12
Finding Love in a War Zone

Di Badcock née Lawrence, RAANC

Trish Kennedy née Yorke, RAANC

1st Australian Field Hospital,

February 1969–February 1970

Di Lawrence and Trish Yorke couldn’t believe their luck when they ran smack bang into each other in the milling crowd at the Melbourne coach terminal in January 1969. They hadn’t seen each other since they’d met at a training course at the Healesville School of Army Health in 1968, so it took a little while to catch up – and, to their mutual surprise and delight, to realise that they were both heading off on pre-embarkation leave prior to deployment to South Vietnam, where they would increase the nursing officer presence at the 1st Australian Field Hospital at Vung Tau from eight to ten. Di was off to have some fun with her extended army-oriented family, and Trish to visit her kin in Queensland.

Although they were both heading to Sydney initially, they were unable to persuade the drivers to allow them to travel together on the same bus. Conceding defeat, they agreed to reconvene their reunion at the midnight meal stop, but when the buses shuddered to a halt four hours later, Di was alarmed to discover that Trish was ill; the side effects of having had every necessary vaccination all at the same time were kicking in and the accompanying high fever was nudging Trish into delirium. To make matters worse, Trish was seated beside a man whose T-shirt and conversation affirmed his conscientious objection to conscription and national service. Because they were travelling in uniform, Di was fearful that Trish’s confused ramblings might spark a confrontation if he realised they were on their way to Vietnam.

So, Di convinced the drivers that it would be sensible for her and Trish to swap seats – an act that Trish has always appreciated. Di deliberately ignored the fellow for the remainder of the trip to Sydney while Trish was safe to ramble on the other bus. By the time they met up again in Sydney a few days later, in order to make final preparations for the adventure of their respective lifetimes, they were firm friends.

Hazel-eyed with an open, beaming smile, Di is warm-hearted, eloquent, beautifully mannered and classically poised. The daughter of an army officer in a long line of army officers, she moved around a lot until she went to boarding school in Sydney and then lived in the nurses’ quarters at Royal North Shore Hospital, where she completed her general nursing training.

Growing up in suburban Brisbane, Trish’s upbringing was tough, her schooling public, and her focus escape. She left school at fifteen, and after completing her general nursing training at Princess Alexandra Hospital, hightailed out to Tasmania to do her midwifery. Her flinty blue eyes are much warier and reflect her street sense; she smiles less frequently and suffers fools not at all. Trish carries the scars of her challenging life less gently.

Having joined the Royal Australian Army Nursing Corps in February 1968, Di was posted to Puckapunyal in central Victoria, where she worked at the health centre. With her military lineage, Di settled into her new life easily. She made lots of friends and enjoyed a busy social life, going out with both her colleagues at Pucka and her cousin Adrian d’Hagé and his friends at the Royal Military College, Duntroon. ‘He’d ring me and ask “Can you bring some nurses up for a ball this weekend?” or he’d bring some of his mates down to parties at our mess.’ It was a lovely life and she established friendships she has maintained ever since.

A few weeks after Di signed up, Trish enlisted in Tasmania. She was immediately posted to Balcombe Medical Centre on the Mornington Peninsula in Victoria. In contrast to the uncertainty of her early life, she found that she liked the discipline and order of the military; she expected everyone around her to achieve the same high professional standard that she demanded of herself.

Along with a crowd of predominantly national service personnel, Di and Trish boarded a Qantas flight to Saigon via Singapore on Monday, 17 February 1969. Because they were landing in Singapore, which didn’t support the war, in Darwin they all had to change into civvies. Di and Trish changed completely into dresses and sandals but most of the Aussie diggers just dragged Hawaiian shirts over their khaki uniforms. The nurses sat up the back and contemplated the colourful palette of mostly baby-faced soldiers. ‘They were actually fairly quiet,’ Di remembers. ‘So many of them were just boys who had no idea what they were going into but some of them had to have known they were going up to replace someone who’d been wounded or killed; that had to have been pretty sobering.’

