5
Running on the Edge of Reason

Pam Bell née Keenan, RAAFNS

Butterworth RAAF Base, June 1966–November 1967

Clark Air Field, May–July 1967

Coming off her regular night shift early one morning in the late 1980s, Pam Bell jumped in her car and dashed home. Hot-wired by adrenaline, she parked haphazardly and hurried in to find the kids bickering over breakfast. Wearily, she continued on through to say hello to her father, who lived in the granny flat attached to her house. Hearing the shower running, she gazed around his room. As her tired dark-brown eyes lit upon his cupboard, out of nowhere the image of the double-­barrelled shotgun inside sliced through her turmoil.

It was as though something in her head switched off. Without further thought Pam found the gun, walked back out to the car, got in and started driving. She has no idea where. She just drove randomly through the streets of Perth, found the edge of the suburbs, then drove some more until she found a lonely-looking bush track. She drove along it until she was well off the road, perfectly isolated. Switching off the motor, she remembers one clear thought. Good, no one will find me.

Twisting slightly, Pam pulled the gun over and placed the barrel under her chin. She didn’t hear the other car until it pulled up right behind, seeming to fill her rear-view mirror. Shocked, she pushed the gun away and tried to hide it. With her heart suddenly pounding in her ears, she watched the car back up and drive away. Jolted into awareness, Pam burst into tears. Deep shudders raked her small frame as she tried to imagine what would have happened to her children if she’d pulled the trigger.

Shakily she turned her car around, knuckles white from gripping the steering wheel, and very carefully drove home. She snuck the gun back into her father’s empty flat and went to find him frantically pacing around the house. He didn’t say anything but she remembers his worried eyes.

Looking back over her life, Pam thinks maybe she’s had a guardian angel watching over her. Given her story, maybe she does.

Pam Keenan was sixteen when she met a boy called Robin Bell in her hometown of Wyalkatchem in Western Australia. He was tall, dark, handsome and seventeen. She barely reached his shoulder but he was knocked out by her sweet pixie face and fabulous smile. They fell hard for each other and were thereafter more or less inseparable.

Robin had moved out from Perth to Wyalkatchem to work on the railway until he was old enough to join the WA police force. Pam planned to train as a nurse. Early in 1961, they both moved to Perth, he to join the police academy and she to commence her nursing training at Royal Perth Hospital. Robin lived at home with his parents and, as required, Pam lived in the nurses’ quarters. When he graduated, Robin went to work as a rookie cop while Pam continued her training. On her days off, she went and stayed with Robin’s family and came to look upon his mother as her second mum.

They announced their engagement on Pam’s 21st birthday, several months before her graduation. Once she’d received her certificate of registration, Pam resigned from RPH and moved out of the quarters to live with her aunt for a few weeks until the wedding. Pam and Robin were married in front of their combined families and friends at St Joachim’s Church at Victoria Park on 21 November 1964.

After two glorious weeks honeymooning among the very tall karri trees at Pemberton in southern WA, they moved into a rental and Robin went back to work as a motorcycle cop. Even though they had barely a bean between them, they were deliriously happy and looking forward to their first Christmas together as husband and wife.

On 23 December, Robin went off to work an afternoon shift with his traffic patrol unit. He rang Pam mid-evening to say he and his partner had one more job to do and then he’d be home. He never arrived.

Thirty-two days after their wedding, and two days before Christmas, a senior policeman and his wife arrived instead, to tell Pam Bell that her husband was dead.

Robin and his partner had been on traffic duty when Robin took off after a vehicle that was speeding along the road leading to the airport. As the pursuit continued, another car pulled up at an intersection ahead before turning right, with the change of lights, onto the airport road. Robin slammed into its side. He was killed instantly.

Pam was not told any details; nor was she allowed to see him. The well-meaning senior policeman and his wife wouldn’t let her stay on her own and insisted on taking her to her aunt’s house. She remembers nothing of Christmas or the funeral that followed. Pam remembers that she and Robin’s mother were angry with each other, but not why, and she remembers that her own mother fell completely to pieces, probably remembering the death of Pam’s brother in a car accident a few years before. She remembers hiding in her room at her aunt’s, creeping out late at night to eat. Mostly she remembers that she no longer cared about anything and felt as though she’d entered a time warp in which all trace of Robin had ceased to exist.

Reprieve from her self-imposed isolation came from an unexpected quarter when Matron Johnson from RPH rang, a few weeks later, and offered her a job. She had two conditions: Pam would not be given a contract, in case it didn’t work out, and she would work in intensive care, a unit she was very familiar with because she’d spent most of her final year there. Pam said, ‘Yes, can I do night duty?’

