“Not An Observer But A Participant In Life”: An Army Nurse Saving Lives In Vietnam

Edie McCoy Meeks was born in 1944 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She grew up with an older sister and two younger brothers. Her father was an accountant and her mother was a housewife. She remembers always wanting to be a nurse, and she also wanted to serve in the Army. She attended an all-girls Catholic school, which she found liberating because it taught her that girls could accomplish anything. For example, at her school, girls served as class president, class vice president, and in all the leadership positions. They were not always relegated to being the “secretary” or other gender-traditional roles. She played basketball when she was young, and then focused on drama and volleyball. After graduating from high school in 1962, she entered St. Mary’s School of Nursing in Rochester, Minnesota, which was started by the Mayo brothers and is part of the Mayo Clinic (now the Mayo Clinic Hospital, Rochester). She was taught the importance of care for the physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being of both patients and their families. Edie is thankful for the good values that were reinforced there, and she notes that students were dismissed for poor attitudes. Students at St. Mary’s took classes on a three-month rotation with a month off between sessions. Caring for people was the easiest aspect of becoming a nurse, and the most challenging aspect was neurosurgery, which she found difficult to deal with. Following graduation in 1965, she began working in an emergency room. Her six months in the ER “made Vietnam make sense.” Next, a bishop from British Columbia invited a group of young Americans, Edie included, to go to Burns Lake, British Columbia, to work as missionaries. The bishop wanted young people to serve as good examples for the youth of Burns Lake. There, Edie worked in a 46-bed hospital from January of 1966 to April of 1967. She describes the experience as difficult, and even though the summers were spectacular with 23 hours of sun each day, the long dark winters were depressing. She was still glad to see how other people lived and gain an appreciation for the pioneer life and community. When she returned to the States, she traveled to California to visit her brother and took a job at Mt. Sinai hospital, working in the evenings and getting around in a used Edsel. When her brother Tom was drafted, he joined the Marines and Edie joined the Army Nurse Corps in 1968 because she knew nurses were going to Vietnam and “I wanted to be there,” remarking “I wanted someone who wanted to be there to take care of my brother.” In the Nurse’s basic course, she remembers practicing techniques on live animals and getting a briefing on the capabilities of Agent Orange. She did not really know much about the war in Vietnam before deploying, but she was angry that we were not allowed to win. Before going overseas, she was able to choose her specialty, and she got to care for returning wounded Soldiers in an orthopedic ward at Ft. Ord, California. By the time she deployed, she felt that she was well trained. Edie deployed in July 1968. Her deployment process included a visit home, and then a stop at Ft. Ord, where she visited Tom, before boarding a plane to Vietnam. She was one of two women on the plane. As she flew over Vietnam, she noticed that the earth looked like “it was hurting” because Vietnam had been at war for so long. Her first assignment was in the intensive care and recovery unit of the 3rd Field Hospital in Saigon. They wore white uniforms, and the hospital was in a school. The nurses worked 12 hours a day, six days a week, and they lived in an old hotel with no air conditioning, only big fans. One of her jobs was to stabilize patients enough to get them to Japan, and she remembers “the ones who didn’t make it.” By October she felt as if she had shut down because of rage. After 6 months at the 3rd Field Hospital, she transferred to the 71st Evac Hospital in Pleiku, where she lived with Diane Carlson Evans in a Quonset hut. At Pleiku, she wore fatigues, not the white nurses’ uniform, and she worked in the surgical intensive care unit for a month or more. After surgical intensive care, she transferred to medical intensive care, where she took care of Soldiers suffering from illnesses like malaria. Comparing the 3rd Field Hospital to the 71st Evac, she remembers that living and working in Saigon was bizarre. She treated combat wounded Soldiers by day, and at night she could go out on a date to a five-star restaurant. The 71st Evac, on the other hand, was definitely in a war zone, and after being rocketed a few times you just “don’t care.” Because of the mobility provided by helicopters, the nurses were seeing patients “we wouldn’t have seen in WWII” because they would have died prior to getting to the hospitals. In Vietnam, however, helicopters could whisk wounded Soldiers off the battlefield and get them to quality care quickly, many of them traumatically wounded. Edie describes how tough it was either patching Soldiers up enough to return them to the fight or sending them to higher level care in Japan or the States, and never seeing them fully recover. She recalls one who sent her a letter from Walter Reed to update her on his condition. Her most vivid memory of Vietnam is the teamwork. The teamwork in an intensive care unit is incredible and the corpsmen and medics really cared about their patients. She describes one Soldier she remembers vividly, “the one who haunted me.” He was 19 years old with a bad abdominal wound. She remembers reading a letter to him from his mother that said, “We are so proud of you, son.” Three days later he died, and Edie remembers thinking, “You want someone to be accountable for their deaths.” Off duty, while some people drank a lot, she preferred to chat, sleep, or read. She was able to visit Hong Kong and Thailand on R&R. When she returned to the United States in July 1969, she threw her uniform in the trash because she had been warned not to wear a uniform in San Francisco. She was then assigned to Madigan Army Hospital at Ft. Lewis, Washington, and she remembers nobody asking her about Vietnam. After leaving the Army, she continued to work as an operating room nurse and an emergency room nurse. “In an ER, everything makes sense,” but in Vietnam “nothing makes sense,” where perfectly healthy young guys were missing limbs or had terrible wounds. In civilian hospitals, though, she found that she was not trusted or allowed to do the things she knew she could do based on her Vietnam War experience. Overall, she preferred OR work because “you are there to protect the patient.” She did not really talk about her wartime experience until Diane Carlson Evans asked her to help with the Vietnam Women’s Memorial Project in the early 80s, and Edie’s response initially was, “I can’t think about it.” Later, she helped, recalling “Diane made me think about being proud” of her wartime service. She notes, “The Women’s Memorial saved my life” because it was the first time she was proud to be an Army nurse. Having the Women’s Memorial has allowed her to grieve. Since the dedication of the Women’s Memorial on the National Mall, she has spoken to different Veterans’ organizations or at reunions. She recalls speaking when a Huey was donated to the Smithsonian. Hearing the sound of the helicopter “got to me,” and it is what she spoke about. She also describes visiting Walter Reed with the 1st Cav Association to visit the wounded from Iraq and Afghanistan. Reflecting on the treatment Vietnam Vets received after the war, Edie says, “I understood why [they] went off the grid,” because the trust was gone. Reflecting on her service in Vietnam, she states it was “a pivotal time in my life,” and “I would do it again in a minute.”