Back in the World War Wounds Surfacing for Many Nurses
Richmond Times-Dispatch
BETTY BOOKER
Novenber 10, 2000
Soldiers with war injuries so horrific that even trained nurses could barely stand it poured into the 24th Army evac hospital at Long Binh, Vietnam, where Martha Mooney Colvin was stationed.
The major with both eyes blown away. The 18-year-old soldier who died from a heroin overdose as she held his hand. The 17-year-old with one eye blown out who told his stateside mother on the phone that he was all right as tears poured out of his good eye.
The place and the situation were a living hell where, Colvin says, nurses "fought to pour the will to live into every person in our care."
On Saturday, the nation will observe Veterans Day to commemorate nurses and others who have served in the U.S. armed forces.
It turns out that Colvin, and perhaps a third of the estimated 8,000 women who served in Vietnam, could stand it while they were on duty but not forever.
Thirty years later, the terrors of Vietnam and the traumas of these patients are surfacing to haunt nurses like Colvin.
So many male and female Vietnam veterans are affected that these painful memories now have a name: post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.
Its crippling effects sometimes don't arise until midlife, a life stage when most people review their lives to lay the groundwork for the second half of life.
Many, like Colvin, developed productive postwar lives, sometimes with little inkling that war would continue its destructive work on the psyche.
"You don't expect old stuff to reassert itself again when you're my age, 53. It hits you out of the clear blue.
"But then, why not? PTSD is a normal reaction to an abnormal situation," Colvin says.
"It was very hard for me to accept that I had it. I am a competent person. A good nurse. A proud veteran proud to have served my country. A strong woman from a long line of strong women. How could this happen to me?"
She leans back in a chair on her suburban Richmond deck, with its barbecue grill and dining table for entertaining family and guests. Gold and copper leaves spiral lazily in the afternoon sunlight.
The scene is pure American, but the tale she tells is chilling.
Colvin was just 22 when she went into the Army in 1969. She was a recent graduate of the Medical College of Virginia School of Nursing with student loans to repay. First, basic training and a stint in Fort Knox, Ky., then she was flown to Vietnam.
"We were really young and naive," she says. "There were over 200 girls, and we had no clue." Colvin's luggage contained her wig and a hairpiece so her hair would always look good.
"It never dawned on me where I was going until I looked out of the plane window and I thought, `What's happening to me? Oh, my goodness, I'm in the middle of a war.'
"It was an experience - and a place - that was unreal. Many in Vietnam used to talk about 'going back to the world' because where we were was surreal."
She and colleagues in the hospital took care of injured and diseased soldiers, Australians, civilians, children and Viet Cong and North Vietnamese prisoners of war.
Five languages were spoken at one time: "It didn't take long to learn how to say cough, go to the bathroom, stop, go, eat, wake up, go to sleep."
Tropical illness such as malaria and black water fever caused fevers to soar to 106 degrees and urine to turn black.
Vietnamese mothers and fathers camped under their children's narrow hospital cots, leaving just enough room to walk between beds. Sometimes hospital personnel were ordered to wear helmets and flak jackets, in the event an enemy soldier entered with bombs strapped to his body.
"You were waiting, but your mind couldn't let you think about that. You had to take care of your patients and let them know you were not the least bit frightened because their welfare was more important above anything. You had to pretend that nothing was wrong and that you weren't afraid.
"You were really tired all the time, and things were tense all the time. You worked 12 hours a day, six days a week. You were doing nursing you never dreamed you'd be doing, that you'd never been trained to do."
Then she transferred to an intensive post-operative surgical unit - "that was the most traumatic for me."
"You buried your feelings and concentrated on the work." But sometimes, that didn't work, like the time "three nurses stood with tears flowing" in front of a 35-year-old major who had both eyes blown out and massive injuries to his chest, arms and legs.
"He couldn't see us cry.
"Nurses did anything you could to help them want to live or to bring them back to life or to die surrounded by someone who cared for them. It took a whole lot out of you, and you didn't have much, except humor and close bonds with other nurses, the closeness with co- workers you never experience back here in this world."
Patients, injured beyond belief, came and went, like the young man with "huge dark eyes and massive chest injuries who was so terrified of what he was going through."
"He was air-evaced back to the States. He had a big grin on his face when he left, and you felt so good that you gave him the will to live. But he went home and his fiancee left him and his family rejected him, and in a month he was dead. This is what the war did to people, and what people did when we got back.
"As a nurse, I came back confident and competent, but I stepped back into a world where nurses weren't allowed to do much. It was extremely frustrating."
Colvin returned to Richmond and married the Rev. James Colvin, pastor of Leigh Street Baptist Church, and continued her career as a registered nurse. They have three adult children, and a granddaughter.
They were missionaries in Japan for eight years.
But when the family returned here in 1983 and she went back into surgical nursing, "I began to realize something was happening to me. I would become very panicked, fearful. It was almost like I was being transported back to Vietnam."
She worked in veterans' nursing, psychiatric nursing, school nursing, psychiatric nurse management, home health nursing.
The brave front worked until she reached age 49, when nightmares, flashbacks and indecisiveness became so overwhelming she was hospitalized twice.
"Most of the time was spent denying that there was anything wrong with me. That's true of a lot of nurses with PTSD, to hide what's going on inside yourself. You want to believe you're stronger than this, but it has nothing to do with strength or weakness. We lived a year, in a formative year of our life, in a very abnormal situation.
