Lynda Van Devanter: Landing in Vietnam

Lynda is pictured second from right, lower photos.

On June 8, 1969, 1st Lieutenant Sharon Lane, a 26-year-old nurse fro Ohio, became the first (and only) US Army nurse killed in Vietnam as a direct result of enemy fire. She had been sitting on a bed in her hooch when a VC rocket exploded nearby, sending shrapnel in every direction.

A few hours after Sharon's death, the plane carrying Lynda and 350 men began its descent into South Vietnam. When the plane began "jerking wildly," luggage fell from the overhead racks. Terrified, Lynda looked out the window. She could see explosions.

"Men," said the voice of the pilot over the intercom, "we just came into a little old firefight back there and it looks like them V.C. ain't taking too kindly to us droppin' in on Tan Son Nhut. So we're gonna take a little ride on over to Long Binh and see if we can't get a more hospitable welcome. Keep your seatbelts buckled and we'll be down faster than you can say Vietnam sucks."

Lynda was slightly reassured by his casual manner and then by their smooth landing in Long Binh. "But if there had ever been any cockiness in me before this trip began, there sure wasn't any now," she wrote later. "In its place was a cold, hard realization: I could die here."

From Lynda Van Devanter: 'Why Do They Have to Die'" from Courageous Women of the Vietnam War.

Excerpts from Home Before Morning: The Story of an Army Nurse in Vietnam included by permission of the Buckley family.

Lynda Van Devanter: After a Mass Casualty (Mass-Cal)

Lynda is pictured second from right, lower photos. 

Over the next three days Lynda snatched bits of sleep whenever she could. She rarely knew if it was day or night. But when the mass-cal was over, Carl gave her the greatest compliment she could have wished for: "You're a good help, Lynda."

As they walked to the hooches, Lynda could hear the sound of guns and helicopters in the distance. She wondered how long it would be until the wounded of that battle would be brought to the 71st. The thought made her shudder.

Both too tired to sleep, Lynda and Carl talked for a long time, both "trying to sound philosophical about...death." Lynda finally broke down, crying and shaking. Carl tried to comfort her and wound up crying too.

"Why do they have to die, Carl?" Lynda asked.

"Who knows?" he replied.

"I don't understand," she said.

"Nobody does," he said.


From "Lynda Van Devanter: 'Why Do They Have to Die?'" from Courageous Women of the Vietnam War. 

Quotes from Home Before Morning: The Story of an Army Nurse in Vietnam included with permission of the Buckley family.

Dana Delaney as Colleen McMurphy of the "China Beach" series, 

which was loosely based on Lynda van Devanter's memoir. 

Kate Webb: In the hands of the enemy

Kate Webb in Vietnam before her capture in Cambodia. 

The above is a low-res photograph of page 158 of Courageous Women of the Vietnam War 

where the Kate Webb photo appears, courtesy of Getty Images. 

After a blurred number of days and nights on foot, the prisoners and their captors stopped in a clearing. One by one, the soldiers singled out each prisoner for what they said were interviews. Thirty or forty minutes would pass, then a single shot would be heard. "As our numbers dwindled, we couldn't meet one another's eyes," Kate wrote later.

Her turn came. She was brought to a military man roughly in his 60s. Ever since her capture, Kate had been striving to view herself as more than a frightened prisoner and the group of them more than a herd of doomed cattle. Now, sitting before this military man, exhausted and ill though he appeared, Kate's hands shook with fear. She forced herself to remember that she was a respected journalist and the representative of an international news service.

"Do not be afraid," said the expressionless interpreter. "You are in the hands of the Liberation Armed Forces."

From "Kate Webb: Captive Journalist" from Courageous Women of the Vietnam War. 

Reporter Tracy Wood and the American POWs at the Hanoi Hilton

Tracy Wood at release of the last American POWs from the Hoa Lo Prison. She attended two releases. Walter Cronkite is second from left. 

Courtesy of Tracy Wood. 