Once they’d transferred through Singapore, the girls were looking forward to arriving in Vietnam and getting on with their jobs. Needless to say, they were somewhat perplexed when they arrived at the Tan Son Nhut airport in Saigon and discovered that no one there expected them or knew quite what to do with them. At the time, both the United States and South Vietnamese forces were using Tan Son Nhut as their main base in South Vietnam, making it the busiest airport in the world. Standing abandoned in the sweltering midday heat, both girls were overawed by the rows upon rows upon rows of planes. ‘There were hundreds of them,’ Di remembers, ‘and most of them military. We’d never seen anything like it.’

Word was sent out across the airwaves that two Aussie nurses were waiting down at the airfield. In the meantime, they were loaded onto a US Army bus and taken to an office to wait. Further subdued by the discovery that the weld mesh on the windows was there to keep grenades out, Di and Trish were heartily relieved when Colonel Bill Watson, the senior officer of the Royal Australian Army Medical Corps in South Vietnam, eventually turned up to collect them. The colonel took them into Saigon and deposited them at a hotel in town, with instructions to stay put until it was time to board the afternoon flight to Vung Tau on 9 Squadron RAAF’s twin-engined DHC-4 Caribou, aka Wallaby Airlines.

Thankful to be out of the heat, Di and Trish did as they were told and tried to rest until the colonel’s driver returned to take them back to the airfield. Climbing the steps of the Caribou, they were very conscious of all the men politely waiting for them to embark first. In their short-sleeved grey walking-out uniforms, they both clutched their black handbags and gloves on their grey felt hats with one hand and fought to keep their fluttering skirts from baring their suspender belts and stocking tops with the other!

By the time they alighted from the plane in Vung Tau, 96 kilometres south-east of Saigon, it was very late in the day and the nurses were relieved to find someone there to collect them. Both the commanding officer of the 1 Fd Hosp, Lieutenant Colonel Ray Hurley, and Matron Major Jean O’Neill were waiting to welcome the girls. Trish was sure that she recognised Lieutenant Colonel Hurley. Travelling in the back of the Land Rover on the way to the hospital, she finally found the courage to ask him if he had been a surgical/urology registrar at Princess Alexandra Hospital in 1963 when she was training there. He had! Trish was pleased to tell him that she remembered how particular he was with certain IV therapies – he always checked the drip rate himself. Recognising the same exacting quality in each other, they eventually became firm friends.

Barrelling along the dusty, bumpy road from the airport with a digger riding shotgun to protect them, Di and Trish gazed out at the cluttered, seedy streets on the outskirts of Vung Tau. As they entered the Australian Logistic Support Group compound and saw the demountable metal buildings that constituted the hospital, they turned to each other and grinned, thrilled to have finally arrived.

When they reported for work early next morning, the matron sent them off to familiarise themselves with the hospital layout. Fascinated by every little thing in their new world, they were particularly entranced by the repetitive whoosh-click, whoosh-click of the Bird respirators that graced the intensive care unit. Of all the American technology that resourced the hospital, they agree that the Bird was their favourite. ‘They were so far advanced of anything we had at home,’ Trish recalls, ‘and you could tell, by the clicking, as soon as one of them wasn’t working.’

Both have clear memories of the first time they heard the dustoff siren heralding incoming casualties and their first glimpses of the months ahead. Even now, any unexpected siren sends goosebumps up their arms and necks and Trish has been known to freeze at the sound, once even in the middle of a busy street. She says she was completely unaware of traffic movement or what had happened.

The long shrieking wail would wind up across the loudspeakers around the ALSG, and all available hospital staff would jump to attention.

When three short sharp blasts sounded, they knew the first chopper was five minutes out. While the radio operator would be swiftly jotting down the particulars coming in across the crackling airwaves, any medical staff not already in the triage area at the back of the hospital hit the ground running. A dustoff meant all hands on deck.

As soon as the matron was apprised of the details, if it was a multi-casualty situation she directed any nursing staff that she could spare from the wards to triage to help with the influx of wounded.