She continued to live at her aunt’s house, moving through her life one day after another. When the inquest at the coroner’s court came around, she learnt that the driver of the other car had seen Robin coming but believed he had plenty of time to turn, especially as his own light was green. She learnt that Robin had probably accelerated, maybe trying to beat the lights. It was deemed an accidental death. None of it did anything to relieve Pam’s total desolation and despair.

Although she felt detached from everything, Pam’s professional capacity was undiminished and she continued to work in ICU, holding the memories at bay by focusing on the busyness of the unit. Even so, outside of work, she was a tad reckless. She pranged her brother’s car several times when she was learning to drive, though she still managed to get her licence. Until she did, she walked to and from work and in the late evenings she invariably found herself looking for Robin among the police on beat duty. She would follow them and wait for them to turn around, but was always disappointed.

Pam continued in this almost robotic existence until one of her friends, Mary Barbour, returned from working interstate undecided about what to do next. When she hit upon the idea of joining the air force, she suggested Pam do the same. Pam thought, Why not? She’d given everything of Robin’s away and had nothing to stay for. Her parents were horrified but, to her, it felt like a chance to escape.

When the RAAF asked what she thought about the Vietnam War, Pam replied that she didn’t even know exactly where it was. Even though she knew she had very good qualifications and had accumulated good practical intensive care experience in the eight months since Robin had died, she was mildly surprised when she passed their psych tests and they accepted her; in fact, she says she thought they must have been pretty desperate. They posted her to Laverton near Melbourne.

Before she left WA, she had her brother’s car repaired. She told the recruitment officers that she had to deliver it to Southern Cross, along the road to Kalgoorlie. She arranged to meet Mary there and get a lift with her to Kalgoorlie, where they’d both board the train to Melbourne. One of the tyres blew before Pam reached Southern Cross; she ploughed into some scrub and wrote the car off. Fortunately, her brother was insured and unconcerned about the crash, relieved only that she had survived. Pam spent a night in hospital but insisted on catching the train with Mary the next day.

When they arrived at Laverton, in early September 1965, Pam was physically battered and bruised and she spent the first few days in hospital. It was an inauspicious beginning; however, she was keen to prove her worth and as soon as she’d recovered she jumped into the aeromedical evacuation course in preparation for flight nursing. Four months later, Pam was transferred to Richmond RAAF Base in NSW, and in the winter of 1966 she was advised that she was being posted to Butterworth in Malaysia.

Emotionally running on empty, Pam was fully cognisant and functional while she was on duty, but felt very insecure and unsure of herself outside work. The idea of going to a foreign country terrified her but somehow, as always, she managed to hide how she was really feeling. She steeled herself and jetted off with Qantas to Manila via Singapore.

For several months, she worked at the RAAF clinic in Penang or in the No 4 Hospital at Butterworth, caring for the same local military personnel as her new nursing colleague Margaret Curgenven. As instructed by her superiors, Pam had told absolutely no one outside the RAAF that she was going to Vietnam, so she was very surprised one day to open a letter from her shocked mother, who asked, ‘What’s going on? We just saw you on television loading patients in Vietnam . . .’ Pam had had no idea she’d been filmed, much less that it would be on the news back home. She doesn’t think she told her parents much about it even then.

For many years after the war, her time in Vietnam seemed like a crazy, hazy nightmare that she might have imagined were it not for flashes of crystal-clear recollection. For instance, she has always been able to remember being told very early in her deployment that if they were flying over Vietnam and they were shot down, it was up to the pilots to shoot the nurses so they wouldn’t be taken prisoner. She used to check out the pilot on every flight, thinking he might the one who’d have to shoot her. Because they were all cautioned not to talk about what they were doing or where they were going, Pam never spoke about it to anyone but she always believed it to be true. After a while, she decided she didn’t really care whether she lived or not anyway. Her world had been shattered the day Robin died.

When she wasn’t working in the clinic or at the hospital, Pam flew medivacs into Saigon and Vung Tau to retrieve Australian casualties from the US 36th Evacuation Hospital. At the time, the only Australian military medical presence in Vietnam was the 2nd Field Ambulance at Vung Tau, which was not equipped to manage surgical cases, or even critical medical cases, so the serious casualties went to the 36th.

