Photo Courtesy of The Washington Post
Caption Reads: "The hospital ship USS Repose in 1966; and Navy nurses Pat Hildebrand, left, and Bobbie Grace, who helped treat 9,000 casualties during their year stationed off Vietnam."
For Two Navy Nurses, a Memorial to a Time They Won't Forget
Photo Courtesy of The Washington Post
Caption Reads: "The hospital ship USS Repose in 1966; and Navy nurses Pat Hildebrand, left, and Bobbie Grace, who helped treat 9,000 casualties during their year stationed off Vietnam."
WASHINGTON POST - November 11, 1993
By Megan Rosenfeld
Washington Post Staff Writer - Nov 11, 1993
Their memories of getting to the ship are such a collage of foreign sounds and sights that none stands out: spending the night before in a crazy hotel in Da Nang, looking down from their window at sandbags and soldiers below, and hearing a nightclub singer across the street warbling "Besame Mucho." Being loaded into the back of a pickup truck the next day in their dress Navy uniforms with the slim skirts and proper stockings for a ride to Dong Ha, behind the demilitarized zone. Putting on flak jackets and helmets, getting into a helicopter, that loud whup-whup as it rose, and seeing smoke below. And knowing that some of those fighting in the smoke would soon be under their care on the USS Repose.
It was October 1966. Pat Hildebrand and Bobbie Grace had been Navy nurses for a couple of years. They were 23 and 24, and had never been out of the United States before. They were excited, anxious, ready for adventure--and they got it.
For the next year, Hildebrand and Grace hardly left the 550-foot ship. They lived in a three-bunk metal room with another nurse, and spent their days and nights tending to the sick and wounded and dying, helping to amputate limbs, administering antibiotics and morphine, getting the fluids started fast through the IV. At night there were movies, old tearjerkers like "Back Street" and John Wayne war films. They wore their sharp white uniforms every day (and this was before either slacks or pantyhose made life easier), wrote letters and made tapes to send home, worked harder than they ever had. And they loved it. It was awful that so many boys were getting wounded, but they were helping, patching them up and sometimes saving their lives. Even though once they had some time and distance to think about it, the conflict seemed problematic, they believed in their patriotic duty and the U.S. Navy. They still do.
Hildebrand, who is now an artist in Carlsbad, Calif., and Grace, who retired from the Navy two years ago after a 27-year career and bought a house in Annapolis, will be on the Mall today for the dedication of the Vietnam Women's Memorial. They will march with others behind a Navy nurse banner in this morning's parade, catch up with old friends, and end the day at the 7 p.m. candlelight vigil.
It is their day. They haven't had one before. Nor did the women who have served in every war since the one between the states. Bobbie Grace and Pat Hildebrand will spiritually hold hands with those who went before, and honor them as they are being honored today. The ceremonies will salute them and the 11,000 other women who went to Vietnam during the nine long years of war.
Eight of them died--a small fraction of the 58,000 names inscribed on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall. All told, 265,000 women served in the military during the war--receiving the wounded in the Philippines, in Germany, in military hospitals all over the United States. There were air traffic controllers, a few doctors, communications specialists and clerks. Nonmilitary women served too--workers from the Red Cross, the Catholic Relief Service, the USO, the American Friends Service Committee and journalists. Twenty of these civilians died.
The women had a different war than did the 9.5 million men who were in service during the Vietnam War years. And Navy nurses like Grace and Hildebrand had a cleaner, more controlled war than Army nurses who were out in the field, operating in improvised hospitals and living with mud and heat and bombs. The hospital ship was air-conditioned, and had showers and washing machines, and three meals a day on tablecloths. You couldn't get off it, however--except for a few days' R&R in Hong Kong--you couldn't take a walk, or be alone, and the ship was always in motion. When you did leave, your body felt as though it was still moving, the blood sloshing back and forth. But it was different than living in a tent.
When they returned to the United States, some nurses (90 percent of the military women were nurses) met hostility, and some suffered from what came to be called Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. About 2,500 of the 265,000 women have sought treatment through traceable channels.
Most carried on with their lives, their careers, remembering Vietnam as a high, intense point in their lives, when all their skills and endurance were tested to the max.
"It was unique," said Grace. "It was such an extreme of everything. It called for the best of you or the worst of you. There was so much negative about it, but so much positive. The teamwork and camaraderie were unlike anything I have experienced since. It was trying and difficult, and at times I was angry, frustrated, weary and scared. At first it was like watching a horrible automobile accident. And then it was just: Do it."
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Hildebrand and Grace met at the Naval Hospital at St. Albans, N.Y., in Queens. Grace had joined the Navy after nursing school (St. Agnes Hospital in Baltimore) because she had been impressed by the Navy recruiter who came to talk to her class.
"I just loved that uniform," she said this week, laughing. She also loves boats, and the water, and she loved the marching they had to learn during basic training. Even today her license plate says NAVY.
For Hildebrand it was different. She went through nursing school (Mount St. Joseph in Cincinnati) on a Navy program and owed a few years of service. When it came to volunteering for Vietnam, they both thought: American boys are getting hurt, we are military nurses, we should go.
"I didn't know a thing about the war," Hildebrand said. "We had just started getting wounded medevacked back to St. Albans, but this was 1965."
Their families--Grace's father worked for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, Hildebrand's for General Motors in Detroit, and their mothers were homemakers--were proud to see them go, if a little anxious.
"I remember I had my orders, and Pat didn't," said Grace. "She had come to visit me in Baltimore before I left and we'd gone out shopping. When we got back my mother was standing there and said our supervisor from St. Albans had just called to say that Pat's orders had come through. My mother had tears in her eyes. But we were thrilled!"
