VIETNAM RESEARCH PAPER

-- –––Original Message –----
From: Amanda Kent
To: John and Jeannie Baldwin
Sent: Saturday, February 28, 2009 11:44 AM
Subject: Vietnam Research Paper

Hi John and Jeannie,

I guess my email never sent the first time!!

How are you? It has been so long since I have seen you guys!

Anyways, I am in a Vietnam War seminar at school, and I am writing a paper on the women’s perspectives of the Vietnam War.

Jeannie, I was wondering if I could ask you a few questions about being a nurse overseas.

1. What were some of your most memorable experiences of the war?

Arriving in country, to Vietnam, one is immediately hit with the incredible heat, humidity and smells. There is dust everywhere unless the monsoon rain is pouring down and for about two weeks until you dive into your work as an operating room nurse at the hospital, you are very homesick. Despite constant artillery going ‘out” at night from the 105mm howitzers that were used to keep the enemy away from our post, you got used to it and could sleep. Only occasionally during my year in a combat zone did rockets fall on our base and none, fortunately, hit the hospital. I was a surgical nurse, so worked in the operating room 6 days out of seven, on 12 hours and off 12… some days were incredibly busy, with wounded stacked up and triaged by the top surgeons in order of their priority to go into surgery. There were six operating rooms going most of the time, and one was held for “emergencies”! One of my most memorable days was when the surgeons operated on a young Vietnamese woman who had been caught in crossfire, she was 8 months pregnant, and we were unable to save either the mother or the baby. I baptized the baby before wrapping in a pillowcase. I operated a lot with John Baldwin, who was chief of surgery and as you know, I later married. He was extremely fast and I do not remember him ever losing a patient, and he operated on nearly 1,800 Americans, Australians, South Vietnamese soldiers, civilians, and even the enemy… North Vietnamese soldiers. He treated them all with great skill. If an American or Aussie was in need of surgery fast, he took them in before anyone else, but other than that, we played fair and square. I got used to the rapid, unexpected pace of casualties arriving by helicopter and by my sixth week, was really a calm veteran, unshaken by blood, blown off arms and all of the other horrors that modern war produces.

2. Did you ever feel like you were judged differently because you were a woman? Were you ever stereotyped?

The only women who served in Vietnam were Army nurses. The military had not made the, in my opinion, terrible decision to put women in combat roles, which came from Congresswoman Barbara Schroeder of Colorado in an insane effort to “give women equality”. (Watch our DVD which link I will send of casualties, and then ask yourself if you want those young boys to be girls… it is bad enough to take care of blown-up 20 year old boys.) All nurses in Vietnam had volunteered to go there. Not one was drafted and not one had to go if she did not want to… there were plenty of nursing jobs at Army hospitals all over the USA. I was treated with utmost respect, partly because I was a woman, partly because I was a saving nurse, and partly because I was an officer. I was never stereotyped and there was nothing even close to what people now call “sexual harassment.” That was invented later on.

3. Why did you want to be a nurse in Vietnam?

I had always wanted to be a nurse, and in college joined the Army reserve and they helped me with my education to become a registered nurse. John Kennedy has been killed in 1963 and then his Brother Bobby was assassinated in Los Angeles in 1967, and the war in Vietnam was getting hotter and hotter, and I resolved that I would go there to help the soldiers as a nurse. My 1967 year was spent at Walter Reed Army Hospital, the crown jewel of their service, where I spent all my time in the operating room… working on kids back from Vietnam, who had had their original operations over there. In June 1968, I shipped out for Nam, and was assigned to the biggest hospital of the nearly 30 hospitals in country… the 24th Evacuation Hospital, in a huge rubber plantation outside of the capital city of Saigon. It was in the very epicenter of all the action and I enjoyed my work, made numerous friends, became a better nurse and person, and met John.

4. How were you affected after the war?

I still have flashbacks and memories and the strange thing was that this almost post traumatic stress syndrome did not really sneak up on me until I had been back home for nearly 15 years. However, the sound of a helicopter coming over or landing, gives me goose bumps and I will often cry when that happens, remembering what that meant forty years ago. I have become more sensitive to life, to the unborn and to the elderly.

The Vietnam War, much like Iraq, was a terrible mistake, fought for “the domino theory” that if Nam went communist, all Asia would fall. That was political lying by Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford. Vietnam had been brutally occupied for 900 years by the Chinese, then in the late 1800s, the French conquered them and made them semi slaves, then in 1938, the Japanese won out and brutalized them until the USA won WW 2. Ho Chi Minh, the father of modern Vietnam, pleaded with president Harry Truman to give his nation their independence, just as Britain was giving it to India, and the USA giving it to the Philippine Islands… but no, Truman never answered.

So Ho Chi Minh fought the French who returned, defeated them in 1954… wiped them out, and Crazy but true, the USA under Eisenhower sent the 1st US soldiers to Nam in 1959. Little did anyone realize that the first man killed would be 1959, and the last in 1975…. 58,000 wonderful American boys, 500,000 or more Vietnamese, and another 200,000 American kids wounded… blind, one leg, brain injuries, and for what?

Last year our daughter Nancy visited for her company, and where my hospital once stood is a huge factory that makes Nike and Reebok shoes… a giant industrial park, and on the coast, you can stay where 5,000 men of the 1st Cavalry Division died in Vung Tau… at a 5 star Hilton with a Greg Norman 18 hole championship golf course.

Does any of that make any sense? Of course not… and when you are my age, you will feel the same way about Iraq.

John and I have entertained about 6 of our former soldier wounded from Nam at our home, including one whose leg John put back on and now 40 years later he still hikes and climbs, another shot in the brain who just retired as head designer for Univ. Pennsylvania Medical Center, and Andy in Florida with whom all four of us have enjoyed vacations to Yellowstone Park and the High Sierra. Andy is another whose leg we completely saved… so there is incredible sense of pride and accomplishment for John and me, because, you see, we didn’t kill people, we just saved their lives. In summary, the role of women in Vietnam was that of the nurse… true Angels of Mercy… to a wounded 19 year old, a pretty, intelligent nurse like Jeannie caring for him was like going to Heaven. Nurses were essential. They were feminine. They were mothers to hurt boys. They cried with them and changed their dressings. In Vietnam, as in other previous wars, women as nurses enjoyed their great shining hour of glory.

If you could answer any of these questions, or simply talk about your experiences, that would be great. I would love to use some of your quotes in my paper! As well, John, if you have anything you would like to add, it would be wonderful! My topic is about the women’s perspectives, but any additional information from a firsthand source would be great!

Separately I am sending a link to the DVD we made… actually several patients got together, took Jean’s and my slides and produced this as a gift to us last year on the 40th anniversary of some of their wounding, operations and recovery. Many of those in the casualty photos were the ones who did this for us, and are lifelong friends. (View the Video at “Vietnam 1968-1969: A multimedia Tour of Vietnam”

View it on a big screen TV, turn up the volume and see the price of war. Ask yourself: “What if those were 20 year old lovely women?”….

That to me is the lesson… feminism went nuts insisting that women go into blazing combat. John has worked at Walter Reed in Washington DC and has seen young women with no legs, one arm, half a face missing….coming home from Iraq. Women in brutal combat makes no sense… actually, none of it makes sense in the long run.

All the best. Jeannie Baldwin (with help from John)
March 9, 2009

Thank you so much for your help
Amanda Kent
February 28, 2009