14
Flying Solo

Bev Milner, RAAFNS

Butterworth RAAF Base, January 1968–January 1970

Clark Air Field, July–September 1969

Section Officer Bev Milner was asleep in the 902 Squadron accommodation trailer on the US base at Cam Ranh Bay when a loud, booming noise echoed through the bedroom over the rumble of the air conditioner, followed by a series of explosive bangs. Bev roused a little but was not alarmed. It was her first night in a war zone, after all, and she expected lots of noise and commotion. Tired after a long day hitching lifts with first the RAAF and then USAF getting from Butterworth RAAF Base to Cam Ranh Bay on her way to Clark Air Field in the Philippines, she rolled over and went back to sleep.

The next morning when she met up with her American hosts at breakfast they asked her where she’d spent the night. Bev shook her head in bewilderment and asked, ‘What do you mean?’

‘While the bombing was on; where did you go?’

Still shaking her head, Bev replied, ‘I’ve no idea what you are talking about.’

‘Oh no,’ they said, aghast. ‘Didn’t anyone call you? We all spent the night in the bunkers!’

Bev was shocked to discover that the 6th Convalescent Center at the other end of the air base had been attacked by the Viet Cong. Under the barrage of 107-millimetre rockets slamming into the base from the other side of the bay, the VC had stolen in through the hospital perimeters in the dead of night and slung satchel charges – bags full of explosives – into the complex, destroying several buildings and wards. Two men in the Convalescent Center had been killed and ninety-eight patients and staff were injured.

Having pretty much slept through the whole thing, Bev could barely get her head around it. Even when she walked down to the other end of the base to survey the damage, it seemed strangely unreal. But then, so much about her new life as a member of the RAAF Nursing Service did.

One of Bev Milner’s greatest challenges as a young adult was her own innocence and naivety, a result of her protected upbringing. A quiet and shy girl, Bev and her twin sister, Jen, were born in 1945 and grew up in country Victoria with their at-home mother and World War II veteran father. He was a very strict man, Bev says, but fair. During their teen years there was little social life apart from local country dances, the pictures and some sporting clubs. With no independent means of travel, Bev and Jen were reliant on their parents to convey them to any social events.

Bev loved animals and secretly dreamt of being a large-­animal veterinarian in the outback, and maybe later, when she had more experience, looking after wild animals in sanctuaries or parks. Although she had most of the qualifications required for Veterinary Science, she didn’t know how to make it happen; nursing was the only career she could envisage that was actually viable and the Traralgon Hospital was the largest country hospital nearby. She enrolled because it was the job that was there and she particularly did not want to be stuck in an office.

Consequently, when Bev left home at seventeen to move into the nurses’ quarters at Traralgon to do her training, she was in for some shocks. She found she disliked some aspects of nursing during her training days, not least the night duty and some of the senior staff. She struggled with homesickness, especially as she could, on a clear day, see her home from the roof of the nurses’ quarters, and she was separated for the first time from Jen, whom she missed dreadfully. It was a big wrench and sometimes she borrowed a bicycle and rode the 50-odd kilometres home, between shifts, and threatened that she was never going back. Despite her angst, however, she eventually settled in. The girls she enrolled with became ‘family’, helping each other through the course and ultimately becoming lifelong friends.

In 1966, Bev completed her training and then worked for twelve months as a staff nurse. Having long since decided she really didn’t want to be nursing ‘old people’, she recalls, ‘I really wanted to get out into the world and do something.’ Nursing sick and injured young servicemen and bringing them home appealed to her and the ink was barely dry on her resig­nation from Traralgon when she joined the air force at Laverton, in Victoria, in April 1967. She’d just turned twenty-one.

While she was based at Laverton, Bev did her aeromedical training at the nearby Point Cook RAAF Base. It only took a few short weeks and Bev admits, ‘Because I was so young and green, I didn’t even understand all the ranks and military jargon, let alone anything else when I went there.’ She basically considered herself a nurse first and a military person second.

Late in 1967, Bev was advised that she was being posted to Butterworth RAAF Base in Malaysia. At last she was going to get her chance to nurse injured soldiers. Since Bev had only trained on Caribou planes, she was posted to Richmond in NSW for two weeks to do an orientation flight on a Hercules – all the medivacs were undertaken using Hercs. In January 1968, she flew out to Penang, via Singapore and Kuala Lumpur. Everything was new and completely different and, for the first time in her life, incredibly exciting. Bev even found the trip itself stimulating. She found she wanted to see and do everything in this new wide world she’d stepped into.