"I remembered trying to save a soldier, who had a raw burned chest, with CPR, my hands sliding on his raw flesh. I couldn't save him no matter what I did. At 2 o'clock in the morning, I was lying in bed in Richmond, Virginia, and I had the same sensations, the feeling of his raw flesh on my hands, and I couldn't wash it off.
"Sometimes you can feel like you're back in the middle of things, and it's overwhelming. A sadness and loneliness will cover you like a cloud.
"You feel immobilized emotionally, and sometimes physically, where you just want to retreat. But you work hard not to let anybody know too much about that. What are you going to do at 2 or 3 in the morning? Call somebody and say, `Gee, I feel like I'm touching raw flesh?' You don't do that; you deal with it.
"I hear a helicopter, and this intense weariness and sadness would come over me because I think more patients, more sadness, more sickness. You learn skills to reorient yourself: No, that's just a weather helicopter. I'm here. This is now. What is around me that is real?"
She ended her nursing career Nov. 29, 1996.
"That was an extremely difficult thing to do. I was close to the nurses I worked with; we're still tight today. My supervisors never quite knew; I maintained very well. But I would come home and become immobile in bed and do nothing but wait to have to go to work the next day."
Retiring helped: "It took the stress of being faced every day with triggers to remind me."
Colvin's life now is centered around home, family and church. She is first vice president of the Richmond chapter of Vietnam Veterans of America. And she uses the Internet to chat with other nurses, many of whom have PTSD in varying degrees.
She writes prose and poetry, and one of her selections was accepted for an upcoming book, "Chicken Soup for the Veteran's Soul."
"Many of the veteran nurses stay pretty much by themselves. They don't share a lot with other people.
"There's a melancholy chord that runs through your life and plays on your heartstrings at times with much intensity.
"Sometimes it's not there: when I clothe my granddaughter, when all my kids are back home and I'm cooking and laughing with them.
"But the chord helps you look at life much more intensely. I look at life in fiery neon colors; James looks at life in pastels. James and I deal with that, because my reactions are much stronger, much quicker, much more intense.
"I don't live a lot of life in the middle because life is precious. Life is sacred, and it can be taken away from you tonight, tomorrow, in the next minute.
"I have come to realize that PTSD is not a weakness, but a wounded spirit. Each time I tell about what we went through, it helps to heal a little bit more.
"If someone listens with a listening heart."
AFTERSHOCKS
Exposure to stressful, traumatic or life-threatening events can result in post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.
* Anxiety: General anxiety, depression, sleep problems, memory difficulties, difficulty concentrating or finishing tasks, survivor's guilt.
* Nightmares: Bad dreams, night terrors, insomnia and interrupted sleep.
* Flashbacks: Flashbacks that make veterans feel as if the events were happening again.
* Emotions: Feeling very emotional when reminded of the event, sometimes with physical sensations such as sweating, feeling faint or racing heart.
* Memory: Having problems remembering important parts of the event. Excessive alertness and a highly sharpened startle reaction, for example, instinctively dropping to the ground when a car backfires.
* Aches: Headaches, gastrointestinal problems, immune system problems, dizziness, chest pain, weight gain or loss, chronic pain, fatigue, alcoholism and drug abuse, panic attacks and other discomforts, often treated without doctors or patients being aware problems are related to PTSD.
* Avoidance: Avoiding thoughts, conversations, people, places or activities that remind of the event.
* Numbness: Emotional numbness - less interest in or involvement with activities or people formerly enjoyed.
Sources: American Psychiatric Association, National Center for PTSD
FIRST AID
National Center for PTSD, Web site: www.ncptsd.org; (802) 296- 5132.
McGuire Veterans Affairs Medical Center, 1201 Broad Rock Road, Richmond, VA 23225; (804) 675-5000.
Vietnam Veterans Outreach Center, 4902 Fitzhugh Ave., (804) 353- 8958.
Vietnam Veterans of America, Central Virginia chapter 78, P.O. Box 708, Sandston, VA 23150-0708. (804) 226-6686.
"Vietnam: Fresh, Positive Insights for All Who Suffered Loss in the Vietnam War," by Joe Hartt and Barney Visser. Premiere Publishing, P.O. Box 50821, Indianapolis, IN 46250
"Home Before Morning: The Story of an Army Nurse in Vietnam" and "Visions of War, Dreams of Peace: Writings of Women in the Vietnam," by Lynda Van Devanter.
"A Piece of My Heart: The Stories of 26 American Women Who Served in Vietnam Diversity," by Keith Walker.
"American Daughter Gone to War: On the Front Lines With an Army Nurse in Vietnam," by Winnie Smith.
"Shrapnel in the Heart," by Laura Palmer.
"The Road Home," by Ellen Emerson White.
"Women at War: The Story of Fifty Military Nurses Who Served in Vietnam," by Elizabeth M. Norman.
Dusty's Poetry Page, Vietnam nurse veterans' Web site, www.illyria.com/dustyhp.html
Vietnam Women's Veterans, Internet address: www.spencergroup.net/ vwv/
Virginia Department of Veterans Affairs, (804) 786-2261.
Vietnam Veterans of America, (804) 358-8287.
Vietnam Women's Memorial Project Inc., 22001 S St., NW, Suite 302 Washington, DC 20009
American Psychiatric Asso ciation: Internet address: www.psych.org
(C) 2000 Richmond Times-Dispatch via Bell&Howell Information and Learning Company; All Rights Reserved.
This news story is not produced by the American Psychological Association and does not necessarily represent the opinions of the association.