Elizabeth Allen,
Army Nurse Corps, Captain, 1967–1969;
Army Reserves Major, 1969–1982

Over five thousand Army nurses served in the Vietnam War. The average age was twenty-three and they were mostly all new to nursing. Elizabeth Allen was an exception. She had her master’s degree when she signed up and wanted to get her Ph.D. in the Army.

Allen served in Vietnam during one of the most deadly periods of the war—the Tet Offensive. For several thousand years the Vietnamese Lunar New Year has been a traditional celebration that brings the Vietnamese people a sense of happiness, hope, and, peace, but on the Vietnamese New Year in 1968 the North Vietnamese Communists launched a hellish attack on the South. Thousands were killed. Although the Communist victories were short-lived, they fueled anti-war sentiment in the United States because the bloody takeover was covered extensively in the media.

In 1968, the bloodiest year of the war, Allen and the other nurses stationed in the jungles of Vietnam tried to save young men whose bodies were blown apart in the middle of a war zone. Allen, of Ann Arbor, Michigan, is now an associate professor of nursing at the University of Michigan and a mentor for troubled youths. She never wanted to leave Vietnam.

I had to go to Vietnam. I needed to go. I made a quick decision on my own. No one knew about it. There are extremely few minority folks in health care. There are a lot of aides, but in terms of professional folks, very few. At that time I had a master’s. I also knew that African Americans were most likely to end up in battle units, in the death units, and I really wanted to do something. It had nothing to do with whether I agreed with the war or not. Folks talk about the love of God and country, but that never factored into my decision. What did factor in was that there was someone in need. My three brothers were also in the Navy at the time and I truly believe that every person who claims to be American has military obligations. I don’t believe women should be exempt.

I left home at the end of January 1967 and did six weeks in Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio. I wanted to go to Vietnam. I didn’t want to sit around. Soldiers were dying in Vietnam, not in America. They kept saying I could go but then they’d try and talk me out of it. They had few people in the military with advanced degrees and they had a nursing program with the University of Maryland and they wanted me to teach there. I had to fight to go to Vietnam, and finally they sent me to Cu Chi Province, to the hospital at a base camp with the 25th Infantry Division.

The Vietcong had been at war since the 1940s and they had a massive tunnel system. Our camp was built on top of them without the Army knowing it. So at night the Vietcong would come out of the tunnels and people would get killed. At first they thought the Vietcong were coming from the outside, and then someone discovered their secret. When I got there they knew about the tunnels. I get there on a Friday afternoon and we were getting orientation on Monday, but we got hit on Saturday. We got hit a lot. If you were off duty, you went to the bunker. If you were on duty, you kept working.

At Cu Chi, people would get caught up in the big wounds, but there were massive psychiatric wounds that I was seeing every day. The Vietnamese people were incredible warriors. They were smart as hell and they used what they had. When we discovered those tunnels, that meant someone had to go in there and get those people out. The Vietcong were half the size of the U.S. soldiers, and those passageways were small and dark. Keep in mind that they opened out into the jungle of Vietnam and they were full of bugs, spiders, and snakes. The Vietcong would hang snakes from the tops of them and so when our guys would shimmy through the openings, the snakes would bite them. But as bad as that was, the worst was when our men would get out of them in the middle of the jungle and these huge spiders had built webs over the mouth of the openings. It was dark and they had no lights. I had more than one soldier whose face hit the belly of one of those huge spiders. They would lose it. Sometimes they would walk into the tunnels and fall into these pits filled with pointy sticks that would pierce them all over. By the time we would get to them, they would be infected all over.

There is another part of what the Army nurses had to do called “medevac.” It’s done in a helicopter, and that means you have to fly with the troops who are in danger of dying. We moved troops from the field to Saigon. When I got to Cu Chi, I was a captain with no military experience. But in no time it was my turn to fly medevac. I didn’t know what to do. They told me when you get the call, you have to go to the helicopter pad. I said to myself, Shit. I haven’t been here a month and my number got picked. They told me to sleep in my clothes, be able to wake fast, and go wait on the pad. So at some ungodly time in the morning like one A.M., the call comes. So I had to wear my flak jacket and double pot [helmet] and stand in the dark. The helicopter comes with no lights and the pilot says, “Come on.” and I jump on. The minute I get in I ask him, “What do I do?” and he says, “Don’t you hear him?”

I then hear this awful sound. It was a young man with a sucking chest wound. The injury has penetrated his chest cavity and air was coming in from the outside, compressing his lungs. All I could hear was this noise. I couldn’t see him but the pilot said we had to fly with no lights on. So all the way from Cu Chi to Saigon I’ve got to keep him alive in the dark, and the Vietcong are shooting at us. It’s just the two pilots, the gunner, a dying kid, and me. You think that’s tough? We finally set down, get him off, and then take off back into the war zone. The choppers were a big part of Vietnam. If I wasn’t flying medevac I would meet the choppers when they came in with the wounded and get them triaged. The hard part is guys who don’t get to go to surgery. The more severe the injuries the less likely he is to go to surgery. It’s hard to look at those kids and say you don’t get to go to surgery. We only had three operating rooms. We took first those who would use the least resources. We didn’t have that many surgeons, beds, antibiotics, and blood. So whoever needed twelve hours of surgery was not getting in so fast. Some died and some we just maintained until they got a chance.