Safely installed in the nurses’ quarters at Butterworth, Bev started work on the wards in the No 4 Hospital almost straightaway. In spite of her enthusiasm, it was a hard slog. The tropical climate and hot, heavy atmosphere totally enervated her, affecting her ability to settle in and adjust to the routine of the hospital.

Three weeks after she arrived, Bev was still struggling when she was assigned her first medivac mission into Vietnam to evacuate patients from the 1st Australian Field Hospital in Vung Tau. She flew with an older, well-experienced nurse who was in charge on the flight. With a small shrug, Bev says, ‘I think I did my dash when I yawned and she asked me if I was tired; I innocently replied, “Yes.” I still hadn’t really acclimatised and that was the end of my medivac career for a while.’

Banished, she believes as a consequence, to the No 4 Hospital wards allotted to the British Army, Bev recalls, ‘Even that was difficult at first and I felt quite isolated in the beginning because I couldn’t understand their burry Scottish or British accents and the ward was run as a very British military unit. I still hadn’t got my head around the army ranks.’ However, she found she liked working with the British nurses, and many of the patients she looked after were Gurkhas, whom she found to be lovely people. As she slowly adapted to her new environment, she began to really enjoy the work, in particular the exposure to tropical medicine. ‘I was able to learn quite a lot about malaria and some of the other tropical diseases I’d had no experience of.’

After a couple of months, the British Army and Royal Air Force downsized their presence in Butterworth and the patient lists in the hospital transitioned into predominantly Australian personnel. With her body finally adjusted to the climate and her internal clock attuned to zulu (military) time, Bev settled into the lifestyle and worked on all the wards of the No 4 Hospital or at the RAAF clinic in Penang.

She also did a couple of medivacs into Vung Tau, but most of the time nurses on shorter deployments to Butterworth accompanied the medivacs. When she was offered the opportunity to undertake the long hauls home, Bev agreed even though she still found flying fatiguing. She loved getting home to Australia, however briefly.

By then, Indonesia had lifted its ban on the RAAF flying over Bali, which enabled them to take a more direct route from Butterworth to Richmond over the Northern Territory. The old Hercs had been replaced by the Hercules C-130E, which the nurses found much more comfortable because it had a proper galley, enabling them to heat meals, make toast and provide hot drinks for all their patients. The galley also had a proper toilet. With a laugh Bev says, ‘I thankfully did not have to ask the loadmaster to secure the pull-down toilet, which alerted the whole plane to our intentions. No more “Quick, rock the plane, Sis is on the dunny”!’

In July 1969, eighteen months after she arrived in Malaysia, and with a lot more experience clocked up, Bev was advised that she’d been chosen for attachment to the US Air Force for the same sixty-day block that nineteen of her compatriots had already undertaken. She felt privileged and was delighted to pursue this new opportunity.

Unlike her predecessors, who’d flown on commercial airlines to Manila, Bev was the first nurse to begin her transfer to Clark Air Field on an RAAF Hercules, which is how she came to be in Cam Ranh Bay the night it was attacked by the Viet Cong. She’d travelled on the Herc from Butterworth to Phan Rang, where she switched to another RAAF flight going to Vung Tau. There she’d jumped aboard a USAF flight to Tan Son Nhut and on to Cam Ranh Bay. The day after the rocket attack, a 902nd AES crew gave her a lift to Clark. She was then officially in the hands of the USAF.

Already shaken by the events of the previous evening, when Bev arrived at Clark she was, like the RAAF nurses before her, somewhat overwhelmed by the sheer size of the complex. But she was exhilarated, too, as she got her handover from the previous RAAF nurse, signed all the forms that were shoved in front of her, accepted the medical bag and waved the departing nurse off as she returned to Butterworth.

Next morning Bev was down on the flight line early, ready to accompany her USAF buddy, Donna, on her first mission returning casualties to South Korea and Japan. On their way back, the plane was diverted to Kadena Air Base in Okinawa to collect a patient whom Bev then specialled, or gave one-on-one care, all the way to Taiwan. They were away for three days.

On her first mission into Vietnam with the 902 Bev was appointed documentation nurse, with Donna as flight nurse. On the flight across to Tan Son Nhut to collect casualties from the American 3rd Field Hospital, Bev prepared herself mentally for the pile of paperwork Donna had warned her about. As they loaded their first patients, she took possession of the bag of documentation and X-rays that accompanied them and quickly skimmed through the files to acquaint herself with their contents.