The casualties from South Vietnam were flown to the No 4 Hospital, where they’d be stabilised ready for evacuation back to their home states. Pam recalls, ‘The hospital was quite old but very beautiful, and the RAAF provided really good food, so the army boys loved it.’ While some had to wait longer than others to be well enough for the long haul home, most were only there for a night before being flown on to Australia.

Sometimes Pam accompanied those long flights home; on one memorable occasion she and colleague Gaynor Tilley nursed a full load of patients back on an older style Hercules with the RAAF’s 36 Squadron.

Gaynor recalls having a bad feeling about that flight even before they left Butterworth. She actually went to the matron, Wing Officer Helen Cleary, and told her she’d had a premonition and asked for extra blankets and oxygen to be loaded. Helen accredited Gaynor’s gut feeling and ordered the extra resources.

All went well as far as Pearce RAAF Base, where they delivered their West Australian patients and overnighted before flying east to Richmond. They still had several hours’ flying time ahead of them to cross Australia and Gaynor couldn’t shake the feeling that something would happen.

They were still nearly fully loaded when they took off from Pearce heading due east to Richmond. Pam, Gaynor and the two medics were nursing about fifty patients, more than half of them stretcher cases and several of them quite ill, one of them with IV therapy running.

They were rumbling along near to their point of no return when the heating system in the cargo bay suddenly died – a common problem in some of the old Hercs, according to the nurses. Forced to decide whether to go on or go back, the pilots opted to push on, wanting to get the Eastern States boys home to their families and specialist care. The temperature dropped, so the pilots revved up the heaters in the cockpit and left the door open in the hope the warm air would drift out into the cargo bay.

Thanks to the extra blankets it was cold but bearable, until the pilots spotted a huge storm ahead and had to ascend to avoid undue turbulence impacting on the patients. At 18 000 feet, the temperature quickly dropped even further and ice started forming on the wings. While the pilots were sweltering in the cockpit, everyone behind them started to shiver. One of the walking wounded who had facial injuries said he felt as though his fragile bones were shattering. Shivering sympathetically, Pam guided him up to sit in the cockpit. Meanwhile, Gaynor took her flying jacket off and wrapped it around the head and neck of the stretcher patient with the IV.

Pam’s enduring memory of the trip is slipping and sliding around on the icy floor of the plane as they attended to their charges, constantly terrified she would tumble. That, and trying desperately to keep everyone from freezing to death. When they finally landed in Richmond and safely delivered the last of their charges, Gaynor stayed overnight before returning to Butterworth, while Pam was very relieved to go on leave for a week. She thought it was the worst flight of her life. Little did she know what was to come in the months ahead . . .

In early May 1967, Matron Cleary advised Pam that she’d been selected to go to Clark Air Field in the Philippines to fly with the USAF 902 Squadron. Pam explains, ‘We were right in the middle of Rolling Thunder [an escalating US operation bombing North Vietnam] and it appeared that the Australian government thought we’d be making a bigger commitment to Vietnam and therefore anticipated increased casualties.’

Pam arrived in Manila in the second week of May. Dressed in her uniform, she presented the façade of a confident, self-assured and very experienced nurse. However, as her predecessor, Senior Nursing Officer Rosalie Henseleit, and one of the USAF nurses drove her back from the airport and explained the layout of the enormous base, Pam felt completely overwhelmed by everything and totally afraid of the unknown ahead. Rosalie showed Pam to her room in the multi-storey officers’ quarters, handed over her drug kit and medivac equipment, gave her a rudimentary outline of what she’d be doing and flew back to Butterworth to resume her duties there.

Next morning, Major Biddy McAlister, one of the senior USAF nurses, explained, ‘We’re going to start training you immediately. You’ll do a couple of flights as documentation nurse and then we’ll reverse roles and you’ll go as the flight nurse.’ As far as Pam can remember, that pretty much constituted her preparation. She had no idea what it was really going to be like.

Pam went off on her first flight accompanying a senior USAF flight nurse. ‘I suddenly felt like a very junior nurse and I was terrified of screwing up,’ she murmurs. The senior nurse explained the ‘milk run’ concept, telling Pam they’d fly down through South Vietnam, picking up wounded soldiers at various strips until the plane was full. By the time they returned to Clark, they’d be carrying at least forty stretcher cases plus another twenty walking wounded, depending on the number of stretchers. Most of the stretcher cases would be very serious, some of them critical.