Some of the prisoners were standing at the iron-barred windows of their cells, while others were outside. Tracy couldn't yet see their faces, but "something in their posture made me uneasy," she wrote. "They were only a few days away from freedom, and I'd expected them to be energized." They weren't Both the POWs and the reporters had been forbidden to communicate before the release was final. When Tracy and the other two reporters tried to whisper to the prisoners, they received no response. There had been rumors of torture, of forced statements, but the journalists didn't know the details. As she watched the prisoners, she was "nagged by something terribly wrong."

Suddenly, she understood what it was:

They had no identity.

Even from a reasonable distance, I can identify friends, including those in the military, by the way they walk and hold their shoulders, their general posture.

These men had no posture.

Or they had the same posture.

They were unidentifiable, taller and shorter, darker and lighter versions of the same man. Their faces had the same lack of expression; they walked the same, stood the same. 

No one stuck out in the crowd. 

Only long practice could have caused that total loss of individuality--practice and a deathly need to be obscure...

This was primitive survival.


From "Tracy Wood: 'They're the Story'" from Courageous Women of the Vietnam War. 

Joan Baez and the Christmas Bombings of 1972

During the next two days, the North Vietnamese showed their American visitors propaganda films and photos of dead civilians and gave long lectures on what specific areas the American military had bombed. Since Joan had long been protesting the war, she was annoyed with these enforced activities and longed to explore Hanoi on her own.

On the third evening, December 18, she was feeling sick from watching yet another graphic propaganda film and was about to retire to her room for the night when the electricity in the building failed. Two long, loud sirens range out. One of the Vietnamese men excused himself calmly, saying it was an "alert."

All the hotel guests walked toward a nearby bomb shelter. Because everyone seemed so relaxed, Joan thought she must be the only nervous on in the group. Then she heard the roar of planes. Everyone jumped and ran down the narrow flight of stairs. An explosion shook the walls.

When the bombing stopped, someone joked that, because it was December, perhaps the raid was an early Christmas present to Hanoi from President Nixon. Everyone laughted. But this series of raids--technically referred to as Operation Linebacker II and spedificalyl designed to intimidate the NOrth into recommencing peace talks--would actually become known as the Christmas Bombings.

Ten more bombing raids occurred that night...

In 1979, five years after the United States had withdrawn from Vietnam, Joan spoke out publicly against the new Socialist Republic of Vietnam. In a letter published in four major US newspapers, she criticized the brutal reeducation centers that were forcing a Communist worldview upon the people of South Vietnam. She wrote, "Instead of bringing hope and reconciliation to war-torn Vietnam, your government has created a painful nightmare." She maintained that her new protest was perfectly consistent with her previous antiwar stance, saying, "My politics have not changed. I have always spoken for the oppressed people of Vietnam who could not speak for themselves."


From "Joan Baez: Protest Singer" from Courageous Women of the Vietnam War.

Excerpt from a letter to Anne Koch Voigt from Air Cavalry Sergeant Robert McCance

Anne Koch, 1969, in front of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

All memorials to South Vietnamese soldiers were destroyed after the north defeated the south. 

Courtesy of Anne Koch Voigt.

"I never forgot the care you gave me those many years ago. I never forgot your name I guess cause you were so kind to me at a time when I really needed the touch of a mother's hand. I really never gave your plight, that of a nurse in a combat zone, much thought until I watched a TV documentary several years ago concerning combat nurses and the emotional trauma you people were experiencing every day. I never realized the scars we left not on you but in you."

From "Anne Koch: 'I Knew in My Heart That I Had To Go'" from Courageous Women of the Vietnam War. 

Anne Koch and her patients

Anne near the nurse's station, Ward 3, 93rd Evacuation Hospital, Long Binh

Courtesy of Anne Koch Voigt

Anne and the other nurses realized that the men sometimes saw them as surrogates for the women in their lives: wives, mothers, girlfriends. So they tried to care for their patients' emotional needs as well as their medical ones. "We would smile and listen as much as we could," Anne says...

