4
Outback Nurse

Janet Beresford née Glasson

NSW Surgical Team

Long Xuyen, October 1967–October 1968

The girl came in shaking with pain, with a blood-soaked towel roughly wrapped around her lower leg and tears driving tracks down her grubby brown cheeks. Her parents were clearly relieved to hand her over to the sister on duty at the hospital. Janet Beresford pulled the towel back to reveal the gaping calf wound.

The girl was only about eight or nine. She’d been playing with her mates down near the river, roaring around jumping over fallen logs and leaping from a mound of earth and detritus deposited by floods past, unaware of the hazard hidden below its outer layer of silt.

Perched on the mound, ready to jump, suddenly the child had slipped, her foot sliding into an unseen crack, trapping her small thin leg in a tangle of buried sharp edges. Instinctively she balanced her weight and dragged her leg up and out too fast to sense the danger. Something sliced through her leg almost from knee to ankle. As the pain shrieked in and the blood flowed out, she screamed. The other kids ran, one for help and the others to huddle around her.

By the time her parents got her to Cunnamulla Hospital, she was in shock. As Janet directed the girl’s father to lay her on the surgical trolley in the small emergency bay she took stock, knowing the nearest doctor was 200 mostly dirt-road kilo­metres away at Charleville. Not for the first time in her career as a nurse in far south-west Queensland, she thanked God and the Foreign Affairs department for the twelve months’ theatre work she’d done in the war zone at Long Xuyen Hospital in South Vietnam.

Janet Glasson was born in western NSW but spent the first few years of primary school in Cunnamulla after her parents bought a property north of the town. When Janet was about ten, her father bought a mixed farming property near Geurie, between Dubbo and Wellington in central western NSW, and moved the family there. Janet and her siblings went to the one-teacher school at Ponto until they reached secondary age, after which they all went to boarding school in Sydney. As it turned out, Janet’s father’s heart wasn’t in farming and when her brother Ian won a ballot to buy a sheep station south of Thargomindah, 200 kilometres west of Cunnamulla, her parents sold up and moved back to Queensland.

Determined for as long as she can remember to be a nurse, Janet says she’d have been a Karitane nurse looking after small babies if her father had let her, but he insisted she do her general training. She enrolled at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Sydney and as soon as she finished her general certificate and received her registered nurse badge she went straight on to train as a theatre nurse. Although she opted not to do midwifery, the most popular of the second nursing certificates, Janet learnt plenty about the challenging side of delivering babies in the operating theatres of RPA.

She was halfway through this second qualification when the first team from RPA went to Vietnam, answering the call for civilian nurses willing to work in surgical teams in provincial hospitals as part of the SEATO program. As her colleagues and friends wrote back from Vietnam, the seeds of interest were planted, but it was reading Susan Terry’s book about Long Xuyen Hospital, House of Love, that got Janet hooked on the idea of going herself.

Convinced she should join the first team available, just after she finished her theatre course Janet happened to see an advertisement in the paper calling for applications from nurses and other appropriate medical personnel to join a combined NSW surgical team. She sent off her application and was excited when she was granted an interview, but stunned to discover there were over 200 other applicants for the nursing roles. Less than two weeks later she was advised that she had been selected to join the team. Janet says it wasn’t until she met up with one of the panel many years later that she learnt her defining feature among all those other well-qualified applicants was the fact that she was a country girl – therefore expected to be down-to-earth and practical – and the added bonus that she’d been to boarding school. ‘Apparently they decided that they needed someone who’d lived away from home for long periods, who’d long since learnt to manage homesickness, who’d be totally prepared to help others settle into their strange new environment!’

The team had only a few short weeks to organise their vaccinations, passports, visas, medical and dental checks, appropriate clothes and uniforms. The baby of the group at twenty-four, Janet says the only confronting thing about going was having to sign a declaration agreeing that she would take the pill to avoid pregnancy in the event that she was captured and raped. Needless to say, it wasn’t taking the pill that worried her. Images of danger aside, however, Janet was mostly just excited.