Directed into triage for the first time, the new nurses joined the fray as a group of critically wounded diggers was brought in. The armoured personnel carrier they had been travelling in had run over a landmine, and the resulting traumatic amputations and injuries were nothing like the ones Di and Trish had nursed back in Australia. These were brutal – flesh and bones ripped apart, the worst of them requiring the soldier to undergo a mid-haunch amputation to tidy it up. Such amputations leave no room for a prosthesis.

It was a shocking induction but the only one they got before they settled into a routine of nine- or twelve-hour shifts with one day off a week . . . maybe. In the following weeks and months the odd dustoff chopper would bring in someone with a serious illness, but most of them brought soldiers with traumatic injuries that ranged from serious to critical: landmine wounds, stab wounds, gunshot wounds and grenade shrapnel wounds with skin and muscles sometimes completely sheared off the length of limbs. Extreme fluid loss sometimes required IV therapy into four veins, or cut-downs into whatever larger veins they could access.

To begin with, Di worked in the medical ward, where she cared for soldiers being treated for a whole gamut of medical conditions from relatively minor rashes to a host of exotic tropical diseases. Trish was allocated to the surgical ward, where she nursed patients with a range of problems, anything from bat bites to post-operative recovery. It was full-on most of the time and she remembers working for twenty-one days straight, frequent shifts of more than twelve hours, and occasionally double shifts. Both women found themselves on a very steep learning curve, professionally and emotionally.

Not all of their very fit soldier patients were seriously ill or wounded, but most were unworldly adolescents who’d had no idea what was in store for them in Vietnam. And most of those who were seriously wounded had no idea what faced them when they returned home with their mutilated bodies. ‘I don’t think any of them really comprehended the level of rehabilitation they were going to need,’ Di says. ‘They just thought they were alive and they were going home.’

Many of them spent months in rehab back in Australia. Although the nurses rarely knew what ultimately happened to their patients, Di remembers hearing news of one young national serviceman who was so badly wounded, he spent two years in Heidelberg Repatriation Hospital in Melbourne. Not only did he have terrible, life-changing injuries, but his fiancée left him, his father was furious, his mother smothered him and his younger sibling resented that he got all the attention. It was not an unusual story and Di was relieved to meet up with him years later and discover he’d eventually made a happy marriage and attained a certain level of peace.

Within a few weeks of their arrival, Di was transferred to ICU, followed by Trish a few weeks later. The girls worked back-to-back shifts, Trish on days and Di on nights and vice versa. Incessantly exhausted, when they weren’t on duty they tried to get some sleep in their sand-ridden cot beds in the corrugated-iron nurses’ quarters. In the dry season especially, everything was layered with the sand that blew through the complex every day. And because none of them could be bothered expending the energy it took to light the ‘choofer’, as the hot-water system was known, if it went out, they often lived with cold showers. It was a tough existence underpinned by the knowledge that they were uncomfortable but safe . . . most of the time.

One afternoon, in the midst of the buzzing, fast-paced response to a newly arrived and particularly hectic dustoff, the quartermaster, Captain Dave Collier, a veteran of World War II and Korea, was walking along the aisle between the bays when he, and he alone, heard and recognised the distinctive click of a striker lever flipping up on a grenade. Di and Trish were across the room attending to casualties when they heard Dave order very firmly, ‘Nobody move.’ Next thing he took off out the door with the grenade in his hand and lobbed it into the nearby weapons pit where it immediately exploded. The usual time between the striker lever flipping up and detonation is four seconds. Forty-six years later, both women still shudder at the memory. Smoothing the hairs on her forearm, Di says, ‘It would have been catastrophic if it had gone off in the middle of triage. The grenade must have been lying under the soldier on his stretcher and when he was moved the safety pin slipped out. We were just so lucky that Dave walked past when he did and recognised that click . . .’

Typically, everyone just got straight back to what they were doing. Although any weapons were supposed to be removed from the casualties as they came off the chopper, there was no time for recriminations or wallowing in ‘what ifs’ or ‘maybes’. They had a room full of already-injured diggers to attend to and time was always of the essence as the first and worst of them were prepped for theatre.

