere.
TS: That was it.
BJ: One piece of shrapnel in that whole twenty-five bed ward with white sheets on top of them. The only piece of shrapnel was two inches in her right side of her jugular vein.
TS: That must have been really hard.
37
BJ: Yeah. Those things, all of them are hard, whether they're Vietnamese, whether they're American, whether they're us. The hardest part that I will never be able to get out of my mind, probably for as long as I live, for as much as I love the ER—I knew right after I'd been there why a soldier will always tell you, "I would rather be captured by a GI from another army than a female." Female are the most vicious, destructive of the body, torturers that you will ever meet in your life. It doesn't matter what army, whether American, Russian, whatever. And that's a true story—The hardest part was those that you knew we could do something, we could get surgery done, and we can send them back to Japan and they'll be okay. The hardest ones are the ones that you talk to. And I mean, after all, these guys are gone. And those are the guys that we have already put our knuckles into their chests. If you put your knuckles into somebody's chest—they're unconscious—or if they're conscious—and they do this.
TS: With their hands, like a jerk motion?
BJ: No. They do this.
TS: With their fingers?
BJ: They just—stiff. They just stiffen up. It's called decerebrate [posture], which means there's no brain left. Which means we're not going to do anything for you. Which means we will lay them on a litter in the ER, a little corner here. We're going to take care of all these guys and in the meantime we're going to tell them, "You're going to be okay. Everything's fine. No problem." And then maybe an hour or so later, say a little prayer, put the sheet over their head, and they go to the morgue. But it—That to me was the hardest thing because I had learned from guys that had come back a second time that we had shipped out the first time—they had come back to visit or they were coming around for a second tour around—what the military medicine could do to put a body back together again. The only time they can't is if there is no brain, because there's nothing to bring back.
And you had their names and so you called them by name. "Joey, you're going to be okay. It's all right, Joey. I'm here. I'm not going to leave you." And you touch them, and you feel them, and make sure they know somebody's with them. They were the hardest. The hardest, and happiest, moment in my ER was I had a body bag come in and they threw it over to the side and said, "Four dead." It was from one of the villages that got hit, so we knew they were Vietnamese. And I don't mean they threw it like a bag of garbage.
TS: Right.
BJ: I mean, they put it to the side of the room. They had already done the body count. They already knew they were dead. They said, "Four dead." "Put it over there." That means we take care of what we have to take care of and then when we're done we'll go back and tag, mark, and check the bodies. 38
Well, my turn to go over and check the bodies and tag and mark them. I took out the first one. I marked the tag, "Female. Middle-aged." I did not have a name so it would be "unknown." And I rolled her, the body bag—just like a regular body bag—I could roll her over and put her on the floor until we were ready to put them back in the body bags and ship them back to wherever they came from.
The second one was a male. Rolled him over. Third one was a female. Fourth one was a little baby. And when I went to check her and mark her, she cried. That was the bo—birth of Mona.
TS: Girl[?]?
BJ: Mona.
TS: I'll put it back. Okay. Mona. Oh, you've got a picture! Is this you?
BJ: I've got a whole—Yeah, that's me.
TS: Oh my goodness.
BJ: I got a whole pictures, I got a whole story of Mona.
TS: Oh, how adorable.
BJ: Mona—Now, any time we find somebody Vietnamese alive we have got to send them back, okay, to the Vietnamese government.
TS: Okay, keep talking.
BJ: Mona was the first—I mean, the fact that there was this baby crying in front of me. My roommate's name was Jane Carson[?] and she was working. She was head nurse down on—supervisor of the medical ward. And she [Mona] had little pajamas on, had no—skinny, scrawny—I mean, she had three huge, big bodies laying on top of her. And she cried.
Anyhow, I picked her up out of—I know, darling, I know. She's going to pause in just a minute. It's her suppertime.
TS: Okay.
BJ: I pulled her out and I said to Tim—I said—to Tim Phillipps[?], I said, "Am I imagining?" I said, "Get a stethoscope. I swear to God I heard this infant cry."
