Susan O'Neill -- Vietnam Veteran and Army Nurse

When one reads a story about a military Veteran,  the expectation is that it is about a man who served .  I guess we always assume  to think that military indicates male.  As you read on you will see that in this piece, this is not the case.

I met Susan at a writer’s conference at the Vietnam Veterans Education Center in New Jersey about 8 years ago.  We were both Red Sox fans surrounded by Yankee fans during playoff time.  We were there to present our work and views to a group of teachers who were incorporating works by Veterans into their curriculum.  Susan and I have been corresponding ever since.  She is a published author and writes a blog, as well.  Her work can be found at the following sites: http://peacecorpsworldwide.org/off-the-matrix/ and http://susanoneill.us/.

I am honored to have Susan as my first female subject in my Veteran’s series and am very fortunate to know her.   Susan served about 9 miles from me in Vietnam at the same time I served, but I never knew her -- probably a good thing since she served as an operating room nurse in Vietnam.  Because of her, I was able to discover that the orphanage I used to visit in Vietnam was still in existence.  She was also a frequent visitor to the Orphanage at Kim Long in Hue, Vietnam, giving much needed medical assistance to the many children there.   As you read,  I hope that you see that my choice as first female to write about was a very good choice.  I hope that more female veterans will come forward and allow me to tell their stories.

Susan O’Neill was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana -- a good place, as a friend once said, to be from.

Susan joined the Army in 1967.  At that time, she was a student in nursing school -- Holy Cross School of Nursing. “My school divided us up after our first basic-study year in South Bend, Indiana and my group relocated to Anderson, a town downstate that was then pretty much owned by Delco Remy industries and the Church of God. It was a boring place for an adolescent, so when my blindly super-patriotic friend ask if I’d like to accompany her on her long drive up to Chicago, where she was planning to join the Army nurse corps, I agreed to go along, strictly for the ride and the city.”

Susan just wanted to get out of Anderson for a few days.  Generally, she had spent her spare time in coffeehouses with her guitar, protesting the war in Viet Nam. But her life would change forever after making this trip.  An army  recruiter caught her at a weak moment and wooed her  with promises of free money for a year before serving, as well as two years in exotic places like Japan, Germany, Hawaii, California, but not, Viet Nam, because there was a waiting list a mile long for nurses there . “All I’d have to do was two years active duty. “

Susan found “Delicious Irony” in telling her buddies in the Gene McCarthy campaign that she’d joined the Army.  “What can I say? I was young and dumb, desperate for travel, even more desperate for money.”   Susan recalls that she signed up and enjoyed a year’s stipend, with which she paid her parents back for her last year of school and bought clothes and lots of hamburgers at that brand new McDonalds in “downtown” Anderson.

“My family must have thought I was nuts to join up, since I was a woman and didn’t have to, and I was always quick to argue against our involvement in Viet Nam.”  Susan’s dad had been a Navy enlisted guy on a Tender ship in WWII, and claimed he never really saw combat. His brother had talked him into joining the reserves after—“Easy money”, Uncle Bill told him. Susan’s older brother had escaped the draft pool because of his severe seasonal allergies. Her three other siblings were too young to know where Viet Nam was. The whole family was ambivalent about the war. “I was the only one who actively opposed it. “, Susan tells.

Susan’s dad’s response to her announcement of enlistment, after a long pause was, “I guess you know what you’re doing.”

“A year later, on my first day at officer basic training in Ft. Sam Houston, I learned that the recruiter had lied about the Viet Nam “waiting list,” I ran down to the education office and begged for a course that would make me savvy enough to work in a war zone. “  Susan, after knowing that she would be sent to Vietnam signed on to become an Operating Room nurse.  “It was the best course I’ve taken for anything in my life. And when it was over, I was sent off to Viet Nam.” 

Susan arrived in Viet Nam in May of 1969 at the 22nd Surgical Hospital in Phu Bai. “It was a cluster of inflatable Quonsets not far from Hue, the smaller of two Army hospitals in the area. I learned a lot about trauma. “

“When my schedule permitted, I took a night Tai Kwan Do class on the post taught by a Korean black-belt who worked at Phil co Ford. He was stern, looked like Odd Job from Gold finger, and spoke little English. I was the only woman.” One day, Susan found a big bouquet of flowers waiting for her in the hospital’s officer’s club. It was from my Tai Kwon Do master. “I stopped taking Tai Kwon Do.”

One day, a corpsman invited Susan to visit an orphanage in Kim Long where he worked on his day off, which luckily corresponded with hers. He drove by jeep into Hue, and upon arriving, were mobbed by little rag-tag kids, most half-American. “They were shepherded by Vietnamese nuns from a Catholic missionary order. I helped feed babies during lunch hour, and then spent the rest of my day hugging kids. I think we all needed the contact. “

Susan recollects, “I was hooked; for the rest of my time in Phu Bai, I spent my days off in Kim Long. During the kids’ siesta time, I helped medically at the orphanage. I actually did scutwork--fed babies, mostly--and hugged kids and played with them. I think the kids and I both needed the contact. I wandered the nearby landmarks and took pictures with my old Instamatic. The royal burial grounds; the seven-story meditation tower, the Tet-ruined Citadel grounds—it was amazing, dark-side-of-the-moon foreign. “

Susan spent nearly three months in Phu Bai when they deflated the 22nd Surgical Unit.  She was reassigned to Chu Lai, the 27th Surgical Unit which, on the face of it, looked like a plush assignment, a short walk to the white beaches of the South China Sea. It was, again, the smaller and less busy of two hospitals; a high percentage of the patients were Vietnamese.