One day Anne had an unforgettable conversation with a wounded soldier that highlighted the tremendous difficulties of the war from the American point of view. This young soldier had been on a long-range reconnaissance patrol in a jungle when he encountered two young men whose appearance and behavior made him certain they were Vietcong recruits. He shot and killed them before they could kill him.

But he discovered later that they were just two boys who had been playing, pretending to be soldiers at war; he described it as "Cowboys and Indians, Vietnam style." The American soldier couldn't cope with his overwhelming guilt. Anne tried to comfort him, telling him that it could have happened to anyone. "War is not always black and white," she said. Mistakes, like the one he'd madce, "can happen in the twinkling of an eye."

Another one of Anne's patients suffered from survivor's guilt after a mission with his long-range reconnaissance patrol unit. The Americans were on a trail when they saw North Vietnamese Army soldiers headed their say. The Americans hid while the NVA soldiers approached with their water buffalo. When the animal stopped and turned its head toward the hidden Americans, apparently sensing their presnce, the NVA soldiers opened fire on the hiddnen unit, killing every American except Anne's patient. Anne tried to tell him that the other deaths were not his fault: "There was nothing different you could have done."


Excerpt from "Anne Koch: I Knew in my Heart That I Had to Go" from Courageous Women of the Vietnam War. 

A reporter and the marines

Jurate is seen in the central image with soldiers of the 1st Battalion, 12th Infantry Regiment

Image courtesy of Jurate Kazickas

Jurate didn't dare let the young marines know how exhausted she found the first day's march up and down hills, through bamboo, 10-foot-high razor-edged "elephant" grass, and a river full of leeches. She even pretended not to notice when one of the men strapped extra ammunition weighing seven and a half pounds around her already heavy pack. "Hardcore!" they laughed admiringly as Jurate marched up the next hill without comment or complaint.

The marines might have played tricks on her but Jurate found the young men endearing. "Watching them kidding around with one another, sharing letters from home, proudly showing off pictures of their sweethearts, I was always struck by how young and vulnerable they were," she wrote later. "The thought that some of them might never come home from Vietnam was too terrible to contemplate. But I knew it was true. And so did they."

During a rest stop, one of them--who called Jurate Sam, claiming her real name was too difficult to remember--asked, "What's a woman like you doing out here?"

She replied, "I'm a reporter, and this is the biggest story of our times. I want to experience what's going on here so my reports will be accurate and truthful."

When another young marine, listening to their conversation, heard that Jurate was a freelance reporter and hadn't been specifically assigned to Vietnam, he cried, "You mean you came over here on your own just to get shot at? Wow! Sam, you're nuts!"


From "Jurate Kazickas: What's a Woman Like You Doing Out Here?" from Courageous Women of the Vietnam War. 

Kay Wilhelmy and a close call with the VC

Kay Wilhelmy inoculating Vietnamese children, 1966

Courtesy of Kay Wilhelmy Bauer

Danger from the VC was always near but never predictable. One day Kay and a nurse named Kathie accepted an invitation to watch a film at an ARVN compound in nearby Rach Soi. A US Army captain who was traiing an ARVN unit there had a generator, a projector, and a new American film he wanted to show the two nurses.

The film was so engrossing none of them noticed that darkness was falling outside. Travel after nightfall was risky. While Rach Soi was only a 15-minute drive from Rach Gia, it was a very dangerous 15 minutes: they might be attacked by VC as they bounced their way along the rutted road in their jeep, but the were in equal danger from ARVN soldiers who gbuarded the road into Rach Gia after sundown and might mistake them for VC in the dark.

Kay and Kathie, to their great relief, returned safely to their quarters. Their phone was ringing when they arrived. It was the hospital. The Rach Soi compound had been partially blown up: while they had been watching the movie inside, the VC had laid claymore mines outside. The casualties--ARVN personnel and their families--were being transported to the hospital, and the nurses were needed immediately...