And he said, "You aren't hearing things." He said, "I heard her cry too." And he got the stethoscope and her belly was about this big. She was—That's after we had her for a year.
TS: Okay. 39
BJ: Anyhow, we in the ER wanted to know what in the hell we were going to do with her, because we ain't giving her back to the Vietnamese. We already knew that. And I'm still with this family of the 312th. And we were not giving her back to the Vietnamese. So I went to the chief nurse—no, I didn't. I went to the medical ward and I said to Jane, "Jane, look what I found in a body bag under three—" blah blah blah.
TS: Right.
BJ: She said, "My God. She's beautiful." And she was beautiful.
TS: She's a beautiful little girl.
BJ: She had a beautiful face. Anyhow, Mona became ours. And Jane is the one that named her Mona. I'll show you her story and pictures or whatever. Anyhow, Jane was ready—we kept her for the first year and Jane was ready to go back home. I was going to have Mona stay with me, and then I was going to re-up [extend time in service] even more, because we haven't told anybody in the government yet that we've got Mona.
TS: Right.
BJ: And we couldn't figure out—because nobody in the 312th was in a situation where we could adopt Mona to the United States. Well, Jane's sister—Jane's brother and sister-in-law said that if we can find a way to get her back to the United States, they would adopt her.
TS: Okay.
BJ: Okay? Process took six months. Jane was ready to leave. She had curtailed one week—She got a curtailment on her orders. 312th was getting ready to leave. We're still here with Mona, and—who was the South Carolina governor? Very, very famous. He'd been in office for a thousand years.
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: Governor or the—
BJ: No. Thurman—
TS: Strom Thurmond?
BJ: Strom Thurmond. 40
[Strom Thurmond was governor of South Carolina from 1947 to 1951 and senator from 1954 to 2003.]
If it wasn't for Strom Thurmond working with Jane's family the only—he was working with the Vietnamese government for us. And the Vietnamese guy came over and he said, "Healthy girl. Healthy girl. No go. No go," because she'd make a good mama-san.
Anyhow, we were panicking. One of the doctors came up and [chuckles] —I love him to death—he looked at her, he looked at her big belly, and he said, "She's not a healthy girl. Oh my God. She's not healthy. She's got cancer of the spleen." Okay? He said—He talked to this Vietnamese doctor and he brought him over, he said, "Look, feel, touch. Look, feel, touch." He said, "Cancer spleen. Cancer spleen. Spleen go. Spleen go."
And he said, "No sicky here. No sicky here."
And so, we took the spleen out. Immediately when we took her spleen out—lowers voice to whisper] It was a very healthy spleen—As soon as we took her spleen out she was no longer allowed in Vietnam because of malaria and all this good stuff, and our government would be able to say that their government tortured her by letting her stay there.
Mona came back to the United States. Mona is still in the United States. Mona is still "skoshi" like BJ. She's got a daughter, Sunflower, and she's doing very well.
TS: Where does she live?
BJ: She lives in South Carolina.
TS: Is that right?
BJ: Still. Yes. Beautiful.
TS: How old is she now, then?
BJ: She is now—Oh my God, I think she's forty-something. Forty five?
TS: Yeah? Maybe almost fifty?
BJ: Well, I found her in—I found her in the bags in '68.
TS: She was just a baby.
BJ: She—We took—The only way we got a potential age on her was we took X-rays of a normal American, which is not right, and matched them up with her bone 41
structure and the closest they could get was she was probably about three years old when we got her.
TS: That's an amazing—
BJ: And that's how she got—The day that she was pulled out of the body bag, and the X-rays, is what determined her birthday and her age.
TS: That's an amazing story, BJ. That's an amazing story.
BJ: That was the story I told and I took this picture with me and I passed it around at Methodist [University in Fayetteville, North Carolina].
TS: That's a great story.