After a few months in Cu Chi, I was sent to Pleiku, the first hospital to get bombed in the Tet Offensive in February of 1968. A lot people got killed in the hospital. So they worked experienced nurses at night, and we got hit every night. There was no place to go. You had to keep doing whatever you were doing. Responding to fear is not always an option. Men’s lives were dependent on me, and my being scared was not useful. You had these guys with massive wounds—not just a leg cut off, but as bad as two legs off, two arms off and blind. He can’t move, and my being scared is not helping him. I had to protect him. I had to make sure he didn’t bleed or choke to death. I had to make sure if a mortar hit, the shrapnel didn’t hit him again. During the shellings, whoever is the head nurse is the HMFICC—the Head Motherfucker in Complete Charge—and you got to ride it. I had to keep them alive to the best of my ability. I sat on the razor’s edge.

I knew the Tet Offensive was going to happen. There were terrible disadvantages of being a black woman in the war, but advantages, too. The black troops seek you. The troops had intercepted communications about the Tet Offensive and they told me it was coming. The first round came in, a rocket at two A.M., and I heard it from a distance. It was a horrible sound and I said, “Good God, we’re being hit.” And as I said it, the hospital got hit and then there was a steady barrage for an hour. At the time there were only two nurses that were combat-trained and I was in surgical intensive care. We used radiophones then, and I got called. The director of nursing was screaming, “Captain Allen, Captain Allen. You have to go to work.” I said, “Will someone walk me to my unit? It’s like three A.M. and the rockets are still coming in.” After a silence, she said, “We don’t have anybody. You have to walk by yourself. Don’t forget your flak jacket, steel pot,* and be careful.” When I hung up I thought, If I could walk across that field I could do anything.

When I came out, the hospital was on fire, and then I saw the unit for surgical intensive care. I opened the door and this poor nurse, she was about twenty-two and she was so frightened. Some of the guys had fallen out of the bed and wounds had broken up, stomachs were open. They were bleeding. It was bedlam. I walked in there knowing I was in charge and I had to make that work, and I did. I was good.

For the next two months we were attacked a lot. I had nurses sleeping under the GIs’ beds. When we got hit we would get the wounded on the floor, get them out of the line of fire. They’d have casts on their arms and legs. They’d have IVs in the neck. They’d be blind with drainage tubes and a catheter and you had to get them out of their beds and onto cots on a cement floor.

The minute they hit the cold cement they had to pee and that meant someone had to help them with that. I made sure they had blankets on the floor, which lessened the chance of them peeing. Guys who were really badly injured, I would put them down on the floor when I came on. They weren’t whiners. They could be hurting and bleeding and let me tell you something, they didn’t whine. One time we could hear the Vietcong, hear the guns clicking; they were that close. I was under the bed with a kid who was blind and couldn’t walk. He was a kid, about nineteen. He was patting me on the leg, telling me, “Don’t worry, Captain, I’ll protect you.” I said, “Don’t you worry, baby. That’s all right.”

That was every day, every day—shit. War is war. It ain’t what these people think it is. We get all caught up about 9/11, it’s a terrible thing, but at least it was quick and we didn’t have to face it every damn day.

I stayed in Vietnam for one year. I didn’t want to come back home. I wanted to work with the troops. I could be a nurse back in the U.S. any day. I was good at what I did, and the black troops needed me and I needed them. Eventually I did go back to Valley Forge and taught at the Army specialty school at Valley Forge until January of 1969. I wanted to go back overseas but the Army didn’t want me to. I was up for major. I wanted to be a nurse consultant and was told those jobs were given to those in the military for a long time. I wanted to be regular Army but it seemed like it was not going to work for me. I was offered a consultant job in civilian life and I got out. I love the military and I would recommend it to anyone, but it wasn’t ready for me at the time.

War is not like picking up a carload of casualties on the highway. There’s nobody to call. It’s you and your skills and your heart—that’s it. When the IVs run out, damn, you hang whatever you’ve got, because you’ve got to keep the soldier alive until you can get him out of there. We had all kinds of stuff like malaria, kids with 107-degree temperatures and with nothing to cool them down, massive body burns, chemical burns that take their skins off and their bodies are just weeping plasma on the floor.

We talk about war as though it’s a trip to the fucking supermarket; well, it ain’t no walk to a supermarket. You hear them talking about “We” going to fight—well, who is “We”?

I was on a talk show once and they said, “I don’t understand why you all don’t get over it already.” It’s just not that easy. Vets shouldn’t have to eat out of trash cans or worry about health care. It’s not right, and it bothers me every day.