Travelling first class on Qantas, courtesy of the Australian government, team leader Dr Ken Doust, manager Howard Menzies, radiographer Clive Bond, nurse leader Brenda Wilton and Janet flew out a few days ahead of their remaining teammates on a trip that proved to be full of surprises. Arriving in Singapore, one of the things that amazed Janet, who is quite small in stature, was how many people there were who were even smaller. And when they flew into Tan Son Nhut airport in Saigon she was astonished to see how busy it was. Describing the scene, she says, ‘It was a noisy, moving parade ground of dull-coloured military aircraft. There were so many different types, with helicopters of all shapes and sizes and planes both big and small. And then there were all the people in uniforms. I’d never seen anything like it.’

At Australia House in Saigon, they were given a briefing and an idea of what to expect from life in Vietnam, though very little about the hospital itself or the work ahead of them. They cooled their heels for a couple of days, touristing around Saigon until the rest of the team gathered. Next day they were flown down to Long Xuyen, where they were met by the previous team leader and a welcoming reception from the hospital staff and local dignitaries.

Driving into Long Xuyen from the airport, Janet was transported home by the unexpected sight of Australian gum trees lining the road – but not for long. As they negotiated the passing parade of cycles, rickshaws, buffalo-drawn carts and people, it was the climate that struck her most. As used as she was to the extreme heat of western Queensland, the humidity was gobsmacking. ‘It was incredibly hot at home,’ she says, ‘but it was a dry heat. This wet heat was quite enervating until we got used to it.’

Enchanted at first glance by Long Xuyen and by the lush greenness of the surrounding area, Janet remembers it as a lovely country town full of friendly people. Although many were obviously poor, she says there was a quiet dignity about them, especially the graceful, gentle women. And the scruffy but beautiful kids instantly touched all of their hearts.

Spellbound by all the strange sights and smells around her, Janet found the markets particularly fascinating. The humidity was laced with the salty, sweet aroma of nuoc mam, a chilli-laden fish sauce used commonly as a dipping sauce. Elderly Vietnamese squatted, chewing betel nuts and watching over large containers of food simmering away while adults and small children alike moved busily between the rudimentary stalls. It was picturesque and captivating and, unlike Saigon, with no dedicated military base nearby other than the very small MACV, there were very few uniforms to be seen.

The house they moved into was the same White House the previous teams had used. Janet and Angela Ross, one of the ward nurses, shared a room on the top floor with wide French doors that opened out onto a balcony. For the first few nights the distant sounds of war rattled them but they soon learnt to sleep through anything. Like others before her, Janet was a little horrified by the scars of Japanese occupation that marked the French-designed villa but, she says, ‘We were very comfortable there with a full-time cook, cleaners and a driver so that we could concentrate all our energy on working.’

Conversely, and again like their predecessors, the primitive conditions at the hospital assaulted their sensibilities. Even though Janet had read about the hospital before she left Australia, comprehending it in House of Love and seeing it for herself were two different things. Walking into the hospital for the first time, seeing the results of the conflict, counting the bodies in the beds, registering the absence of linen and the shortage of appropriate resources made a significant impact on her; more than anything, it illuminated the reality of her new circumstances.

‘There were so many people everywhere. There were two and three people in the beds and, for much of the day and all night, all their relatives were there as well. And there were so many sick children.’ The hospital smelt rank and unhygienic and the bathrooms were revolting. Even so, Janet’s first raw impressions were mitigated by the presence of the charming Vietnamese staff, who were all delighted to welcome the newcomers.

While it was obvious that the Vietnamese staff had been well supported by previous teams from Melbourne, who’d established a blood bank, a central sterilising unit, a proper recovery ward and, best of all, a school of nursing which was run by an American nurse and an Australian, Janet says there was still plenty of work to do. Determined to clean the whole hospital from top to bottom, Brenda Wilton and her ward nurses, Lorraine Bingley and Janet’s roommate Angela, started scrubbing.