BJ: That's my—That's our Mona. They asked us—We were giving her—The nurses would take turns so that Mona would never be alone when she first got there until she got to know everybody. And she was funny. One day they had her at the chapel. The priest used to come on Sundays for a chapel. And he walks over to Mona and he says, "I haven't met you. You must be Mona." And he puts his—and she says, "Oh, shit!" [chuckles]
Jane was with him and she said, "I'm sorry, Father, but BJ's been around."
That was her first American words: "Oh, shit!" Because that's what I used to always say when something went wrong: "Oh, shit!"
TS: [chuckles]
BJ: And then the other thing—she walked up and she had—brilliant little girl. Still is a brilliant lady. The first thing that she learned about another thing was "Black power," when she saw a black man.
TS: Black power? [laughs]
BJ: Black power. [laughs] I have got to take a pause.
TS: Okay, we are going to pause—I'll pause it right here.
[Recording Paused]
TS: Okay. We took a little break there and we're back here with BJ. We're still in Vietnam. You've been talking about Mona. Now, about the time that Mona—after Mona, about how much longer did you have left in Vietnam after that?
42
BJ: Jane took her home in '69 and I left in '70. I stayed another year. I was going to stay in Vietnam, but—I told you about—the 312th was a family, okay? When the 312th left—and this is nothing at all against a regular army unit—they had no concept of what we had been through because in '70 the war was going down.
TS: Right.
BJ: It was—It was stopping, alright? We got the unit from the 91st [Evacuation Hospital]. They were all from the States. There was no reservists in that unit. My hospital was the—My hospital, the 24th Evac, were the only reserve full complement, with four or five regular army nurses with them, okay? And we went through what we'd considered the war, okay? Worst of the war. The worst of the worst. I didn't even tell you that, but there will be another day, another time. Anyhow—
TS: Well, what do you mean? Why don't you want to tell me the worst of the worst?
BJ: Well, the worst of the worst, and the hardest thing—you know I told you the hardest thing was the guys that were decerebrate and we knew they had no brain power left, they were going to die, but we still talked to them and waited until they did die. Well, if you remember during the Vietnam War—see I don't know what the heck—I missed all the hippie stuff and everything. It's awful. I missed all that hippie rock and roll. I would have loved that!
TS: You would have. I'm sure. [chuckles]
BJ: Anyway, I don't know whether they talked in the States about the napalm bombs?
TS: Yes.
BJ: Napalm was a form of fire, okay? A burn. It's a chemical. Napalm is a chemical that does not—if you get a burn here, okay, you clean it up. It will scab, you heal it up, and it's gone. You have a scar, but it's gone. Napalm does not burn up. Napalm burns down into the body, okay?
The only thing that will slow the burn and be able to assist—not quit or decease, but slow down the pain is potassium chloride. Potassium chloride works—I think napalm has a—I don't want to say sodium. I want to say whatever is in the v—magnesium. It has a sort of magnesium and that's why it burns down. If you put water on it, it just gets hotter and burns quicker and faster. The only thing you can put on it is this purple potassium manangum—manganite.
Anyhow, the worst of the worst was when they started putting the napalm bombs down. And at that time it was—I think it was sort of late into '69, because those were the things that were starting to help the war to go down a little bit. It was the Vietnamese, the civilians, that we were getting in. Mostly children with eighty and ninety percent burns, okay? I don't know whether you've ever been on a burn unit, or ever smelt somebody that has been on fire, or has had a major burn 43
to a part of their body. Small burns don't smell. Whole body burns are God-awful. They are God-awful.
You know that once it's gone through the dermis and the epidermis it is now on your third layer, which is where every one of your nerves are. Every nerve. Which means pain. Nerves are what causes the pain, not the skin, not anything else. Nerves are what gives you the pain. And these little bitty babies, or kids like her, or anybody. Women. Children. Very few men, because the women and children had to stay out to maintain the food and the goods for their soldiers, or their men, okay?
The Vietnamese—the RVN—the reason why we didn't really win the war was because these people had tunnels. They were phenomenal in those mountains. Our napalm, our bombs, they would probably be so far down in a level, they'd be, "I think somebody's walking on top tippy-toe." You couldn't find them. They could have been a hundred miles away and you're just now dropping bombs.