From Tan Son Nhut, they flew north to collect more patients and their paperwork from the 71st Evacuation Hospital at Pleiku, south-east to gather up another group from the 91st Evac Hosp at Tuy Hoa, south down the east coast to retrieve still more from the 8th Field Hospital at Nha Trang and on to the 12th Field Hospital at Cam Ranh Bay. By that time, Bev had several bags of paperwork that she juggled, updated and collated according to the treatment given and observations made by Donna and the two medics who assisted her. Then the plane was diverted to Thailand to deliver a critical burns patient and Bev, who had no visa for Thailand, had to stay and spend another night in Cam Ranh Bay. There she met some of the crew members of the 903rd Aeromedical Evacuation Squadron, who were officially based at Tan Son Nhut, but also operated detachments out of several bases in South Vietnam including Cam Ranh Bay. Not inclined to twiddle her thumbs waiting for someone to come and collect her, Bev volunteered to fly with her new friends. The all-male crew included two nurses and usually two medics, all of whom welcomed and quickly accepted Bev’s offer

She spent the next three days flying into and moving patients around the northern reaches of South Vietnam, and found that being an extra gave her a bit of a chance to look about as they flew over the country. Disturbed by the moon-like craters left by B-52 bombing runs, Bev says it was sad to see the once beautiful countryside so destroyed. ‘It wasn’t just the bomb craters,’ she says. ‘The country was brown and dead from all the Agent Orange spraying. It illustrated better than anything the social, political and environmental cost of this particular war.’

As luck would have it, Bev’s crew were on stand-down in Cam Ranh Bay after completing their day’s missions when the Apollo II astronauts stepped out onto the surface of the moon on 21 July 1969. Word got out that a crew member had a small black-and-white TV. He invited anyone who could squeeze into his tent to witness Neil Armstrong walk on the moon. Bev was one of the lucky ones and was incredibly thrilled to hear Armstrong’s voice declaring, ‘That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.’

Excitement over and feet firmly on the ground in a land cleaved apart by war, next morning the crew went back to work. Every day was different, she says, and their destination could change in transit. ‘We sometimes did not know who we were going to collect if we were redirected midair on those in-country milk runs.’ Sometimes Bev flew as the flight nurse and sometimes as the medication nurse. After a couple of missions, Donna more or less cut her loose and left her to get on with whichever role she was appointed to.

The 902 was winding down by this time, which gave Bev the opportunity to fly more missions with the 903 when she was staying in Cam Ranh Bay. Even though she wasn’t officially attached to the 903, USAF approved her joining them when she was able and documented some, though not all, of her volunteer missions.

On occasion, flights were scheduled for specific critical patients. One such mission took Bev from Cam Ranh Bay to Tan Son Nhut, where they were to collect a young American with a tracheostomy and on a ventilator. It was only an hour from the bay to Tan Son Nhut, but then another six hours back to Clark Air Field. Bev’s only prior experience with a ventilator was in theatre during her training and she was very worried about managing this one in flight, especially given the peculiarities associated with nursing at altitude. Unfortunately, when they landed at Tan Son Nhut they were informed that the soldier had died. Bev recalls, ‘I felt so sorry for him and his family, although I was a little relieved not to have the responsibility of getting him back.’ That in itself bothered her and, not for the first time, she wished she’d had some intensive care training before she went to Vietnam. ‘It just wasn’t available when I trained.’

Even after eighteen months in South-East Asia, flying still tired Bev. ‘With the medivacs out of Butterworth we flew one every two weeks. With USAF we were flying day after day, up and down throughout the day.’ And then there were all the pre- and post-flight activities that often made the day’s shift even longer. But Bev was also fast building confidence, especially as she became more familiar with the USAF crews and their flight paths. ‘Before I worked all that out, I didn’t even know what direction we were flying in most of the time,’ she says with a grin. Once she got her head around that, she was able to appreciate the adventure in each day, although there were exceptions.

A couple of the landing strips up near the 17th parallel, the border between North and South Vietnam, allowed once-only attempts as they ended with a sheer drop-off. Bev often thought they weren’t going to pull up in time until she got used to it, though she says the American evac pilots were very good. It was just some of their planes that were dodgy because of their age.

Bev was flight nurse on a C-118 flying to Tachikawa in Japan when they developed a hydraulic leak and lost the use of all their brakes. They diverted to Yokota, which had a much longer strip, and prepared for a crash landing. There wasn’t a whole lot they could do other than hang on. The stretcher patients all had harnesses on and the rest of them buckled into their seats and took their chances. ‘Those pilots got us down in one piece and everyone was okay but it was a bit hairy,’ Bev recalls with a shudder.

