True to Life
David Stone Martin #6
Oil on canvas, circa 1943
Gift of Abbott Laboratories

     "TET" Journal Feb.6 1968  

By Jeanette Wolfe 

    (Ret. USANC)     

71st EVAC- Pleiku - RVN      

I've been trying to get to sleep, but I'm so wired up I can't seem to drift off.  I did sleep for a couple of hours, but I woke up and can't get  sleep.  I thought maybe if I got up and wrote in here for a while I'd be able to settle down and get some rest.

    The last week or so has been the most horrible time of my life, bar none.  I don't know if I can get it down on paper, what it's like.  I'm so tired I can hardly hold my head up, but isn't it strange that I can't sleep?

    Adrenaline, again.

    Starting back last month sometime--I'm not sure when this all started, really, it's blurred together--we had been thinking that something big was gonna go down.  Little things got us to wondering.

    The hootch maids were very distant and not as friendly as usual.  Also, there seemed to be less Vietnamese in evidence, like they were staying home or something.  We thought maybe they were getting ready for Tet, making preparations like we do for Christmas, as this is their biggest holiday; they have feasts and give presents, etc.

   It all could have been put down to that, logically.   But also we were getting fewer chopper shipments of supplies in and that was weird.  We usually get at least one shipment a day; our storage facilities are limited here, so higher-higher sends things in piecemeal.

Anyway, there had been a lot fewer shipments coming in and we thought that kinda strange.  Of course, I suppose it can all be put down to gearing down for the Tet cease-fire, but I'm beginning to wonder, seeing as we were getting a lot of VC wounded who had our own antibiotics, albumin, ect., in their packs.  It probably got sold on the black market before it ever got to us, which infuriates me.  We were running out of everything.  But I'm getting ahead of myself.

    I'd gone to bed early the night of the beginning of the Tet holiday. We'd been told that the Vietnamese set off fireworks (Tet is sort of like New Year's Eve, July 4th, Easter and Thanksgiving all rolled into one), so I didn't get all excited at first when I heard a lot of noise going on.  But then it sounded as if we were taking incoming--there's NOTHING like that sound, I can't describe it--and it sounded as though I could hear small-arms fire fairly close by, so I got up to look out my window.  I saw dark figures running around and I couldn't tell if they were ours or theirs, but it scared the hell out of me.  When I heard mortars landing inside the perimeter, I knew something was up.  I woke up all the girls in the hootch and we got dressed in a hurry and made for the EVAC to see if we could find out what was going on.

    The girls there were pulling out masses of supplies and were glad to see us.  There was fighting all around the camp and a lot of confusion.  The major was at the narc cupboard and she handed us each a big handful of MS styrettes.  She said we weren't to waste time signing stuff out if we had a lot of casualties.  I stuffed mine in my shirt pockets.

We could hear an awful lot of incoming.  Now, normally, we take shelling every night, but not like this.  This was almost continuous and everything was shaking with the impacts of the hits within the camp.  There was a lot of screaming going on outside, we could hear orders being given in English and a bunch of Vietnamese being spoken. Still, we weren't exactly sure what was going down.
    Pretty soon we got the first of the wounded.  They came in waves, sort of.  Most of these were in their civies and had been wounded by incoming as they slept in their tents.  Their buddies dropped them off at the EVAC and went right back outside.   Usually, when we get wounded, they are flown in off a chopper and a medic has evaluated them  ahead of time, but these were all local.  Within ten minutes the EVAC was full of wounded with more waiting outside.  The major did the triaging, since she was the most experienced.

      We were so busy inside that we had all we could do to make sure everyone was still alive when they got to us.  Some weren't, had been killed outright by the shelling.  There was one boy who didn't look to have a wound on him anywhere, but he was quite dead from the concussion.