An integral part of the nursing care of all their patients was actually just caring about them, reassuring their young charges so far from home and family and keeping them company, even though the nurses knew the Red Cross girls were always on hand to help with that. Any time they weren’t flat out, the nurses would sit and chat with the soldiers, often comforting them. ‘They never complained,’ Di says. Remembering one young kid who started to cry quietly one night, she adds, with a shake of her head, ‘He looked about fifteen. All of them were like our kid brothers. I remember one guy who’d lost both legs, one arm and an eye who came into ICU from theatre one night. He had these huge combine bandages all over his stumps and half his head bandaged over his eye. He must have been terrified but he never complained once. I held his hand whenever there was time and we got through the night and he finally dozed off in the morning.’

Apart from the surgeons, physicians, anaesthetists and nurses, the medical team included radiologists, pharmacists, physiotherapists and a psychiatrist, all of whom played their part in the patients’ survival. Di and Trish credit one particular psychiatrist, Maurie Sainsbury, with helping many of their young charges struggling with memories of their mates being blown up or gunned down beside them. Di remembers him as ‘the sanest psychiatrist anyone ever met’, adding, ‘Maurie was so compassionate; he understood that they were shell-shocked. Their pain was not just physical.’

Even so, controlling physical pain levels was paramount and after the critical surgical cases had been to theatre and the less serious ones had been attended to, Trish says one of the doctors would walk through, checking the patients’ condition, and order 100 milligrams of pethidine for those who needed immediate pain relief. Trish explains, ‘Back in those days, we didn’t have the pain management protocols we have now. We only wanted them to be pain free. It was the same with infection; you don’t usually give anyone the huge doses of antibiotics that we gave them in triage, but we wanted them to be infection free. They were entirely unusual circumstances and after a while you begin to accept that an abnormal situ­ation is normal.’

It wasn’t only the surgical cases that were extraordinary. Trish was especially interested in some of the medical conditions they faced, acknowledging that everyone talks about the surgical impacts of the war but less often about the medical ones. Amoebic dysentery, scrub typhus, PUO (pyrexia – fever – of unknown origin), hookworm and other worm infestations, malaria, and venereal diseases were commonplace. She particularly remembers that twice in that year she nursed soldiers with agranulocytosis, an absolute suppression of white blood cells. It was believed to have been caused by dapsone, a drug that all Australian military personnel had to take, during the time she was there, to combat malaria. Trish says, ‘They were very, very ill and suffered terribly high temperatures.’

In each case, because of the patient’s severe immunosuppression, apart from the doctors and pathology technicians, Trish and another nursing officer, Lorraine Potts, were the only ones allowed into the isolation area. They worked opposite shifts until both soldiers recovered. Many years later, a series of studies entitled Dapsone Exposure and Australian Vietnam Service: Mortality and Cancer Incidence concluded that veterans who took dapsone had no higher incidence of cancer than those who didn’t. Some of those who were there still wonder . . .

As a rule, there were two nursing officers on duty in the surgical and medical wards during the day shift and one each in the operating theatre and ICU (if it was open). On the evening shift, there was one each in surgical and medical; overnight, there was one in charge of medical and surgical both. ICU worked twelve-hour shifts. Around the clock the nurses were supported by several medics, many of whom were national servicemen. Few of them had chosen to be medics and most had never seen someone else’s blood before they were called up, much less the horrific injuries that rolled into triage. Both nurses speak warmly of the medics they worked with and say that even though some of them were initially reluctant to be appointed to the 1 Fd Hosp, all worked tirelessly as part of the medical team to ensure the boys who were ill, injured or maimed had the very best chance of surviving and recovering. Di recalls, ‘The level of expertise and care was so high, if they made it into the triage unit alive, their chance of survival was excellent.’

One young digger who didn’t survive broke all their hearts. He came in one day after his armoured personnel carrier had been blown up by a landmine. He was alive when he was admitted to 1 Fd Hosp with severe head injuries and both arms and legs blown off, although he never regained consciousness. The doctors did what they could for him, but his injuries were so extensive they knew he couldn’t survive. When he was wheeled from theatre to ICU post-surgery, he was completely wrapped in bandages and Trish remembers being shocked to realise how small his body was.