When they landed at the first stop, the ambulances were waiting with their first casualties. The flight nurse began triaging oncoming patients with the loadmaster to ensure the worst cases could be unloaded first back at Clark. It was a complicated, convoluted process that involved a certain amount of guesswork as they never knew who they’d be collecting until they got to each airstrip. The stretchers were locked into tiers along the walls of the cargo bay, and the loadmaster had to balance weight as well as access because the nurses had to be able to easily reach the most serious cases to attend to their needs in transit.

Meanwhile, one of the medics who’d arrived with the ambulances tossed Pam a bag full of documentation to go with the casualties. She had to match the documentation to the correct patient and update each file with all treatment administered during the flights. Once the casualties were loaded, the pilots were always keen to take off as quickly as possible and fly to the next pickup. It was a long, stressful day of landing and taking off in potentially live combat zones. Pam survived, but there was no debrief once they’d off-loaded back at Clark and she retired to her room wondering if it had all been real.

Setting off on her first mission as flight nurse, in charge of everything to do with the patients, was as scary as hell. Triaging the oncoming casualties with the loadmaster was chaotic, confusing and noisy as they sorted who needed to be where in the loading bay. The loading ramp would barely be shut and locked before they’d be rolling back down the runway taking off. Paddling flat out like a duck underneath the surface, Pam got all her patients back to Clark alive and ready for ongoing treatment. Even in her most terrified moments, she always appeared confident and capable, though she still maintains that most of the time her emotional self felt quite detached from her professional self.

As the days blurred and her mission tally grew, Pam got used to the workload but still found it disconcerting knowing she might or might not get a briefing before they flew and she probably wouldn’t know where they were going or what they’d find when they got there. Although she flew a handful of times with one nurse, Olivia Terrio, she found she rarely flew with the same crew. An African American, Olivia told her stories about racial discrimination such as Pam had never heard before and couldn’t comprehend. It just added to her weird sense of dislocation.

As the flight nurse, Pam understood that once she accepted the casualties from each pickup onto the plane, she was responsible for their duty of care until they arrived back at Clark. Her resolve was tested to the limit one day when she refused to accept a patient. The plane had landed for the third time that run and they already had a fairly heavy load of seriously wounded casualties, with one more stop to go. The loading ramp descended and Pam spotted a couple of ambulances waiting for them.

There was a doctor waiting beside one of the stretchers and Pam could see lots of paraphernalia, including a tracheostomy tube and respirator plus chest drains in the patient. The soldier had been shot up badly; he was semiconscious and he was clearly critically ill. As she assessed him, they started to push him up the ramp, but she called a halt, saying, ‘No, we can’t take him. He’s going to require too much care.’ She remembers the doctor yelling at her, abusing her and asking who she thought she was, and she felt as though all the Americans around her were pressuring her to say yes, but she knew he would take full-on attention and she already had several serious cases on board, including a couple with tourniquets around limbs awaiting amputation. This patient was just too unstable for her and her two medics to be able to look after him and forty other stretcher cases. She felt dreadful but stuck to her digs and refused to take him. By the time they were airborne, she was worrying that the same thing might happen at the next stop. It didn’t, and they got everyone back to Clark alive, but the incident made her feel more isolated than ever, especially as, once again, there was no debriefing.

In addition to the stress of being flight nurse, the flights themselves frightened her. Broken parts, dodgy engines and bullet holes became a part of her daily routine. Used to the strict safety protocols of the RAAF, she was not at all reassured by the casual attitude of the American pilots, who’d drawl, ‘Don’t worry, Sis, it’ll be cool . . .’

Pam turned up at the flight line early one morning and heard they were taking a planeload of Korean patients back to Seoul. Most of them couldn’t speak English, but she got the impression that they weren’t very happy about flying with the Americans either. As they took off, she said to no one in particular, ‘Oh God, here we go again.’ The documentation nurse strapped in beside her looked at her oddly. ‘Whaddya mean?’ she twanged. Pam explained, ‘I’m not happy about flying anymore. So many things go wrong.’ The USAF nurse assured her that nothing had ever gone wrong on her flights.

They’d been airborne for a couple of hours and Pam was chatting with the one English-speaking Korean officer about all things Australian when suddenly they heard a bit of mad panic in the cockpit. The loadmaster came running back to tell them they had a runaway propeller; they were radioing mayday calls, dumping fuel and everyone needed to get ready to ditch. If corrective action didn’t work, the loadmaster explained, the engine could self-destruct or the prop might fly off the hub.

