Sharon Lane and Lynda Van Devante

Letters from Vietnam 1969

These letters were written by two military nurses from evacuation hospitals in Vietnam.

[Twenty-five year old Sharon A. Lane, from Canton, Ohio, was a nurse with the 312th Evacuation Hospital, Chu Lai, beginning in April 1969.]

4 June 1969

Dear Mom & Dad,

Got your letter of 28th, Mom, yesterday, 3 June. Today I got Dad's of 26th April. Never know what is going on with the mail. Haven't gotten the package yet. Heaven only knows when they will arrive and in what condition.

Worked in ICU [Intensive Care Unit] again today. Was lucky, got to 102 today, and ICU is air-conditioned. They have a lot of really sick patients. Had three die yesterday. They still have four on respirators. None too good, either.

One of the GI's who died yesterday was from Ward 8, medical. Had malaria. During the previous night he had been nauseated and kept getting up to the latrine to vomit. Got up at 2 A.M. and was running to the latrine. Fell really hard and cracked his head on the cement floor. The nurse who was on duty said you could hear his scull fracture. He immediately started bleeding from ears and nose and stopped breathing. Then had cardiac arrest. They got him going again and transferred him to ICU but

he died anyway yesterday. Had severe brain damage. Other death

was [a] GI with multiple fragment wounds from a mine explosion.

He was there two weeks ago when I worked that other day in ICU.

Also a Vietnamest died. Don't know what was wrong with him.

Census hit the 10,000 mark yesterday. This unit, the 312th

[Evacuation Hospital] has treated 10,000 patients since [we] arrived last September. Unbelievable. Registrar office had a poll going as to what time and what date the 10,000th patient would be admitted. Was yesterday morning. Haven't heard who won the money yet.

They put plastic or rubber? floor tile down in the mess hall the evening before last. Looked real nice until yesterday noon when it got hot. The tar came up between the tile and it got tracked all over the place. Couldn't move your chair at all. It was stuck to the floor.

How did the home-made ice cream turn out? Start "nights" tomorrow so don't have to get up early tomorrow. Nice thought.

Still very quiet around here. Haven't gotten mortared for couple of weeks now. We are getting some new nurses this week. They are from the unit who will take over when the 312th goes home in September. Their hospital is farther south somewhere. They are handling 80% Vietnamese casualties now so are turning their hospital over to the Viets and coming here to take over. Supposed to get the new chief nurse tomorrow. So the unit will change names in September. However, they are supposed to be an RA [Regular Army] group. Not a reserve unit like the 312th is. Things are supposed to get a lot more "strict Army style." No one is looking forward to it.

Read a book last night and missed a good Lee Marvin movie at the mess hall.

Had a movie star visit here the second or third week I was here. Named Ricardo Montalban? Ever hear of him? Forgot to mention it previously. Some of the older people here remembered him. Said he was in movies with Esther Williams.

Will stop for now. Getting sleepy.

See you sooner.

Shar

[On June 8, just two months after arriving in Vietnam, Sharon Lane was killed by shrapnel during a rocket attack.]

[Lynda Van Devanter served as an Army nurse in Vietnam from June 1969 until June 1970--with the 71st Evacuation Hospital in Pleiku and the 67th Evacuation Hospital in Qui Nhon.]

24 July 1969

Dear Family,

Things go fairly well here. Monsoon is very heavy right now--haven't seen the sun in a couple of weeks. But this makes the sky that much prettier at night when flares go off. There's a continual mist in the air which makes the flares hazy. At times they look like falling stars; then sometimes they seem to shine like crosses.

At 4:16 A.M. our time the other day, two of our fellow Americans landed on the moon. At that precise moment, Pleiku Air Force Base, in the sheer joy and wonder of it, sent up a whole skyful of flares--white, red, and green. It was as if they were daring the surrounding North Vietnamese Army to try and tackle such a great nation. As we watched it from the emergency room door, we couldn't speak at all. The pride in our country filled us to the point that many had tears in their eyes.

It hurts so much sometimes to see the paper full of demonstrators, especially people burning the flag. Fight fire with fire, we ask here. Display the flag, Mom and Dad, please, every day. And tell your friends to do the same. It means so much to us to know we're supported, to know not everyone feels we're making a mistake being here.

Every day we see more and more why we're here. When a whole Montagnard village comes in after being bombed and terrorized by Charlie, you know. These are helpless people dying every day. The worst of it is the children. Little baby-sans being brutally maimed and killed. They never hurt anyone. Papa-san comes in with his three babies--one dead and two covered with frag wounds. You try to tell him the boy is dead--"fini"--but he keeps talking to the baby as if that will make him live again. It's enough to break your heart. And through it all, you feel something's missing. There! You put your finger on it. There's not a sound from them. The children don't cry from pain; the parents don't cry from sorrow; they're stoic.

You have to grin sometimes at the primitiveness of these Montagnards. Here in the emergency room, doctors and nurses hustle about fixing up a little girl. There stands her shy little (and I mean little--like four feet tall) papa-san, face looking down at the floor, in his loin cloth, smoking his long marijuana pipe. He has probably never seen an electric light before, and the ride here in that great noisy bird (helicopter) was too much for him to comprehend. They're such characters. One comes to the hospital and the whole family camps out in the hall or on the ramp and watches over the patient. No, nobody can tell me we don't belong here. . . .

Love,

Lynda

29 December 1969

Hi all,

. . . I don't know where to start except to say I'm tired. It seems that's all I ever say anymore. Thank you both for your tapes and all the little goodies in the Christmas packages. Christmas came and went, marked only by tragedy. I've been working nights for a couple of weeks and have been spending a great deal of time in post-op. They've been unbelievably busy. I got wrapped up in several patients, one of whom I scrubbed on when we repaired an artery in his leg. It eventually clotted, and we did another procedure on him to clear out the artery--all this to save his leg. Well, in my free time I had been working in post-op and took care of him. I came in for duty Christmas Eve and was handed an OR slip--above-knee amputation. He had developed gas gangrene. The sad thing was that the artery was pumping away beautifully. Merry Christmas, kid, we have to cut your leg off to save your life. We also had three other GI's die that night. Kids, every one. The war disgusts me. I hate it! I'm beginning to feel like it's all a mistake.

Christmas morning I got off duty and opened all my packages alone. I missed you all so much, I cried myself to sleep. I'm starting to cry again. It's ridiculous. I seem to be crying all the time lately. I hate this place. This is now the seventh month of death, destruction, and misery. I'm tired of going to sleep listening to outgoing and incoming rockets, mortars, and artillery. I'm sick of facing, every day, a new bunch of children ripped to pieces. They're just kids--eighteen, nineteen years old! It stinks! Whole lives ahead of them--cut off. I'm sick to death of it. I've got to get out of here. . . .

Peace,

Lynda

[Following her return home, Lynda Van Devanter became a teacher in the Washington D.C. area and wrote a book about her experiences in Vietnam, Home Before Morning.]

Bernard Edelman, ed. Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam. New York: Pocket Books, 1985.