Di was on duty in ICU when he died, and her enduring memory is of one of the doctors, Rod Kennedy, climbing onto the bed beside the young digger, wrapping his arms around him and gently holding him until his life slipped away. ‘It was just so sad but what he did was typical of the man,’ she discloses softly. ‘Rod was such a compassionate person and he didn’t want that young fellow to die alone so far from home.’

It was Rod’s excellence as a physician and his enormous compassion for everyone around him that initially charmed Trish; that and his stunning good looks. While their admiration was mutual, both professionally and personally, for them any romance was untenable because Rod was married. Nevertheless, living every day on the edge, in an increasingly intense environment, surrounded by the ravages of war, with heightened awareness of the sanctity of life, it was impos­sible for either of them to ignore the growing feelings between them.

Di, however, says she had no idea they were romantically linked until after they all left Vietnam; she also admits she was so naïve it might just not have occurred to her to wonder. Added to that, she had her own fledgling romance to occupy her rare free moments. Her cousin Adrian had graduated from Duntroon the year before and had been posted to the 6th Battalion based at Nui Dat. He invited Di and a couple of other nurses up for a party in the mess at Nui Dat one weekend and promised another 6 RAR officer, Philip Badcock, that, if he was very lucky, he’d introduce him to Di. Apparently he was and Adrian did. By the time Di returned to Vung Tau she’d agreed to exchange letters with Philip.

Initially a friendship, their romance was mostly facilitated by another of Di’s friends, Peter Bradford, a chopper pilot with 9 Squadron RAAF at the US air base at Vung Tau. Peter would take Di’s letters to Nui Dat whenever he was going up there, and carry Philip’s back. At the end of the day, he’d bring the letter across to Di at the hospital. In this manner Di was also able to hear news of her many army friends out in the field.

Having friends out on the frontline caused the 1 Fd Hosp staff concern every day, but never so much as when the dustoff siren sounded. Di recalls the shiver of dread they all felt every time the wailing alarm wound up. And then there were the days when the chopper brought in someone killed in action. ‘You always asked who it was,’ she says softly. ‘Regardless of whether you knew them or not, all of them were just like younger brothers and you felt for them.’

Di clearly remembers the day that it was one of her particular friends who was brought into the morgue. John, a platoon commander, had been killed by a gunshot to the head in a single confrontation incident. When she was told who it was, Di rang another Duntroon friend, Pete Baker, who was a transport officer based at the ALSG compound. He came straight over and the matron let them share their grief in the privacy of the sisters’ quarters sitting room. Adding to their sorrow, they knew that John had married just before he was posted to Vietnam. When Di and Pete had both returned to Australia they went to visit his family; nearly fifty years later, the sadness lingers.

Back in the war zone, Di and Philip’s romance continued to develop. The letters that Peter Bradford ferried back and forth between Vung Tau and Nui Dat were a bit of loveliness in a grim landscape.

One night, Peter was late flying back and decided to sneak in and land on Vampire just to drop off Di’s mail. He gave it to a passing medic to hand on to her and zipped off again. Alerted no doubt by the thump-thump-thump-thump of the incoming Iroquois helicopter, the ward master got wind of it and stormed down to Vampire to vent his wrath, but Peter was already gone.

Although she was sure she’d be in huge trouble if he ever complained to Matron Nell Espie, Di never heard anything about it. In fact, a few months later and a couple of days before Di was due to leave Vietnam, Matron Espie conspired to aid their romance by contacting the commanding officer of the 6th Battalion to tell him that Di had the next afternoon off duty. She then called Di into her office and told her that Philip was being sent down to Vung Tau to look for some ‘silver’ for the officers’ mess at Nui Dat. Recognising it as the farce it undoubtedly was, the unlikely pretext amused Di and Philip for a long time afterwards, especially since neither recalls ever seeing tablecloths in the mess, much less silverware. Regardless, they were grateful for this unexpected kindness. Most of their relationship had been conducted through their letters, so having those last hours together was precious. With no privacy anywhere, they spent the afternoon and evening in the chapel, assured by a chaplain bearing tea that they were very welcome.