They had no orientation or training, were told only to bring "enough for a year," which meant 15 uniforms and 12 bottles of white shoe polish and as many pairs of white hose as they could pack.
Once the helicopter landed on the ship, they had a few hours to get oriented and then reported to triage. And it began.
In triage, cases were assigned a priority, so that "we could do the greatest good for the greatest number." The categories were these: Immediate, which meant he could be saved; Delayed, which meant he could get to the operating room later; Minimal, for some who was going to be fine; Expectant, for a soldier who was likely to die.
These categories ruled their lives, especially when the helicopters were coming in one right after another, load after load of shot-up boys. They'd know how bad things were going to be by the number of litters, the ones who couldn't walk.
"The first thing you did was get fluids into 'em, hook up an IV," said Grace. "The first things you looked for was blood loss and the establishment of an airway. You did a quick typing for blood, and if you couldn't do that you gave them the universal. We used a lot of blood--an average of 40 to 50 units where normally it might be four or five."
They are sitting in the neat den of Grace's suburban Annapolis home, which is decorated with pictures of ships and Navy souvenirs, including a small glass case containing her stripes and medals and lieutenant shoulder boards. Grace is tall and lean, a jogger with fine-boned features and short graying hair. Hildebrand's hair is curly and a little disheveled; she wears a brightly patterned shirt over her slacks.
Grace consults a scrapbook in which she has collected information about the USS Repose. There were 22 doctors on board, 29 nurses and 256 medics. Two Red Cross volunteers helped the patients, and two medical service corps officers did administrative work There were 500 beds, in 10 wards, and when those were full another 250 beds could be set up on the covered weather deck outside, which they often were. During their year, 9,000 casualties passed through their hands; 2,000 were non-combat problems. About 100 died on the ship.
They treated Vietnamese, some of them children, in a "humanitarian ward." Grace has a photograph of a sweet-looking child sitting on her lap. He'd come aboard for heart surgery. But it didn't help; the little boy died.
The nurses never knew how many soldiers might have died later, either after they had been patched up and sent back into combat, or after being sent home. A soldier could stay on board for only two months--after that he was either better or was shipped back to the United States for further treatment.
"You did have a little bit of everything," said Hildebrand. "Surgery, transfusions, malaria, appendixes. There were cases of sprained fingers--I guess you'd call it trigger finger. Psychiatric. Sometimes we'd get fellas who needed a meal and an ice cream cone."
"Most of our patients were Marines," said Grace. "And they wanted to get back [to the war] as soon as they could. I have never had such compliant patients. There was no such thing as malingerers."
They did a lot of amputations. And there was a lot of blood. "It was not running down our arms or anything," Grace said. "Nothing like what the Army nurses talk about. I guess in the operating rooms we'd see them standing in blood. You saw a lot of hemorrhage, but not spilling onto the deck. It saturated everything, the green canvas of the litters. But not bucketfuls."
She remembers the first Expectant she saw. He looked fine--not a mark on him. There was just a small hole in his uniform, at his heart. She didn't understand why he'd been classified that way. Then she turned him over and learned about exploding bullets.
In August 1967, the ship was summoned full-speed to help the USS Forrestal. "Bombs from our own planes on deck had dropped into berth areas," recalled Grace. "We turned off all our power to get up there as fast as we could. It was 2 a.m. when we got there, and took on 87 bodies. Just the green body bags. I can smell it to this day, the burn smell. The franticness to get them out. We took on some burn cases, and we brought them all back to Da Nang. I remember watching them offload those body bags into refrigerator trucks. That was the worst experience."
But if the work was unending, and repetitious and bloody, the rewards were great. "These guys literally thought we were angels of mercy," said Hildebrand, smiling at the thought. "They'd come out of anesthesia, and be tying there in clean white sheets and look up and probably hadn't seen an American woman for months. And there we were in our white uniforms. They really did say they thought they'd died and gone to Heaven!"
Grace has a few letters that she has saved these 26 years. One came with a black-and-white snapshot, the face in shadow so the young GI is virtually indistinguishable from so many others.
"Just to let you know that you were something special, not just a nurse on the Repose," it says. "I wish you all the luck in the world. They just don't come any better than you. Take care. May God Bless. Frank. "
There are three others, from Reo L. Hoffman, 2286648, and his mother. Hoffman had been shot in the face and arm, and was sent home.
"Everyone has adjusted to my face and lack of normal vision except with the possibility of the little woman of my life," he wrote in May 1967. "I think she is scared that I may be a freak or something. [My face] reminds me of an owl sitting on top of a packrat."
"I want to say 'thank you' for being so kind to him," his mother wrote from Manhattan, Kan. "We thought of you often ... even though we have never met."
Hoffman said that if Grace ever got near Manhattan, he would like to take her out to dinner -- and he wouldn't wear his uniform so she wouldn't be embarrassed to be seen with a soldier during the years of anti-war sentiment.
"I'd have been proud to have dinner with him," she said. "Especially in his uniform."
But she never did get to Manhattan, Kan.
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When Grace and Hildebrand came home, nobody asked them what the war was like. But since both remained in the service--Grace a committed lifer, Hildebrand uncommitted but interested in her next assignment in San Diego--they had each other and fellow nurses to talk to, to understand and to support. Neither felt the need for counseling as a result.
"It seems like Army had the brunt of it in terms of where they were," said Grace. I talked to one who bought a house near a railroad track when she came back, and the sound of it reminded her of gunfire and she couldn't sleep. Whenever I hear a helicopter the first thing I think of is Flight Quarters Stand By. But I don't remember it with a cringe. More with a smile."