Anyhow, with the napalm burns, it is a very, very—have you smelled rotten eggs?
TS: Yeah.
BJ: Okay, napalm smells like rotten eggs. And the body is literally not burning, but it's smoking. The patient is in total, total, total agony. You don't know where to touch them. You don't know where to feel them. Somebody her size, if she was burnt on her back and I just went like this because I wanted to pick her up, she would stay there but her skin would be in my hands.
TS: I just want to say to the transcriber, you're talking about Mona and the picture. That's what you're pointing to.
BJ: Well, because Mona came during that time. And thank God she was not in a napalm village. She was in a lower village. She came from Phai Toa[?] because that was the vi—we figured she came from Phai Toa because that was the village nearest to us that was just hit. And that's when we got our bodies and stuff.
Anyhow, you have to stay there. You put gloves on and then you start smearing this potassium manganite, which is even worse in smelling, and even worse in pain. And the only thing you can hear is, "Dau, dau, dau, dau, dau, dau, dau, dau," which means "die, die, die, die." They want to die.
["đau" is an abbreviation of the Vietnamese "đau đớn" which means "pain".]
TS: Right.
BJ: You want so much to help them.
TS: Yeah. 44
BJ: Essentially, you know. They're not going to make it.
TS: They're not? No.
BJ: A small napalm burn, it burns in. It does not burn out. So therefore they will suffer until they have been burned to their heart, their liver, their abdomen or whatever. That kills them—or to their respiratory system—that kills them. And to watch them, to talk to them, to try to be sympathetic when they don't understand you and you don't understand them. They know you're their enemy. We know that maybe you're my enemy, maybe you're not. You find a way to talk to them, and comfort them.
And I guess—I keep coming back to most rewarding, most growing, most—most everything that my life revolves around has been Vietnam. And yet the one thing that I will never talk to anybody about—I told you that today—is Vietnam, because I came home and—when we got off the plane in San Francisco we had our uniforms on, we got off the plane, and the people just came up and the men just peed all over us. They called us names, they called us—I mean, it was awful. It's a beautiful welcome home. It was wonderful. And if you went anywhere, even to a military base, and they said, "Where was your last assignment?" you learned real fast you don't say "Vietnam."
And that's why it's thirty years a little late, but have you ever seen—until recently—have you ever seen a welcome home party for the Vietnam soldier? Have you seen so much outpouring to those guys that were coming home in '68, '69, and '70? No. No. No. Have you seen the heroes? No. No. No. Have you seen the homeless? The PTSD? The stress? The drunks on the street who have nowhere to go, nothing to do? Up until this past year or two, they finally said, "Welcome home, Vietnam."
First plane back from Afghanistan was a hero's welcome. Hero's welcome. And I do not degrade—I don't want this wrong—I do not degrade them. I—They are just as good as we are, if not better. They've got better equipment. They can take care of soldiers better than we can. But I think of all the guys in Vietnam, who also lost their minds, lost their brains, lost their hands, lost their legs, lost their—their everything. And all they did was—I mean, a man walked up and literally peed on me from my belly all the way down, calling us names: pigs and slobs and traitors.
TS: What'd you—
BJ: I had—I brought up to my family. I'd come home and I figured, "Mom and Dad will understand." We didn't talk for a long time. It was just, "I'm glad you're home, glad you're home. Alive. Safe." That's all we talked about.
TS: Right.
BJ: One day, Mom sat down and she said, "Tell me a little bit about Vietnam." 45
And I said, "Well, let me tell you a little bit about the people, and about the nurses." And I got out my scrapbook.
And my mom said, "Oh, you're lucky. You're in a nice place, because that is really quaint."
I said, "Mom, I don't want to talk about Vietnam, because nobody will ever, ever, ever understand Vietnam except somebody who was there." And I believe that Vietnam is the most different, different story in all of history.