The noise and confusion outside was tremendous.  The Army had been truly caught with their pants down.  A lot of men had been given in-country leave and were visiting friends on other bases, since there was supposedly this chiseled-in-granite cease-fire.  And there were men here from other units who were visiting friends and nobody knew who was in charge and who was supposed to give the orders.  From what the wounded were telling us as they came in, they were fighting in small pockets all over the camp; nothing was organized and each pocket of men was isolated from the others and were just trying to hold what ground they had.

We kept asking the new guys as they came in, trying to figure out what in the hell was going on.  But mostly, we were swamped and had to run to keep up with the flow of wounded. Hardly any of these were light wounds.

At one point, we could hear orders being given in English right outside the windows of the Triage and we could hear Vietnamese being spoken; small-arms fire was very, very close.  The major came inside--she'd been ordered to go in by somebody out there.  She took a couple of the girls aside and told them quietly to go to their hootches and to gather up our .45s and bring them back.  Also to get everyone's flak jackets and pots.  She was sending two orderlies under arms with each girl.  She was trying to be quiet about it, but we heard her giving the order.  I doubt if anyone was as terrified as I was.

They disappeared and we just kept working frantically.  It sounded as if the whole place was exploding.  When they came back, we were ordered to strap on our sidearms and keep them on.

The major told us not to allow ourselves to be taken alive, if it came to that.  Some of the men on the stretchers still had their weapons and the ones who were aware of what was going on said they'd protect us.  The orderlies were ordered to carry their rifles and to protect the doorways, if necessary. Two of our orderlies are Conscientious Objectors, but they picked up weapons, I noticed.

A couple of our girls had been given in-country R&R, so we were very short-staffed with all these wounded coming in faster than we could process them.

I had a guy with a bullet in his left bicep who was begging to be let go so he could get out there with his buddies.  I pulled the bullet out with the hemostats (unsterile) I keep clamped to my breast pocket, poured some antibiotic powder into the wound, wrapped him up and told him to come back later.  As soon as I was done with him he grabbed his weapon and was out the door.

I had another guy who was brought in minus part of a leg.   I fixed his tourniquet and had him put over to the side.  He had every chance of living, but we had other things to do and would have to wait for his stump to be cleaned up.  Besides, they weren't ready yet in surgery.

I had to do a trach on the next one and he needed a chest tube to reinflate his lung, as he had no breath sounds on the left side.  I hollered at Gary across the way, but he was subduing a guy who was wild, trying to get off the stretcher tho he was too seriously hurt to do much of anything.  He was awfully scared.  All of us were.  So Gary called instructions over to me about how to do the chest tube.  A  chest tube is a long rubber tube, sterilized, of course, into which a huge sharp thing sort of like a nail without a head, called a trocar, about a foot and a half long, runs down the middle of the hole in the tube.  Gary could see how scared I was to do this, but he yelled instructions over to me as he was holding this other guy down.
    "Find the sixth or seventh intercostal space on his side," he yelled, "and then swab some Betadine over it.  Then put some gloves on and make a small slit in the skin, about an inch or so long, in the middle of the target you've made--don't worry about using a local, you haven't got time and he looks like he's going out on you!"  I put some local in, anyway, as the fellow was still conscious.

"Okay, now grab the tube with the trocar inside it and aim right for that slit you've made.  You'll have to push hard, Jen, to get it through the muscle layers, but not too hard.  As soon as you feel the trocar going through the muscles, back off on the pressure you're using.  You should be able to feel a small popping sensation when you get to the right place.  Don't go any farther than that or you'll put the trocar right thru his lung and make mincemeat of it.  When you feel the pop with your hand, take the trocar out and stand back.  Then hook the other end of the tube to the suction bottles on the floor.  That's all there is to it."

I did exactly as he said and, sure enough, there was this tiny popping sensation as I got thru the pleural sac.  As soon as I took the trocar out of the tube--the trocar is sharp and is also a guide for the tube;  when it's removed, the tube stays in place--blood came gushing out of the tube all over my pants.  I'd  had the 2-bottle suction unit set up before I started, so I just jammed the other end of the tube into the place for it on the tubing system and hooked the other end of the tubing system of the bottles to the Gomco suction unit.  I was having to use two Gomco's on this guy, one for the chest tube and one for his trach.