Meanwhile, Janet and fellow theatre nurse Kaye Parnell focused their attention on the surgical suite, where two theatres ran full bore most days, treating people with a wide range of complaints including various deformities and bowel obstructions. Most of the latter, especially in children, were caused by worms or by sponges left inside during surgeries done before the SEATO teams arrived.

Depending on how busy they were and what the procedures were, the surgical team sometimes worked independently and sometimes alongside the Vietnamese surgical staff. Thanks to the interpreters, they all managed to communicate enough to work together and the theatres often rang with shared peals of happy laughter when they succeeded in understanding each other directly. With a grin, Janet says the Vietnamese could be quite funny and weren’t above playing a joke or two. During her first wormectomy (clearing worms from an obstructed bowel) with a local team, the Vietnamese surgeon handed Janet the kidney dishes full of squirming Ascaris worms and tasked her with the very serious job of counting them. Out loud she counted, ‘One, two, three, four . . .’ After a few minutes, when Janet got to about 168, one of the nurses started giggling and very soon they were all laughing as Janet realised he’d tricked her. With one last laugh, she says, ‘I’m not sure why I thought they’d count worms, because they didn’t even count the sponges they used during surgery until our teams taught them to. The joke was definitely on me!’

The team soon settled into the hospital routine, which included a siesta between 12.30 and 2.30 p.m. (although the Australians usually had more than enough work to keep them busy during that period), and they quickly got used to the Vietnamese staff leaving at 5.30 p.m., when the influx of relatives not already in residence arrived to look after their family members for the night. They brought hammocks to sleep in and bowls of food for themselves and their particular patient. There was a definite air of cheerfulness in the sombre surroundings as families enjoyed being together.

The Australians started their days early in the morning and worked until they were finished. For the surgical staff, that was often well into the evening and sometimes late into the night. And then they were on 24-hour call as well. After a few weeks, the team leader, Ken Doust, recognised the unfairness of the system and drew up a new roster sharing the on-call duty among all the staff. If non-surgical staff were on call and couldn’t manage whatever came in, they’d call for surgical staff. It meant everyone had a bit of free time to relax and even enjoy some of the social aspects of their posting.

Although there was a 10 p.m. curfew in place when they arrived, they were otherwise free to drive or walk anywhere around town. They often went over for drinks or to watch movies at the MACV and continued the strong connections previous teams had enjoyed with the Americans. However, they were not allowed to drive outside the town limits, and they only ever flew thanks to the MACV staff who arranged appropriate air transport for them in consultation with their team administrator, Howard Menzies. They mostly travelled in choppers, although Janet did fly one time each in the cockpit of a Caribou and a Dornier. Occasionally the flights with the Americans were scary, such as the weekend she and Lorraine were changing planes at Can Thou and came under heavy fire as they took off. ‘That was a bit hair-raising!’ she declares; most of the time, though, they felt perfectly safe.

The Americans kept an eye on the Australians, especially since there was no military base close by, and actually took each and every one of them out to their firing range on Sundays and taught them how to handle various firearms so they could use one if they ever needed to. Not unfamiliar with firearms thanks to her farm background, Janet was particularly handy with an M16 assault rifle. With a wicked grin, she says she pissed one American colonel right off one Sunday afternoon when she out-shot him on the targets, an achievement that amused the members of her team and some of her new MACV friends, who had already nicknamed her ‘Miss Sunshine’. Janet thinks the presence of their Australian team provided the MACV residents with a little bit of sanity in a crazy, brutal war.

Like the teams before them, they were required to attend some diplomatic functions as well as local events to which they were invited as special guests. These events included the opening of bridges and buildings that had nothing to do with them, but they went because they knew their assistance was being acknowledged and recognised. They were also invited to dine with the local doctors and their families, which was always fun, even though some of the local dishes were a bit confronting. With a slight shudder, Janet says she managed to avoid the mooncakes (which were full of very salty egg yolks), the duck’s blood and the turtle dishes. It was all part of the experience, though, and one she generally embraced with enthusiasm.