Excerpt from "Kay Wilhelmy Bauer: American Survivor" from Courageous Women of the Vietnam War. 

Bobbi Hovis and the Diem Coup

Bobbi Hovis in Saigon, 1963, posing in front of a WWII-era ambulance

Courtesy of Bobbi Hovis

Immediately after landing in Saigon, Bobbi and the other nurses who had flown with her were escorted into a staff room where they were told in a brief meeting that "anti-American feelings were running high." Bobbi felt a tinge of excitement. It was dangerous, yes, but history was unfolding here. And she would witness it.

The nurses, supporting a larger medical team, were in Saigon to start a combat casualty hospital which would serve US forces in the area, as well as Vietnamese civilians and military personal from Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, and South Korea...

After an uneventful morning, the senior corpsman, returning from lunch some distance away, had shocking news. "There's all kinds of barbed wire strung across the street," he said. "There are gun emplacements set up with .50-caliber machine guns and they're all pointed right up the street at us."

By the time she returned to the hospital, Bobbi could hear gunfire. She saw "tree limbs snapping and flying in all directions. Lead was ricocheting of building walls." Planes were dive-bombing the presidential palace. She saw one plane hit by anti-aircraft fire. It went into a dive and disappeared.

The long-rumored coup to overthrow Ngo Dinh Diem, South Vietnam's highly unpopular president, had begun.

From "Bobbi Hovis: Witness to History" from Courageous Women of the Vietnam War. 

The author with Bobbi Hovis, July, 2018.

A 12 year-old Vietnamese village girl sees her first American

Le Ly Hayslip at 12

Courtesy of Le Ly Hayslip

In the sky, she saw two flying ships "whining and flapping like furious birds." The wind from these ships blew off her sunhat. She fell to her knees. She thought she was going to die. Then she reaised her eyes. The ship landed. "The dull green door on the side of the ship slid open, and the most splendid man I had ever seen stepped out on the marshy ground," she wrote later.

He was enormously tall and fair-skinned. "Still cowering, I watched his brawny, bond-haired hands raise binoculars to his eyes," she wrote. ."He scanned the tree line around Ky La, ignoring me completely." After saying something in a strange language to another man inside the ship, he went back inside.

"Instantly, the flap-flap-flap and siren howl increased and the typhoon rose again," Le Ly described. "As if plucked by the hand of god, the enormous green machine tiptoed on its skids and swooped away, climbing steadily toward the treetops."

The next sound she heard was her father's voice.

"Ba Ly--are you all right?"


Excerpt from "Le Ly Hayslip: 'Freedom is Never a Gift'" from Courageous Women of the Vietnam War. 

Genevieve de Galard: The Sole French Nurse at Dien Bien Phu

Genevieve de Galard at Dien Bien Phu before the seige.

Courtesy of Genevieve de Heaulme

As the enemy moved in, Genevieve's very presence lightened the profound sense of hopelessness falling upon the garrison. Later that day a large group of French paratroopers landed in the area. One of them, when he saw Genevieve, exclaimed cheerfully, "What do you know? There's a woman here!"

Though overwhelmed with medical work, Genevieve tried to attend to the men's emotional needs as well, explaining later that "when wounded, the toughest man becomes as vulnerable as a child and needs to feel supported...In Dien Bien Phu I was, in a way, a mother, a sister, a friend"


Excerpt from "Genevieve de Galard: 'I Only Did My Duty'" from Courageous Women of the Vietnam War. 

Xuan Phuong, the Vietminh, and the Battle of Dien Bien Phu

The Battle of Dien Bien Phu offered the Vietnamese the exhilarating hope of independence from the French. Each evening, Finance Ministry workers excitedly assembled around a large map that depicted combat areas with red pins and French casualty numbers on labels. "The atmosphere was electric," Phuong later wrote of this time. "The slogan heard and repeated everywhere was "We work one and all for Dien Bien Phu."