He started breathing a lot better and was looking real scared, but he reached out and grabbed my hand just as I was starting to suture the tube in place on his skin.  I had to swat his hand away, as he'd ruined whatever sterility I was working with, but I didn't havetime to change gloves so I kept working.  He kept thanking me over and over, saying it with his mouth because he couldn't speak because of the trach, and I kept reassuring him that he wasn't going to die.

Another fellow was gut-shot and had intestines hanging out all over the front of him.  I poured some sterile saline into his wound and onto a big field dressing and covered the wound and had an orderly tape it on; he'd be one of the first into surgery as no doubt there'd been a lot of damage one inside him.

The noise outside was tremendous and we could hardly hear ourselves think.  Shells and mortars were dropping much closer than they ever were before, but I was so busy I was almost able to forget about it.  I found that there's a kind of noise barrier that surrounds me when there's a lot of urgent stuff to do.  I can hear it, yes, but it's way in the background like it's coming from a different county, or something.  I was hearing myself give myself directions in my head as I worked.  It seemed like I had to go so fast between one patient and another that there wasn't time to worry about what was going on outside.

There was another guy with a head wound and it was hopeless.  He was already in a coma and I had to have Jerry, my orderly, move him into the Expectant's Room.  I was surprised he gotten by the major and put into the Triage.  The Expectant's Room is a tiny room off the side of the Triage where we take the boys who's wounds are so severe that we can't do anything about them.  They will surely die.  There's always a nurse in there when it's occupied and we try our very best to keep the men as comfortable as possible until they go.  Also, a chaplain makes it his business to be in there when we have a patient in there.  Nobody is ever alone when they die.  Nobody. Ever.

I had taken off my flak jacket because it was entirely too hot and it impeded my movements.  I couldn't get to my pockets and all the stuff I keep stashed in them, so I dropped it in a corner somewhere.  I tried to take the pot off, too, but somebody yelled at me to leave it on.  I think it may have been Jerry, who was only a step behind me wherever I went.

There was a fellow who had a large belly wound and I was doing the bit with the saline and large field dressing when this loud BANG! went off and it knocked me right over the patient's chest.  I looked around  and there was a big hole in the wall of the Triage about two feet behind me. The lights went out.  I guess a sapper had gotten through the wires and satchel-charged the emergency generator.  There were a lot of screams from the girls and Jerry went running for a big flashlight.  I was standing between two stretchers and the guy behind me, whom I hadn't gotten to yet because he wasn't very seriously hurt, was dead.  Part of his head was resting on my foot, though I didn't know that until Jerry had come back with the flashlight.

Somebody stepped thru the hole in the wall, which was about 6 feet across, and yelled and I almost peed my pants.  He was very nearly shot by one of the patients who still had his weapon with him.  At first, I wasn't sure who's side the guy who came through the wall was on.  But it was an American wanting to know if everyone was all right in here!  Idiot question! Of course, everyone wasn't all right in here!  What did he think this place was-- a f--ing restaurant??  Anyway, he stationed an armed guard at the hole so nobody could get through it and get to us.  What we were going to do for lights was another question, but I didn't have time to worry about it, there was too much to do.  Several of the wounded men had received more shrapnel wounds from the blast.

I don't know how long it took to get the generator going again.  It seemed like a long time, but maybe it wasn't.  Jerry kept right beside me with the flashlight so I could see what I was doing while outside they were fighting a delaying action around the hospital.  We could hear voices giving orders in English just on the other side of the wall.