Not as scary, though, as the day they had a near-midair collision. As flight nurse, Bev had been called up to the flight deck of the C-118 as they flew in over the coast of Vietnam from the Philippines. She was standing beside the pilot when they all looked out and saw a US fighter jet headed straight for them. Bev thinks she probably froze and maybe held her breath but says she wasn’t too worried at the time.

‘Shit! Cowboy,’ she heard her furious pilot swear as the jet eventually spotted them a couple of very slow seconds later and took evasive action. It was only later Bev realised how dangerous it was and how catastrophic it could have been. ‘Being a medivac plane we had right of way and all the fault lay with the jet pilot. I’m pretty sure our crew reported him.’ With the wisdom of her years she says, ‘We were probably all a bit gung-ho back then. We thought we were invincible and that nothing could possibly happen to us.’

In early August 1969, Bev began an official 21-day attachment flying with the 57th Military Airlift Command, taking American casualties home to the United States. Her new buddy, Judith, was, Bev says, fantastic to work with and they became instant friends. Rising at sparrow’s to be down on the flight line and ready to load all their charges on a C-141 Starlifter, Bev was very excited to be going to the US. From Clark, they flew to Tan Son Nhut, where they collected a load of fresh casualties ambulanced to the strip from the 3rd Field Hospital in Saigon. Their destination was Kadena Air Base in Japan, from where their charges were transferred to the US Naval Hospital in Okinawa. The crew overnighted in Kadena before flying two hours to Yokota, where they spent another two nights waiting for the patients due for evacuation home. While they waited, Bev never sat still. Burning the candle at both ends, she raced around seeing as much of Japan as she could, dragging the American nurses with her. She laughs now when she says, ‘It was just as well I was only with the 57th for twenty-one days because I could never have sustained the pace. I wanted to see and do everything that I could. I was impatient back then and felt I didn’t have a moment to lose.’

Finally, on 8 August 1969, they took off from Yokota with a full contingent of casualties destined for the east coast of the United States. They carried twenty-three stretcher cases and twenty-four ambulatory patients who sat in cushioned reclining seats like those on a commercial aircraft. ‘The Starlifters were pretty spacious and comfortable,’ Bev recalls, ‘particularly when compared to the RAAF Hercs. We had two nurses on those flights, or sometimes three if we had any critical patients on board, and two medics.’

The plane had a well-equipped galley for heating up to thirty meals and drinks at a time and, happily for the nurses, it also had a real toilet. The extra space on the Starlifters meant the nurses could get around the cabin more easily to treat every­one and, because they were longer flights, Bev appreciated having several consecutive hours to provide concentrated nursing care. Seven and a half hours and several time changes and a date change later, they landed at Elmendorf, Alaska very late at night and handed the plane over to a new flight crew who continued on to Andrews Air Force Base near Washington.

Bev and Judith and the rest of their crew stayed in Elmendorf for the rest of the night and next day. Making the most of the opportunity, Bev urged her fellow nurses to come with her and see as much of Alaska as possible in the few short hours available. That night, when the next C-141 arrived from Japan, they automatically took over from the incoming crew at midnight and escorted their new load of patients through more time zones to Andrews Air Force Base and McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey.

Bev found flying the Americans home quite different to flying Aussie diggers home to Australia. ‘They were always happy to be going home but they generally weren’t as cheerful as the Aussie boys. They appeared to have had a terrible time and most of them seemed to have done more than one tour.’ She remembers an African-American soldier who was going home from his third deployment with a psych patient classification. He told her, ‘They won’t be able to send me back again now . . .’ The harshly whispered words seared her memory and she’s never forgotten him.

The crew returned to Yokota on a military flight and a day later, Bev’s next mission took her from Yokota back to the west coast of the US, to Travis Air Force Base in California, returning via Anchorage. After overnighting in Yokota again another mission returned her to Clark, where she prepared to join another medivac into Vietnam and up to Japan, before crewing on a flight to the west coast of the US via Guam and Hawaii. It was a hectic schedule, but she managed to fit in a bit of sightseeing in each country she visited, making the most of every opportunity to discover more of the world.

Back at Clark, towards the end of her sojourn with the 57th, Bev was offered the chance to work a shift as nurse of the day. This entailed viewing patients with a staff member in the hospital, determining their individual needs and drawing up the loading manifest for their onward journey to the United States. She also organised all necessary documentation for the departing patients plus their medications and X-rays and any special equipment that might be required. Next morning she had to be down at the flight line to help supervise loading and hand over to the appointed flight crew. It was an opportunity Bev knew wasn’t extended lightly, which made her whole attachment to the 57th even more special.