Pam was shocked. She didn’t know what a runaway propeller was and had no idea what to do if they ditched. She could only copy what the rest of the frantic flight crew was doing and get as many of the stretcher patients as possible moved into seats, using the Korean officer as interpreter to explain the need to brace ready for impact. Finally, she strapped herself in, gripped her crossed arms in front of her face, and waited to hit the ocean.

Then, just when Pam thought her number was definitely up, the propeller corrected and the pilots loudly whooped their relief. Pam cautiously lowered her arms, realising the crisis was over.

Flying carefully at low altitude, the pilots made the decision to turn back and limped home to Clark escorted by the fighter jets that had come to meet them. Back on the ground, with everyone safely unloaded and returned to the hospital, Pam went back to her room shaking and shivering and telling herself she never wanted to get on another plane. Then she received a phone call: ‘Be down at the flight line at 5 a.m. You’re going to take the same load to Seoul.’

At 5 a.m., she was there on the flight line with the same flight crew and the same document nurse. They loaded every­one again, strapped in and took off. Pam says the other nurse barely said a word, and adds wryly, ‘We were all a bit subdued.’ After delivering the Koreans home they returned, trouble-free for once, to Clark and Pam started counting the days to handover; she didn’t want to fly anymore and certainly not with USAF. Ramping her autopilot up another notch, she somehow got through the last flights, and calmly welcomed her successor to Clark when she arrived at the end of Pam’s sixty days.

Pam had already met Captain Anne Laurence at Richmond and had got to know her at Butterworth, and she was delighted to meet up with her again, albeit so briefly. Pam quickly showed Anne around the officers’ quarters and handed over her medivac equipment before leaving to fly back to Manila. Looking back, Pam thinks they were deliberately given very little time during the changeovers so that they couldn’t tell each other too much. She also thinks she had so much stuff bottled up inside with the lid jammed on that she couldn’t have talked about it anyway.

Within twenty-four hours of arriving back at Butterworth, Pam was required to write and deliver a report on her experience. When she handed in her report to Matron Helen Cleary, she told her about the ditching incident and that she’d had no idea what to do. Pam wanted to be sure that all future aeromedical training for RAAF nurses included a more comprehensive and practical approach to ditching procedure. When the RAAF offered her the opportunity to go home, Pam stalled, electing instead to stay on at Butterworth even though she knew she’d have to fly again. Staying away from Perth and keeping busy made it easier to not think about Robin and all she had lost. In hindsight, she thinks part of the reason she was such a good nurse was because, with every patient, she was trying to save Robin.

Pam stayed at Butterworth for another few months before finally accepting a posting back to Pearce RAAF Base. As she had expected, she found it very hard being back in Australia, but she was still functioning normally so she put her hand up for a lot of on-call duty to keep as busy as possible. Because of their proximity, the medical staff at Pearce were often called out to road accidents on the highway to the regional city of Geraldton. One night Pam went out with the on-call doctor to a single vehicle accident in which a woman travelling with six children and several ducks smashed her car. There was stuff strewn all over the road and kids flung around all over the place but the mother kept yelling at them to save the ducks. Pam found it too traumatic for words. She decided she couldn’t do it anymore.

As soon as her discharge date came around, she went to the pay office, signed the forms, handed in her uniforms and collected her pay. ‘They just said, “See you later,” and I went.’

With no clear idea about what she should do next, Pam was checking out the job advertisements one day when she read there was a nursing position going at Dampier. She picked up a map of WA, found Dampier up in the Pilbara and decided it sounded as good a place to go as any. She applied, got the job and headed north.

At the Dampier Hospital, they were flat out taking care of everyone who worked for Hamersley Iron. When a man from a surveying team came in with chopped-off fingers, Pam looked after him, and thereafter he pursued her relentlessly. With a wry laugh she says, ‘There weren’t many women up there.’ Although he knew she’d been married before, he didn’t want to know about Robin and she never talked about Vietnam; she just pushed both subjects down, jammed the lid on a bit tighter and married him.

They moved around the country, from Perth to Tasmania and then up to Brisbane, where they had three children. After each birth, she went back to work, initially working shifts at Greenslopes Repatriation Hospital but then signing on with a nursing agency, which better suited her needs as a working mother. She could work nights while her husband was at home and vice versa. The agency sent her mostly to Brisbane’s Mater Hospital, where the director of nursing quickly recognised Pam’s intensive care skill and experience and asked for her regularly.

Meanwhile, Pam’s relationship with her husband coasted up and down, then progressively deteriorated as he drank more and more. When he started hitting her she cared about him less and less. Once again, she was running on autopilot, going to work, coming home, looking after the kids and trying to keep one step ahead of the reality of her life.