Sometime in there, I don't know exactly when, Jerry pulled the light away from where I was working and said, "Miss Jen, you've been hit!"  He had the flashlight shining on my back..  There was blood there, but I thought it was someone else's.  Then he turned me around and found more blood on my shirt front.  A few pieces of shrapnel had gotten me in the blast, I guess. It was nothing.  I told him to keep his mouth shut and keep working.

I must have started about 50 IVs on guys.  It's hard to start an IV on a guy who doesn't have any blood pressure, since his veins are almost collapsed.  I was pushing MS and albumin into IVs like mad, trying to keep them comfortable and expand their blood with the albumin so they wouldn't go into severe shock.  We had one orderly doing nothing but running for units of whole blood from the blood bank.  The soldiers' blood had all been typed in Basic Training and their blood types are on their dogtags.

I can't begin to describe what it was like, the moaning of the men in the darkness, wondering what had happened to them, where they were because they couldn't see.  A few of them could tell they were going to be alright because they felt the hand of a woman on them, or smelled American perfume. Many of them wanted Jerry to shine the flashlight on my face briefly so they could see I was really an American woman, a nurse.  Sometimes shrieks screeched out in the darkness, incoherent and primally frightened.  The voices of the other nurses and the docs calling for more supplies or soothing the men.  Men were asking for their mothers.  They asked for Jesus.

They wanted to be left alone to die or they begged for someone to help them.  Most of them wanted to know if their private parts were still there.  They wanted a drink of water.  Some struggled for their very breath.

We had to send for some Red Cross workers to help with the flow of men that was becoming endless; they could run errands, find supplies, or sit with the more seriously hurt men to make sure they kept breathing.  I showed a couple of them how to suction a trach in case the patient sounded wet and was having trouble breathing.

Two girls were working frantically in the back, trying to get the ORs set up and wanting to know which cases were coming first so they could figure out what kinds of instruments to put out.  All the docs were out in Triage, up to their elbows in wounded, and they said to delay the ORs for an hour or so as there were too many seriously wounded out here to take care of first. We had to provide primary care for most of them before we could even begin to think about taking some of the first ones into the OR.  I said that I wanted my belly wound taken back among the first ones and Shelley gave me the thumbs-up sign.  At least she could equip one OR for that case.

The lights came on and I blinked.  I was running down the aisle in the middle of the Triage when I heard my name being called softly.  It took me a minute to find where the voice was coming from, but it was from a man over in the corner near the Expectant's Room.  I can't say it was a man, it's shape was not that of a man.
    "Jen....Jen..." he softly called to me.  I went over to him, not able to understand how anyone here might be able to recognize me.  He was very young, of course, but had no legs.  His right arm was gone also.  His right eye was merely a bloody socket.  The right side of his face seemed to have melted.  He seemed filthy until I was able to see that he had been burned almost past recognition.  He had taken direct machine gun fire, which had severed his legs and possibly his arm.  A bullet had set off the Willie Peter (a white phosphorus grenade) that had been attached to his web gear.  There was obviously nothing I could do for him: he would surely die.

"Jen," he whispered again through those lips that were so charred they could barely move.  "It's me, Jen."  I looked more closely and still could not think who he might be.  "I came up on the holiday to see you," he said. "Some holiday.  Where's your guitar?"

There was a boot where his right arm should have been and it had a dogtag fastened to the laces.  Sometimes the men would bring in body parts in the belief that we could reattach them.  Reading the dogtag, I was struck dumb with the most incredible shock and grief.  It was Peter, my friend Mary's brother with whom I had spent so many balmy summer evenings singing songs on their front porch.  Oh, God.

He reached out with his left hand, charred as it was, and grasped my hand.  His voice was as soft as I'd remembered it, not betraying pain at all, but serene.
    "Jen," he said.  "It's me, Peter.  Come closer, there's something I want you to do for me."  His left eye was still clear, though his face was caked in blood and gore, and as I came closer he lifted his left hand and touched my face.  "God, you are so beautiful," he said, "but you're a mess.  Look at all that blood on you.  Are they treating you okay?"  I told him I was fine, that he should rest.