Almost before she knew it, twenty-one whirlwind days had passed and she was officially back with the 902 Squadron. Once again Bev ended up in Cam Ranh Bay, where she spent four days flying some of her last medivacs around South Vietnam with the 903, arriving back at Clark just in time to hand over to the incoming RAAF nurse. Bev gave her the medical kit, showed her around, gave her the handover forms she needed to sign and wished her well. On 7 September, Bev said goodbye to her USAF friends and flew to Cam Ranh Bay, overnighting for one last time with her 903 mates before taking a morning medivac flight to Vung Tau and then an RAAF C-130 medivac back to Butterworth. She left exhausted but very satisfied. Not only had she contributed significantly to the welfare of the young Americans in her care, but she’d also packed a lot of living into every spare minute. As a consequence, she felt emotionally strong and much more self-assured.

Back in Butterworth, once she’d settled into the routine of the hospital again, Bev wrote and submitted her report on her USAF experience to the director of nursing and the commanding officer. That was her debrief, such as it was, though she did discuss some features of her experience with the girls who’d gone before her.

Bev worked at the No 4 Hospital for several more months before she returned to Australia in January 1970 on one last medivac flight to Richmond. When she resigned from the RAAF in 1972 she took off overseas for twelve months, purposely travelling in places where the Vietnam War was a non-event. It was only when she came back through the United States to catch up with Judith and some of her other nursing friends who’d been members of USAF that she talked about her Vietnam experience. She felt a very close connection with the American nurses and has actively maintained those friendships ever since.

Returning at last to Australia, Bev went home and finally reunited with her family. She stayed with them for a while and worked in some local jobs, but her view of the world had changed and she realised she had outgrown their small community. She was keen to pursue her nursing career, this time by working in some of the remoter areas of Western Australia. Realising she needed midwifery qualifications to do so, she applied to train as a midwife at the Royal Women’s Hospital in Brisbane. Bev says it was the worst twelve months of her life; the work felt like a production line to her but she studied hard and did well because she was determined to succeed.

Once she’d qualified, she signed a contract to work for the WA Health Department for a year, travelling around the state as they directed her. She enjoyed moving around and loved working in some of the most remote communities, once again feeling that she was contributing something tangible and worthwhile that benefited people in need.

When her contract was up, Bev returned to Victoria to be near her family and got a job in coronary care in Melbourne where, she says, the doctors taught her a lot and whetted her appetite for a coronary care qualification. In fact, she finally felt she’d found her true calling. Ultimately, she did a course in intensive care nursing as well, and after her parents and Jen moved to Queensland, she followed them and ended up working in ICU at Nambour Hospital in the Sunshine Coast hinterland.

In 1992, Bev went to the dedication of the Vietnam Veterans’ memorial in Canberra and met, for the first time, some of the other RAAF nurses who’d been at Butterworth and who’d flown with USAF between 1965 and 1971. She also became aware that some of them were trying to get the active service of the RAAF nurses recognised by the Department of Defence.

By that time, Bev was starting to suffer from odd minor health problems and also nightmares in which she was forced to survive in the jungle with some of her soldier patients from Vietnam. She found this very disturbing, as none of it had ever happened, and became more distressed as even worse nightmares slithered in to haunt her sleep. Her health continued to deteriorate and her enthusiasm and efficiency in her job waned, until she realised she needed psychiatric help, and got it.

When the RAAF nurses’ active service was eventually recognised in 1994, Bev wasn’t officially advised about it. In fact, she didn’t hear about it until she and a few of her fellow nurses were invited to Washington in 1997, to participate in the inauguration of the Women in Military Service celebrations and the opening of the Nurses Memorial at Arlington Cemetery. She admits, ‘It made me a bit angry, especially when USAF was making such a big deal about us while we were there and, to my knowledge, little about our Vietnam participation was known at home.’

After she returned to Australia, Bev applied for her medals, which turned up, in due course, in the mail. In spite of the way RAAF nurses were treated, or not, by the Department of Defence, Bev says going to Vietnam was the best experience of her life. ‘It was challenging, fulfilling, interesting and rewarding and it gave me a maturity I hadn’t had prior to going.’ For the quiet girl from country Victoria who became a nurse because it was what she could do, it was her ticket to ride; it enabled her to get out into the world and make a difference.

Bev Milner (centre) stands in front of a USAF C-141 Starlifter during her stint attached to the US 57th Aeromedical Evacuation Squadron, 1969. Courtesy Bev Milner.