About 7,000 U.S. women served overseas as nurses during the Vietnam War. These veterans are working to ensure their contributions are honored on Veterans’ Day 2024.
Between 1967 and 1968, Nancy Wells spent her waking hours stitching injured Americans back together amid the haze of the Vietnam War, treating wounds she’d never imagined seeing.
When not on the hospital wards, Wells and her fellow nurses lived like other soldiers: They ate at the same mess hall, slept in the same Quonset-hut dorms, called hooches, and were jolted out of bed by the same alarms and explosions. Some nurses suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. And all were subject to the same upheaval and protests when they returned stateside.
Yet after the war, there was far less support and community for nurses and little recognition from the public of what they went through overseas. On Veterans’ Day, nurses gather at the Vietnam Women’s Memorial, which was built in 1993 after years of advocacy, to honor the service of the « forgotten veterans. » »It seemed like the choppers would never stop coming in »
About 7,000 American women served in Vietnam as nurses during the war. Many, like Wells, were recruited from nursing school. Those who completed the Army’s student nurse program and passed state nursing exams were commissioned as Second Lieutenants in the Army Nurse Corps. While overseas, they often served in multiple hospitals during one-year tours. Wells worked at the 85th Evacuation Hospital in Qui Nohn and at the 71st Evacuation Hospital at Pleiku. There, she said, red alerts that meant enemy and hostile fire in the area became a part of daily life.
« You’d have to throw on your steel pot (helmet) and your flak jacket and go over to the hospital wards » when the alarm went off, Wells, now 80 and living in Michigan, told CBS News. « The siren would be blaring. Initially, it was a little frightening. You could hear the gunfire off in the distance. But after enough red alerts, you kind of became used to it. »
Even when the world around them was calm, there were always soldiers in need in the hospital wards. At the 71st Evacuation Hospital, there often weren’t enough staff members to cover the 400 beds. Wells said she and her fellow nurses would work six or even seven days a week there, « depending on the casualties coming in. » During one period in November 1967, she said there were three weeks of nonstop casualties, coming so fast that medical personnel were flown in from other locations to help the 71st. During this period, the Battle of Dak To was taking place in Vietnam’s Central Highlands. It was one of the bloodiest battles of the war.
« There were days when it seemed like the choppers would never stop coming in with the wounded », said Wells. « Those were hard days, and the wounds the guys were coming in with were horrendous. »
In January 1968, the hospital was in the path of , a major military campaign by Vietnamese forces.