"I'm going to rest soon," he said, "but first there's something I want you to do for me."  I nodded, feeling as though we were isolated in a corner of the world where nobody else could possibly go.  All the noises receded into the far distance and it was just Peter and me.  "I'm in terrible pain," he said.  "Please, Jen, give me some morphine and end it for me."      How could he ask this of me?  How could I bring myself to do it, even though I knew he was in pain beyond telling.  His eye pleaded with me.  How could I not?

"Peter," I said, "I'm right here and I won't leave you until it's time."  He smiled with half his mouth.  I unhitched my rubber tourniquet that I use for starting IVs and wrapped it around his left arm.  It was hard to find a vein; he probably had almost no blood pressure.  I was pushing in the first styrette of MS when he spoke again.

"God bless you, Jen," he said.  "Please write to Mother and Mary as soon as you can.  Tell them you were with me at the end.  It will make them feel better to know I wasn't alone.  Don't let them know how it was, Jen, they'd only grieve more.  It's best they don't know all of it."

His muscles were relaxing as I pushed the second styrette and he began to pray.  I repeated the Lord's Prayer with him as I kept pushing the morphine.  I could barely see, tears slipping down my face.  His voice tapered off at "Forgive us our trespasses" and I finished the prayer without him as I pushed the fourth styrette into his arm and he was gone, a peaceful look on his charred face.  He's only 18, I kept thinking.  He shouldn't be dying.  He's only 18.  He's only 18.  He's only 18.

I felt so empty, just destitute.  I wanted to hold him in my arms and rock him and cry until there were no more tears, but there wasn't time. People were yelling at me and I needed to get back to work.  I reached for the tourniquet I'd need and when I pulled it off most of the skin on his arm came with it.  I'm trying not to remember this, but I have a feeling it will haunt me clear into Heaven, should I be worthy to get there.

Sandy was calling me to come help her with something and the next time I looked back to Peter's corner, his body was gone.

The night continued into day and some of the girls from the 73rd came over to help out in the Triage.  They could help there, but weren't equipped to help in the OR.

We began operating in the early hours of the morning.  As we were still taking shelling and mortar rounds, we were made to wear our pots, which only got in our way.  Sometimes the lights would go out again for awhile, but they'd come back on and we'd keep on going.

We cleaned up stumps.  We spent lots of time on belly wounds, looking for pieces of shrapnel and bullets.  They make a terrible mess when they ricochet around in someone's belly.  There is bowel to run time and again, taking it out of the abdominal cavity and inspecting it both manually and visually for tiny bits of metal.  There are organs to inspect and suture if they're bleeding.  Livers are the hardest to stop bleeding.  They are so vascular that even the needle puncture of the suture is difficult to stop bleeding.  Thank God we had electricity again and we could use the Bovies. The smell of burning tissue got to be very strong, but each time we used the Bovie, it hopefully meant another bleeder was stopped.
    We didn't have time between cases to clean the rooms.  We just hauled the dirty instuments out for the orderlies to clean up and resterilize.  We didn't even have time to wipe the blood off the OR beds; just put the next patient on there and get to it again.  They just kept coming and coming and coming until I thought we'd operated on every GI in Vietnam.

There was no time to sleep; I'd just back up against a wall someplace and slither down it to a sitting position and catch a few minutes' rest until someone nudged me with a toe and told me my room was ready again. The mess sarge sent over sandwiches and orange juice and the orderlies would take down our masks and feed them to us as we worked, taking care that we didn't get any crumbs into the wounds.