Janet especially enjoyed frequenting the markets, pleased to have access to a hairdresser where she could have her hair washed, set and combed up for the princely sum of two Australian dollars. Her long red-gold hair was a shining beacon among the dark hair of the Vietnamese, who were invariably drawn to touch it. She never really minded, although all those strange fingers running through her hair did add to her appreciation of the hair salon. ‘We could even get a manicure, a pedicure and neck massage while we were there,’ she adds. ‘It was an excellent service.’

Janet also looked forward to their occasional visits to Saigon, where she could buy the best French perfume relatively cheaply at the American PX store. As well as duty-free shopping, there was always the promise of a good night out in Saigon, although there was one notable exception. Janet and another nurse accompanied one of their visiting specialists and their radiographer to a bar in the capital one weekend. Not realising they’d be considered competition by the Vietnamese party girls trawling the bar in search of round-eyed men with fat wallets, the nurses were stunned when the local girls greeted them with barely concealed hostility; even more so when one of them grabbed the pearls Janet’s friend was wearing and ripped them from her throat. The specialist calmed things down by shouting a round of drinks for the bar but they left soon after and, lesson learnt, the Australian girls never returned.

Most of the time, however, and day after day after day, the team worked long hours in the hospital, interspersed with continuing the weekly clinics that previous doctors had provided either in town or in the nearby villages and refugee camps. The nurses accompanied the doctors in turn and Janet remembers the Vietnamese people always greeted them with beaming, gap-toothed smiles of welcome. In fact, apart from the party girls in Saigon, everyone welcomed them wherever they went.

As visiting specialists came and went, they geared their theatre lists to take advantage of each doctor’s relevant skill. When one particular plastic surgeon arrived, Janet says news of his expertise buzzed around the bush telegraph like wildfire and people travelled from far and wide to consult him. As with the previous teams, the Vietnamese surgeons took advantage of the opportunity to learn from the visiting specialists, but Janet adds that the Australian doctors and nurses all learnt plenty from the Vietnamese as well.

Somewhere in between, Christmas came and went. The team had planned on one collective day off and settled in for a few drinks before their celebratory lunch. They’d barely swallowed the first aperitif when the ambulance turned up at their door advising them that there were injured civilians coming in and more expected. They jumped into action, dealing with wound after wound on the victims of the escalating war. As usual, the power blacked out at least once that afternoon, rendering the theatres hot and stuffy, their dripping sweat a constant threat to the sterile environment. All thoughts of Christmas lunch, and later dinner, were abandoned as they worked into the night.

It was a portent of things to come as the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese cranked up hostilities at the end of January 1968 when they launched the Tet Offensive against South Vietnam and all its allies. On 30 January, more than 80 000 guerrilla fighters attacked the allies on several fronts, including the US Embassy in Saigon, thrusting the country into deeper turmoil.

At Long Xuyen the first civilian casualties poured in through the night. The surgical team quickly hit their straps and barely stopped for several days. They were inundated with men, women and children wounded by landmines, mortar attacks, grenades, firearms, and shrapnel flung into unsuspecting bodies with deliberate intent to harm. There were gaping wounds and torn tissue, lost limbs and burnt flesh. The smell of blood permeated the blanket of tropical heat. The team operated around the clock, cleaning, debriding, packing or suturing every conceivable traumatic injury, including stumps where limbs had been blown off, only stopping to sleep when they couldn’t stand any longer.

And still the wounded poured in. Janet’s longest shift was thirty-two hours and one of the doctors, she says, operated for two full days trying to keep on top of the chaos. When they ran out of space they set up a temporary emergency room to cater for the overflow. Every day, among the casualties, came the orphans created by the war. Some of them were absorbed into extended family but others ended up in the local orphanage. With a distant look, Janet says, ‘It was terrible and heartbreaking.’