The Civil War was black and white in the States. World War I was a country against another country. World War II, all the women were into taking care of the soldiers and flying food over, and they knew what they were doing. They came back, the birth of the SEALS [U.S. Navy's Sea, Air, and Land Teams], they were heroes. [General George Smith, Jr.] Patton, [Dwight David "Ike"] Eisenhower. It was a hero's welcome, right? Korean War. We won the Korean War. And we got peace between the north and the south and we took over them. Our soldiers come back heroes from the Korean War. Vietnam. Although they call it the Vietnam War, was never, ever, ever, ever declared a war, okay? Never declared a war. It was not ran like a war. The politicians ran Vietnam, not the generals, not the—anybody else. And they were never even there, so they don't know what the frick they were talking about even at the time of it.
Anyhow, we came back as nonexistent human beings, and that's why you find that people will come back from Afghanistan, Iraq, and they'll sit around and have a beer and they'll talk to you about it. I'll bet you, you don't find a lot of Vietnam people that come back and say, "Let's have a party and talk about Vietnam." Not even those of us who were there together, who have partied since, talk about Vietnam.
TS: You don't talk about it with them? No?
BJ: No, because wherever they were was their place, where we were was our place, and we almost have turned to the point that nobody would ever believe us anyhow, because China Beach [American T.V. series set at an evacuation hospital during Vietnam] came out, it was a sex movie. You didn't have time for sex in Vietnam. I've got news for those bastards. You didn't have time for sex. You didn't screw around with the doctors, the patients, or anything else. The patients didn't have anything to screw around with most of the time.
TS: Right.
BJ: Drink a little bit over at the club? Yeah, but you knew damn well you didn't get drunk, because you had to be over there as soon as you hear a DUSTOFF coming across the water. Run down and take a swim for an hour? Yeah, felt good getting out of the smell. But nobody talks about Vietnam. Nobody understands it. Nobody ever will. And the only thing that people remember of Vietnam is the front cover of—I guess it was Time or Look [American magazines]—of the little girl being shot in Mӳ Lai, right? That was the epitome. We were killing kids, right? And women and children. 46
You know what the kids were used for? I had one offered to me. I took it, but I didn't open it. I thanked him. I gave him a penny. It was a Coca-Cola. I walked away and I threw it and the son-of-a-bitch blew up, because that's what the kids and the women were for. They were your enemies, not the ones with the guns. You could see the ones with the guns. Most of our casualties were from women and children. Most of our—And I'll tell you about them because I see them often—not often—I can still see them periodically. A woman had him—She had—
TS: A woman had who?
BJ: A Viet Cong woman had captured this guy. He was hurt.
TS: Okay.
BJ: She had captured him and she figured—he figured the way she was talking, she was going to take care of him. He was nineteen years old. He had one month to turn twenty. When he got to us—and he was mine because I had the first litter in, which is always the most serious—he had no eyes. He had no tongue. He had no genitalia. He had "VN" sliced across his chest. He had needle and thread slipping[?] his voice, right behind his trachea. He had no fingers. He had no toes. And you know damn well he wasn't out at the time that any one of these injuries were done, because not one of them is life-threatening at the point. And he was alive when he came there and said, "Will I make it?"
And the answer was, "Yes."
Sadly, yes, he did make it. He will be blind all his life. He will never be able to have sex, if he were to get married or whatever. He will live with that for the rest of his life. So I often wonder, what kind of a life does he have? We weren't in a safe area. Not anywhere in hell. But who is going to believe what we say.
Anyhow, we had a get-together of some friends of ours and the guy was a lawyer—a JAG lawyer [Judge Advocate General]—and he said to me, "I heard you were sent to Vietnam,"
And I said, "Yeah."
He said, "How long were you there?"
I said, "Two years."
He said, "You're the stupidest goddam idiot I have ever met in my life." He said, "Don't you realize you didn't have to be there."
I said, "Yes, I did." I said "Number one, I had orders. Number two, I'm an army nurse and I'm here to take care of the soldiers."
He said, "You're a stupid-ass idiot. It was never declared a war. Nobody had to go there. All you had to do is say no." And he said, "Nobody could have forced you to go."