Soon things started to look familiar.  Faces meant nothing to me, as there wasn't time to learn their names, but  the wounds were beginning to ring bells.  Wasn't that the same suture I'd put in a while back?  It was all happening in a blur of fatigue; we were all running on full automatic, "Rock 'n' Roll", as the G.I.s say, nearly mindless.  Clamp this bleeder, will you? You run this part of the bowel, I'll get the lower bowel.  This stump is a mess; we're going to have to take it up farther so he doesn't get gangrene and lose the whole thing.  This belly is mincemeat; we'll take out what we can and hope for the best, but he's going to have to be sent on to Japan ASAP so they can do a better job.  Pour some antibiotics in here, there's grass and crud all over the damn place in here.

Gary and I had worked together since the whole thing began.  I'm not clear on how many days it was; night just seemed to run into day, day into night and back again.  He never lost patience with me, even though he was as tired as I was.  He always seemed to keep a clear head.  Once or twice when he was too tired to stand anymore, he'd drop out and sit down over at the side of the room and tell me what to do.

I took out spleens.  I learned to repair bowel.  When we had to take out whole sections of bowel because it was too shot up to be able to heal, he taught me how to anastamose (reattach the severed ends of the bowel, kind of like sewing two ends of a hose together so they fit exactly) and I did one or two myself with him guiding me.  It took some of the strain off him, as he was the one who had to make all the decisions about what to do for each patient.

We did chest cases.  We did amputations.  We did facial wounds.  We did some cases where bullets were so close to the spine that we were afraid we'd render the man paraplegic for the rest of his life, but they had to be done. We repaired secondary arteries that had been shredded by bullets or shrapnel. I can't think of one traumatic injury we didn't deal with.

We ran out of blood of a couple types a few times and I was called on to donate my Universal Donor's blood twice.  Gary was furious, both that we'd run out of replacement blood and that I was compelled to be drained of my own.  It weakened me, taking that much blood in so few days, but I kept thinking of how much blood had been drained onto the floors of our EVAC already by this carnage.  Gary made me drink more orange juice, so sweet I could barely stand it.  Then choppers were able to get in, as the fighting eased off, and we were apparently resupplied.  I'm not sure what day this was on.  All of this is running together in my mind and I can no longer distinguish what happened on what day.

Finally, we seemed to be done; there wasn't anybody waiting to be operated on out in the Triage.  I looked at my OR room; bloody linen and drapes were piled high at the edges of the room.  Bloody suction bottles were stacked in corners; our circulator had been circulating three different rooms and hadn't had time to keep up with them, only change them when one got full.  The bed was encrusted with gore.  I began cleaning up when the major walked into the room and ordered me to go to my hooch.  She had people who could do the clean-up work.  I was to get a shower and some hot chow and go to bed.

We'd stripped down to T-shirts before we went into the OR.  I think now that the only reason I was able to stand up was because my clothes were stiff from the blood they had absorbed.  I went to the hooch, stripped off everything I had on and threw it away.  The quartermaster will no doubt kill me, since he went to a lot of trouble to get them in my size, but they were ruined beyond all hope.  I took a brief shower, wasn't hungry, and went to bed.  I think I slept a few hours, but woke up.  Now I'm sleepy finally.

What am I going to tell Mary and her family?  God, forgive me.

Feb 8, 68
Dear Ann, Dave, Mary and Family,
    I know that by now you must have already received the horrible news that Peter is gone.  I've no idea how the Army does these things or how long it will be until you receive his body, but I know of the magnitude of your grief.

I was with Peter when he passed on.  He was very badly wounded when he came up here to visit with me for the Tet cease-fire and the fighting broke out.  I'd had no idea he was coming, but just yesterday got Mary's letter telling me he was planning to come.  He was brought to my EVAC when he was wounded and I took care of him.  We did the very best we could for him, but his wounds were too serious.

He was not in pain and we prayed together at the end.  He wanted me to write to you to ease your minds.  I know this is very difficult.  I mourn his loss along with you.

He was extremely brave, I want you to know that.  He went to the Father peacefully and I was right beside him.  His last words were of his hope for your peace of mind and comfort, that he loves you very much and he wanted you to know he is now in Heaven.

My thoughts and prayers are with you and your family.

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