Finally Pam decided she’d had enough and wanted to go home. Her husband agreed and they moved back to Perth with their three small kids. Happy to be back in WA, Pam quickly got another night-duty nursing job, but things at home steadily went from bad to worse. Her only friends were her husband’s friends and she felt very isolated. The turning point came one evening when he punched her in the face in front of the kids. Drawing on all the coping mechanisms she’d refined in the cargo bays of the USAF planes, Pam reassured her children that she was fine and walked out and went to work. Next morning she went to casualty and ended up in theatre having her broken jaw wired. She also had some photos taken of her injuries and hid them.

Her husband was contrite for a while, but then one night when he was drinking he suddenly threw a small statue at her, as the kids were eating dinner. It hit her in the back of the head. The jolt broke the fragile filaments in her jaw and she ended up back in theatre being rewired.

More than two decades after Robin had died, Pam was so accustomed to blocking everyone out and hiding her real feelings that she didn’t know how to accept help. Then she heard on the radio that there was free legal help available for women who’d been bashed, and somehow it filtered through. She took the photos, went to the legal service and filed for divorce. Despite the strong advice and fierce encouragement they gave her, in the end Pam didn’t press charges. She was teetering on the edge and just wanted him out of their lives.

That’s what Pam was thinking about the day she drove home from work and found the gun. She’d just got the news that her ex had won fortnightly weekend access to the kids, and a tangle of searing thoughts and memories was threatening to engulf her. When the firearms police turned up at the house not long afterwards because they’d noticed her father hadn’t renewed his licence, Pam reckons she and her father were both secretly relieved. He happily surrendered the gun.

With three young children to support, a mortgage and no financial help from her ex-husband, Pam went to the Department of Defence and applied for a loan. Although she provided them with documents detailing her deployment to both Butterworth and Clark, they rejected her claim, telling her she wasn’t eligible as she hadn’t been on active service. Pam felt so angry she tossed the lot in the bin and began to think she’d imagined the whole thing. Then she did what she always did in a tough situation – she turned up the autopilot.

With her father on hand to help mind the kids, Pam took on as much work as she could get. She’d lost her nerve for the pressure of ICU, though, and opted instead to work in aged care. By the time the kids had all grown up and left home she was on a treadmill, at one stage working anything up to 100 hours a week in different jobs. She was hyped right up and feeling invincible.

When Pam’s cousin rang her in 1992 to tell her that someone called Gaynor Tilley had put an ad in the paper looking for her, it was like a bolt from the blue. Pam had pretty much convinced herself that she couldn’t have been in Vietnam because the Department of Defence told her so, but after she spoke at length with Gaynor it all started coming back. Through Gaynor she reconnected with some of the other RAAF nurses she had worked with and re-established her link with her past. In October 1992, she joined many of her colleagues in Canberra for the commemoration of the newly established Vietnam Forces National Memorial.

As old memories were triggered, Pam began having flashbacks. She became more and more anxious but resisted the idea of post-traumatic stress disorder, even though Gaynor and the other nurses encouraged her to check it out. She was belting along to work one afternoon when her heart started pounding, her hands shaking and sweating. She had no idea what was happening to her but thought she’d managed to hide it from everyone, until a doctor asked her why she was shaking. She fobbed him off and asked the director of nursing for more night shifts.

Pam still hadn’t sought professional help when the Department of Defence finally acknowledged, in 1994, that all RAAF nursing officers who participated in aeromedical evacuations into Vietnam were entitled to the Vietnam Medal as well as an Active Service Medal.

Along with that recognition came the possibility of access to the Department of Veterans’ Affairs’ services – though they all still had to jump through several hoops to prove their eligibility. Pam finally gave in, agreed to a prerequisite psychiatric assessment, and was diagnosed with PTSD and offered appropriate DVA support.

These days, after years of counselling and care, Pam Bell has stepped back from the edge. She happily lives on her own, bootscooting her way through regular line-dancing sessions, playing cards and going to the gym. She has strengthened her relationships with her children and grandchildren in recent years, and values the time she spends with them. There are still moments when facing the world is all just a bit too much, but she simply retires indoors for a few days until she’s ready to step out again.

While she wishes parts of her life had been different, Pam knows she did the best she could. She has finally got her head firmly around her history.

She still misses Robin every day.

RAAF nurse Pam Bell making sure her patient, an Australian soldier, is ready for take off from Vung Tau, 1966. AWM VN/166/0013/01.