Ultimately, the sheer volume of work forced the doctors to teach the nurses to suture, from inside out if necessary, so that they could deal with most of the minor procedures. They were all exhausted and barely coping.

The team’s isolation from any significant military support had never been more apparent but, although the MACV guys offered them refuge, the team wouldn’t walk away from their responsibilities at the hospital. Instead, the Americans provided them with a variety of weapons, several hundred rounds of ammunition and quick refresher courses on how to use them. All the team members were required to take turns on guard duty at the house and they kept their firearms with them at all times, even in the theatre suite. Although she was a nurse and obliged to save life where possible, even now, Janet likes to think she could have used her M16 if she’d needed to defend the team or her patients.

For several weeks they were under 24-hour curfew, which dramatically changed the way they lived their lives. They weren’t allowed to walk anywhere and they were driven to and from work; they travelled with all of the windows tightly wound up and the doors locked. No social outings were permitted and apart from a happy hour they conducted at the White House prior to dinner in the evening, all they did was work, go home to eat and sleep, and go back to work. In the brief free hour or two they might have, they played cards and games or listened to music for entertainment and to distract themselves from the danger and awfulness surrounding them. And when they had time they wrote letters home, although Janet tended to downplay the events around her so her parents wouldn’t worry any more than they already were.

As the war continued, the members of the surgical team were all offered the opportunity to return home to Australia. Committed to helping and unable to bring themselves to leave during a crisis, they all declined. Instead, it was decided that some of the team would be moved. Some went to Vung Tau; Janet, Lorraine and radiographer Clive Bond went to Bien Hoa, where there was a smaller civilian hospital but a large American military hospital close by. At the time there was another Australian civilian surgical team working at Bien Hoa. Even though the civilian hospital was smaller, being right in the war zone it was incredibly busy. The casualties at Bien Hoa came by the busload and the doctors performed a huge variety of major surgical procedures. Again the theatre nurses were taught minor surgery procedures to help keep up with the workload and Janet was able to practise her surgical skills.

The downside of their new posting, Janet says, was that they didn’t mesh so well with the resident team and missed the special bond they had with their own crew back at Long Xuyen. The best thing about Bien Hoa as far as Janet could see was the officers’ recreational bar, the Green Door, located at the American base. Because they weren’t under 24-hour curfew anymore, the Australians were able to go to the Green Door for some proper social interaction and entertainment. Even with that release valve, though, it was a professionally challenging few weeks and both nurses were relieved and pleased to follow Clive ‘home’ to Long Xuyen when he left a few days ahead of them. ‘Although we didn’t have much protection there, we were much happier back with our own team.’ With the Tet Offensive finally over, the team returned to a ‘normal’ routine, albeit still dealing with any civilian victims of the ongoing war as well as the usual day-to-day sufferings of the Vietnamese people.

Janet says much of their success as a team rested on the fact that they had so much respect and even love for each other. At Bien Hoa they were outsiders and she could understand that because she knew the strength of her own team. They instinctively helped each other deal with the trauma and death that surrounded them. Single herself, Janet was inspired by the sacrifices of the married personnel who committed themselves to helping in Vietnam.

By the time Janet’s twelve months drew to a close, they were all extraordinarily tired and she had mixed feelings about leaving. She was pleased to be going home, but she’d acquired so many practical surgical skills as a result of being there during the Tet Offensive she could never be sorry she’d gone. She’s never regretted taking the chance to live and work among the Vietnamese, whom she remembers with great affection, nor has she ever regretted the time spent with the wonderful colleagues in her team. ‘It was a unique opportunity and one of the best years of my life.’