Trish and Rod’s romance was a rockier road interspersed with lectures about responsibility and fraternisation. But, eventually, they did end up together. Rod was posted back to Australia in November 1969. Trish returned at the same time as Di, in February 1970. In June 1971, Trish was posted back to Asia to the ANZUK Military Hospital at Changi in Singapore for twelve months, and then resigned from the army to pursue a civilian nursing career as a sub-matron at the Crown Street Women’s Hospital in Sydney. Rod resigned from the army in 1975 and, by then divorced, he and Trish married at the end of the year. They moved to the Central Coast of New South Wales after Rod was appointed to the position of medical superintendent at Gosford District Hospital.

Both Trish and Rod suffered symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder years after they returned and, although they didn’t speak about it, Trish realised her very bright, charismatic husband was struggling. He continued to work long hours, pushing all the limits. Meanwhile, their two sons, Iain and James, were rebelling in true teenage style, making Trish’s life increasingly challenging. But Trish Kennedy has never expected ‘easy’ in the life stakes and she held the family together. She realised Rod was seriously unwell in the months before he died, but when she broached the subject of his health he told her that he knew what he had and he wasn’t going to do anything about it. He died suddenly at home in 1995.

Throughout all this time, Trish and Di remained firm friends. When they returned from Vietnam, Di was posted to Ingleburn. Philip returned home three months later, and her old friend Pete Baker drove Di to the airport in her parents’ car to meet him. Typically, the plane arrived after midnight and she was so excited she completely forgot about Pete. Smiling ruefully, she admits Philip drove the car back to her parents’ place and she never did find out how Pete got home.

Philip stayed in Sydney for two days to meet her family, then went home to Adelaide where Di joined him to meet his. Happily, Philip was posted to Ingleburn as well and they announced their engagement shortly afterwards, with the intention of marrying about six months later. Then, out of the blue, Philip came to Di with the news that he was being posted to Singapore in eight short weeks. They went to her parents, explaining they would have to get married in six weeks instead of six months. Di laughs as she remembers her mother’s instant migraine and declaration that they couldn’t possibly find a reception venue that quickly. Eight weeks later, Second Lieutenant and Mrs Philip Badcock were on a plane back to Asia. Di had to resign her commission, as the ban on married women serving in the military had not yet been lifted, but she had no regrets. She was delighted when Trish turned up, a few months later, on her posting to Singapore. Happily, Trish was also around to share the excitement of the birth of Di and Philip’s first son, Peter, in August 1971. They welcomed their second son, Michael, in June 1973, by which time they had returned to Australia.

Being able to share precious time with their sons and their wives and, in recent years, their beautiful grandchildren, has brought great joy to the Badcocks who, like the Kennedys, have skirmished with post-traumatic stress disorder. Di says she was told that the more education you have about PTSD, the longer you can deny it, but she always knew in her heart that it lurked waiting to pounce. All of them have acknow­ledged the indirect impact of it on their children. Trish reckons turning fifty and slowing down can be a precursor, and certainly there are specific, personal triggers in the moment. Like many Vietnam veterans, for Di and Trish it has always been sirens and the distinctive, growling thump-thump-thump-thump of the Iroquois choppers.

And yet, in spite of any challenges they’ve since faced, Di and Trish both feel their year in Vietnam was a defining experience, and agree that they wouldn’t have missed it for anything. It’s not just that they both found love up there in the war zone. It was also about friendship and loyalty and looking out for each other. It was about living on the edge and in breathless anticipation. It was about facing their fears and doing their very best. It was about duty and responsibility and contributing something worthwhile to the world. Most of all, though, they say it was about nursing and the brave young soldiers they cared for.

(L-R) Matron Nell Espie and Sister Patricia Yorke enjoying one of the social gatherings at Nui Dat that the nurses were regularly invited to by the soldiers from 6 RAR, 1969. Photograph by Denis Gibbons AM.

Although they rarely saw each other, Di Lawrence and Philip Badcock met and fell in love in Vietnam. One of the chopper pilots ferried their letters to each other between Nui Dat and Vung Tau, 1968. Photograph by Denis Stanley Gibbons AM.