Former military nurses share Vietnam war experiences

Former military nurses share Vietnam war experiences

(EXCERPT) BY SHANNON MCMAHON Chicago Tribune

WASHINGTON - (KRT) - The Vietnam Women's Memorial shows a woman
cradling a wounded soldier while another woman looks upward. But for
former military nurses visiting the site for Veterans Day, it brought
back other images: soldiers' dying screams, rats crawling across
patients, bombings, mortar blasts and the hallucinations of the
wounded.

"This wakes up a lot of old memories," one former nurse whispered to
her friend at a candlelight vigil Monday night.

It reminded Marilyn Rice, a Chicago native who lives in Freeport,
Ill., of her work transporting "blown-apart soldiers" from airplanes
to a hospital in Okinawa, Japan in 1970-71.

Rice, joining 1,500 other veteran nurses to commemorate the memorial's
10th anniversary Tuesday on the National Mall, said she enlisted not
only to have her nursing school tuition at Northwestern paid, but also
to prevent her younger brothers from being drafted to go to Vietnam.

"I figured if I went, they wouldn't have to go," Rice said, "You
couldn't have multiple kids (from the same family) there. I also
thought that, working as a nurse, I'd probably be safer."

Rice, who was 21 when she left for Okinawa, remembered the war with a
numbed, intimate detail.

As a nurse, she cared for amputees, burn victims and soldiers who
ha...

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---------------------------
Otis Willie
Associate Librarian
The American War Library
http://www.americanwarlibrary.com