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.