I lived in Saigon for six months, and Nha Trang for the other six. I was idealistic and religious, having grown up and gone to school in the Midwest. The Army paid for my last year of school, and as a result I owed the Army 2 years of service. The jet carrying all of us Army personnel landed first in Hawaii, where the air smelled like flowers and was the perfect temperature;
the second stop was nighttime in Manila and the heat and humidity were so fierce that it felt like walking into a sauna, and the final stop was Saigon, where the jet dove steeply out of the sky in order to avoid snipers at the ends of the landing strips.
I always say that my Vietnam experience was surreal because it was so comfortable and special...The first weekend I was there, I was whisked downtown in the back of a jeep with my Australian Red Cross roommate, for the first time encountering the smell of feces and garbage which filled the air, to have dinner in 'The Guillaume Tell' restaurant, where I had French food for the first time in my life and adopted a Siamese alley kitten. A week later, the nurses were invited to a cocktail party, where I found myself chatting with a young Air Force lieutenant while looking out from a balcony at the Caravel Hotel, cradling a drink and watching flares light up the night sky. At that same party, I was talking with a wistful 3 star General who missed his wife and bridge partner, when he said to a person standing behind me "Oh, good evening, sir", and when I turned around, I was face to face with 4 stars, belonging to General Westmoreland. I lived in the 'nurses' villa', next to the 3rd Field Hospital, where maids swept our floors and cleaned the bathrooms, and my white uniforms were delivered, starched, in time for me to work six days a week in the ICU, where I saw soldiers with neatly bandaged stumps and heads. The only hardship I suffered while there was not being able to leave work to watch Danny Kaye perform one building over from the ICU!
I was granted leave to transfer to the 8th Field Hospital in Nha Trang, because I had fallen in love with a neurosurgeon who was assigned there. Nha Trang is idyllically beautiful, with a giant 'U' of blue mountains enclosing a green rice-paddy valley and the red-roofed town and a crescent of fine white sand beach lined with palm trees and banana-leaf shacks called 'Beach Houses', where I had my first French omelet. From that beach, you could look out onto the blue South China Sea where there were darker blue, triangle-shaped islands. Once again, I lived in an airy, clean 'villa', where I kept my Siamese cat and maids to clean the bathrooms and launder our clothes, but this time, instead of starched white uniforms and white nurses' caps, I wore 'jungle fatigues' and jungle boots to my work in the ICU. Again, there were many, many soldiers with neatly bandaged heads and stumps. There were also Viet Cong patients, who, the couple of times we were low on painkillers, had to do with out pain relief. One such patient was a young girl who had lost her legs when a grenade was tossed behind her as she dove into a 'rabbit hole'....she actually tried to kill herself by biting her tongue off. Once there was a Korean soldier who had had a shell go through his brain and lodge, still live, behind one eye...since he was too dangerous to operate on or be put in a ward, he was taken to a shed unconscious and blown up. One dawn, I conducted an informal poll of the patients in the ICU: one third were all gung ho to get back to their units, one third hated the war and saw no reason for it, and one third were just confused. Meanwhile, I was in love - Young and Numb.
The juxtaposition of all these beautiful and horrible experiences was very disorienting to me, though I denied its impact, and I entered into years of neurosis and alcoholism, from which I've recovered, thanks to AA. Nowadays I characterize myself as 'spiritual', not religious. I'm no longer Young and Numb, but am Elderly and Aware!