I said, "Thank you very much. I volunteered, and I stayed." I said, "And I have more class than you've got shit." And I walked out. That was the end of my partying with that group, obviously. So I didn't party too much with many— 47
But do you, not being there, really understand any of these stories, or any of the feelings that we have when we come back there, if you've ever heard anybody else discuss it? Seriously? Honestly?
TS: Depending on the circumstances of their tours, they have different stories. But it's not always the same. Nurses, I think, saw different things that some of the other people I've interviewed, like some of the WACs—
[Speaking Simultaneously]
BJ: Yeah, well the WACs were—
TS: —and some of the women that were in the air force that were in the headquarters. So I think that maybe the experiences differ depending on—and the times that people were in Vietnam too.
BJ: Oh, yeah.
TS: So it's different, but certainly—
BJ: But does it sound realistic in your mind? Can you even picture anything I'm talking to in your mind? Seriously. I mean, I'm not—turn that damn thing off because I don't want to put you on the spot. Turn it off. Yeah?
[Recording Paused]
TS: Okay, we turned it back on. Okay, thanks for letting me pause that, BJ. [chuckles]
BJ: Okay.
TS: Let me ask you a question about—
BJ: I think you better go to questions. You're going to have to come back another day, because we ain't even got out of Vietnam yet and I was only in my twenties.
TS: Well, you've talked—We can sum some things up, though. But you've talked about a lot of things. How about if we talk a little bit about your relationship with—you have talked about this being a family and you were trying—you were starting to get to the next unit that came in, how it was a little bit different.
BJ: Yes. And that was when I was ready to go home, okay? I told you—Now, the ER—and I'll show you. I've got pictures. You can take pictures back with you. 48
Anyhow, the ER and our buildings were all just wooden buildings with—they didn't have windows or anything. They had big openings and then they had slats in them, okay? Open slats so that we could ventilate. Every time—I told you, the hospital was here and the helipad was here, and you know what a helicopter does—
TS: I have my picture.
BJ: Okay. The helicopter, when it goes around and around and around and around before they can stop the blades—and most times they'd never stop the blades; they landed, dumped, and took off—that is dust and dirt coming into our ER, okay? It's dirt. Our ER was dirty. We tried to be as sterile as we could, in order to not hurt the guys, but we knew it was dirty, and we knew the next plane coming in is going to be dirty as well.
TS: Right. It wasn't going to be a sterile environment, right?
BJ: No. And it was going to be a dirty environment, okay? When the 312th—and I have the picture of the 312th ceremony—and our theme song every time somebody went home was "I'm Leaving on a Jet Plane" [song written by John Denver in 1966 and recorded by folk group Peter, Paul, and Mary in 1969]. When the 312th had their retirement ceremony, where the entire hospital goes out on the helipad, and they diverted to the Da Nang hospital if anything came in so we could have our change of command ceremony.
They were all out there in uniform—fatigues was our uniform, obviously, no dresses or dress blues or anything. That's what killed me, man, when we went to ship. They had silverware and real plates, the navy did. And white uniforms. We looked like pigs, but anyhow. They were out there. They were standing at dead, dead attention, and we—as—they were the unit, we were their compadres—part of their family—but we were not part of the 312th. I belonged to Americal; to the medical thing, alright?
So they're standing there, looking at us. The flags would be swapped back and forth between us. And we were standing here. There was about ten of us left—enlisted and I think two or three officers—and we were all standing at attention. They did the change of command, and it was beautiful. Nobody said anything except the two commanders. They swapped their flags. The 312th had—They put the canvas on the 312th's because it gets closed until it goes home, because it's a closed—it goes back to a reserve outfit, not a war outfit, okay?
TS: Right.
BJ: So they closed the casing of the flag and they opened the casing of the 91st because they were going to take over. And as they were closing the flag, which is the most solemn part of a change of command ceremony, the 312th en masse started singing, "We're leaving on a jet plane, don't know—" That—