Vietnam made them best friends, better nurses

From Sept 9:
From Chicago Tribune: Vietnam made them best friends, better nurses

Over the years, when best friends Patricia Susor Maravola, of Gurnee, and Ellen Lally, of Springfield, had their Friday night telephone chats, their conversations inevitably would include reminiscences about their time as Army nurses during the Vietnam War.

They'd talk about how both were in their early 20s and a few months out of nursing school in 1969 when they arrived at the Army's Third Field Hospital in Saigon, and how thoroughly unprepared they were for the long, grueling hours and the emotional toll of caring for soldiers and some civilians in the intensive care unit.


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They'd talk about how the experience of war made them better nurses, and also made indelible imprints on their lives.

"We developed friendships and bonds," said Lally, 63, who was a nurse for 39 years until she retired in 2007. "I never forgot any of these people. I had such an admiration for them and it set the tone for my nursing career."

Earlier this year, Lally suggested to Maravola that they plan a first-ever reunion. And so, on Friday, about 90 former staff members of Third Field Hospital, called the "Walter Reed of the Orient," and a few ex-patients will come from around the country to Chicago for a two-day celebration of their time there.

Most of the hospital's personnel — including doctors, nurses, lab and X-ray technicians, chaplains, transportation staff — did yearlong tours of duty, and many of the roughly 2,000 workers never met face to face.

But the stories they heard of each other's tours were the stuff of legend: There was the doctor who removed a live explosive from a soldier; the surgical team that performed an operation in a bunker; the nurse and medic who cared for a Vietnamese infant who was the sole survivor after the Viet Cong leveled her village.

"We learned that she had been found in her dead mother's arms," said Lally, who cared for the baby with an ICU medic who became her husband. "She was rushed to surgery and later adopted by someone who worked in the hospital." She now lives in California with her husband and three children.

Retired Col. Sterling Mutz, 82, an orthopedic surgeon who lives in California, helped set up the military hospital in a former school. Third Field Hospital was open from 1965 to 1972 and at its height had about 500 beds. He said it was the largest Army medical unit in Vietnam and one of the few that wasn't run out of a tent.

"We brought in a 100-bed field unit left over from (the Korean War) and wooden canvas cots and portable operating lights and gasoline sterilizers," Mutz said. "And it still was nowhere near adequate for a surgeon in 1965. But somehow they saved many lives and limbs. Much more came later."

Maravola, 64, now a civilian nurse at Naval Station Great Lakes in North Chicago, said that when she was there the gymnasium was the postsurgical ward. Soldiers brought to the hospital were missing limbs, peppered with shrapnel, or had gaping head or abdominal wounds.

"When I got there, I'd never even treated a person with a gunshot before, but now there were many people with four or five," she said.

Jaclyn Rautbort Tropp, of Skokie, arrived in Saigon in December 1969, about a year out of nursing school. She said in the 1960s, nurses were taught to be subservient to doctors. But in Vietnam, doctors and nurses didn't have time to quibble over their roles.

"Everyone pitched in and I really learned a lot," said Tropp, 64, who was the head nurse in a dialysis unit and also volunteered in an orphanage. "I was suturing and the doctors let us put the shunts in for dialysis. I was doing so much that I felt stifled when I came back to the States and was supposed to be (subservient) again."

Edward Russell, 66, who worked as a chaplain's assistant, said the Vietnam War led to advances in the fields of medical evacuations and trauma surgery.

"Helicopter evacuations were done to a small extent in the Korean War," said Russell, who lives in Pennsylvania. "But by the Vietnam conflict, medevac (units were) so much more effective in extracting casualties from the battlefield and getting them to a hospital during what's called the golden hour, when doctors have a better chance at saving a life."

Not all the memories are hard. They recall off-duty dancing in the hot, sticky night air to music by Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Beatles and the Supremes.

"Our down time was our party time and we partied hard," Maravola said. "We had huge speakers and huge reel-to-reel tape decks and for just a few minutes we'd let our hair down, throw our heads back and just have fun and forget what we'd just seen in the (intensive care unit)."

All told, about 66,000 patients were admitted to Third Field Hospital, Mutz said.

The sheer numbers of patients saved and lost could be overwhelming, according to Lally.

"If you go through an experience like that, you have to have some emotional trauma," she said. "We had such an intense, emotional year together."