When Janet returned to Australia after some leave in Asia, she also returned to the Royal Prince Alfred theatre floor. However, before she completed her contract, her father had a serious accident and the hospital released her to go home to the Cunnamulla district to help her mother care for him. Towards the end of 1969, she decided that if she was staying she’d better get a job, and rang the matron at the Cunnamulla Hospital to see if there were any vacancies. When the matron heard Janet’s qualifications and experience, she welcomed her with open arms. Although Cunnamulla had a small theatre and the flying surgeon, Dr Tony Paul, flew in from Longreach on a regular basis, they could only offer minor surgery because of the lack of qualified theatre staff. Once Janet joined their workforce, however, Tony was able to perform much more complicated procedures, knowing that he had a good assistant and someone who understood and could provide appropriate post-operative care.

Having always enjoyed an active social life, it wasn’t long before Janet was being courted by one of the young local graziers, Bill Beresford. They married in 1972 and Janet went to live on his sheep station between Cunnamulla and Eulo. She cut her commitment at the hospital to just two days a month to continue assisting in theatre with Tony Paul, and was available for emergency surgery. At home she settled happily into station life helping Bill and raising their children when they arrived.

During those years, Cunnamulla sometimes had a resident GP; often it didn’t. Once when a GP was there, and even though she’d never done midwifery, Janet was able to assist him to perform an emergency caesarean section because of her theatre experience at RPA. The matron delivered the anaesthetic under direction from the doctor, and they saved both the mother and baby.

When her children reached school age, Janet opted to drive them to Cunnamulla and made herself available to work at the hospital each day. When the matron resigned, Janet successfully applied for the job and bought a house in town to save travel and ensure she could be on call. Janet and the kids spent the week in Cunnamulla then hightailed it home for the weekend just as soon as she could get away.

One of those weekdays, she was working in her office when the small girl with the blood-soaked towel wrapped around her lower leg was brought in. As Janet assessed her, knowing the nearest doctor was hours away, she was confident that she could manage the wound. So was the doctor when she consulted with him. Fully cognisant of her background, he told her to go ahead with the procedure and instructed her to give the child a Tet-tox booster to guard against tetanus and an antibiotic to fight any possible infection.

While the girl’s father and mother sat either side of her, holding her firmly and comforting her, Janet quickly cleaned the area, and injected around the wound with local anaesthetic. As soon as it kicked in, killing the pain, she irrigated the wound with normal saline to clean out all the dirt, and inspected it for damage to blood vessels or nerves. Fortunately there appeared to be neither and, although the gash went into the muscle, she couldn’t see bone. Starting from the inside out, she loosely repaired the muscle layer, just as she’d been taught by the surgeons in Long Xuyen, then sutured the subcutaneous layer before stitching the skin layer as neatly as she possibly could. After applying a dressing and administering the Tet-tox and the prescribed antibiotic, Janet kept the girl in hospital for a night to keep an eye on her and then sent her home the next day, giving her parents strict instructions that she should rest at home and return to have the wound checked and the dressing changed.

In the years that followed, it gave Janet immense pleasure every time she saw that virtually unscarred child running with her friends around the neighbourhood.

In the end, Janet’s marriage didn’t survive the intricacies of the extended family partnership that underpinned their grazing interests and in the late 1980s she resigned from the hospital and left the district. Her children were in boarding school or pursuing careers away from home so, with nothing to hold her there, she moved to the Gold Coast where she nursed until her retirement in 2008. Now happily remarried, Janet says she has no regrets and a whole bucketful of wonderful memories.

In all the years that Janet worked at the Cunnamulla Hospital, although they were well supported by the Royal Flying Doctor Service and had access to consultants in Brisbane, she and the nurses who worked with her were often the only medical help available on the ground. When there wasn’t a doctor in residence, medical responsibility rested with Janet. Many people in the Cunnamulla community and surrounding district have reason to be grateful for her experience in South Vietnam – as is Janet herself.

A member of a NSW surgical team sent to Long Xuyen in 1969, civilian nurse Janet Glasson excelled on the firing range when the guys from the US Military Assistance Command, Vietnam took them out for shooting practice. AWM P05209.004.