“Because business was relatively slack, the brass had time to make us lesser mortals suffer. I was hounded regularly by the head nurse because I took my combat boots off to dance in the officer’s club, and was sloppy about wearing my hat (I’ve always hated hats). She chastised me for not saluting—or for saluting in a desultory manner. “

Morale was low. Everybody resented the brass strack-ness. (strict adherence to military rules)  Some also resented the Vietnamese patients—they were there to tend GIs. “That attitude drove me nuts; I figured most of our clients were there either directly or indirectly because of us; we at least owed them care. “

Three months into her time at Chu Lai, Susan briefly dated an enlisted man and once again, found herself sitting across the desk from the head nurse, who was clearly incensed by her brazen “fraternizing.”

Susan explains, “In my defense, I was not trying to piss the woman off. I tried to stay as far away from her as possible and just do my job to the best of my ability. When I’d been in Phu Bai, I’d gotten along fine; we were there for a purpose, and the Mickey Mouse aspects of the military were pretty much checked at the door. But evasion wasn’t enough to save me from the Colonel’s wrath. I’ve refit the scene that ensued in that office that day as a piece of a story in my book, Don’t Mean Nothing.  It is a fiction riff on the year-and-a-month Susan spent as a combat operating room nurse in Viet Nam.   Another, later, story dealt with the long-term fallout from my scarred relationship with the head nurse. She gave me grief and pain, but ultimately she gave me great material.”

Susan managed to get transferred to the 12th Evacuation Unit at Cu Chi, a big, busy hospital near the southern capital, Saigon. “The medical and surgical teams were real teams, and they—we—were good. Very good. We all had a mission, and we worked hard to accomplish it, whether we cared for GIs or Vietnamese or—when Nixon made his 1970 foray into Cambodia—Cambodians and POWs.”  Nobody saluted; nobody cared who dated whom. It was a welcome change from the constant bureaucratic hot water she’d been treading in Chu Lai. The head nurse of the Operating Room was Colonel Darlene McLeod, who had been Susan’s instructor in the Fort Sam Houston Operating Room course.  Susan recalls that the Colonel was as good at running the suite at the 12th as she had been at teaching her and her classmates how to be both fine OR nurses and empathic human beings.

While at Cu Chi, Susan started dating the hospital’s registrar, a young Massachusetts man named Paul O’Neill.  She had spent seven months in Cu Chi—one extra, so she could get out of the Army when she got home, and not have to serve four more months in a stateside military hospital. “ It was hard to extend for even that brief time, but I knew I’d never make it in an atmosphere where, once again, I would subject to military ceremony, and would be demoted to a mere “helpmate” OR nurse, rather than the esteemed team member I’d become in a combat situation.”

Paul came home shortly after Susan did and showed up to surprise her at the door of my temporary room in Oakland’s Bachelor Officer Quarters (BOQ). Ever the romantic, he said, “Are you going to marry me, or what?” “I’d been away from him for a week, and missed him terribly—and never thought I’d see him again—so I accepted. “

“I didn’t realize when we flew off into the sunrise together that we weren’t alone: A couple weeks after we told his parents we were getting married, I received a lab slip in the mail from Oakland. “Congratulations!” was scrawled across the slip, a message from the doctor who’d done my exit physical; I’d told him I’d been feeling nauseated, and he’d requisitioned a pregnancy test “just in case,” although he saw no real evidence and, in fact, had asked me out to a party the night he examined me.”

“So…we had a full plate, Paul and I. We got married, settled in his hometown of Northampton, MA, and Kym was born at Westover AFB’s hospital.”

Paul and Susan took courses at the University of Massachusetts and were immediately thrown into campus life—which, in 1970 and ’71, included anti-war protests. She can’t say that they were discriminated against for their service; nobody at UMass knew what to do with a woman who’d served in Viet Nam. In fact, most people had no clue that there were women in Viet Nam.

“I was angry enough about what I’d seen in-country—the devastation, the disruption, all done with a lack of real purpose by an outside country that had no clue what the Vietnamese culture was about—that it might’ve even lent me some credibility as a protestor. So when the big march on Washington was scheduled in May of ’71, Paul and I were there. The first overnights we’d had without our baby, who was left in Paul’s mother’s capable hands.”

One thing Viet Nam did for Susan and Paul was to ignite a travel fever.  Another, was to make them want to travel to places where they may actually be useful.  “A place where the inhabitants might appreciate us, not want to kill us. “  So, the couple joined the Peace Corps family program when their daughter Kym was two, and all trundled off to Venezuela, where they stayed for a year. “ Ultimately, we weren’t very useful, but it was a great window into a different culture.”

They  returned, lived in Maine, and for 25 years, in Eastern Massachusetts. Paul started a company that brokers goods and services for hospitals.  Susan attained her BA in Journalism/Advertising, worked as a reporter, then a nurse again, a free-lancer and a musician/storyteller. Paul retired in 2008 and they moved south—to Brooklyn, NY.

“Through it all, we traveled the world. We took a trip back to Viet Nam in 1999: we rode bikes around Hanoi—something that would’ve defied imagination in 1969—then biked from Hue to Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City.”  In Hue, Susan reconnected with the Kim Long orphanage. She had been  writing her collection of short stories at the time, and had vowed that if it got published, “I would give some of the money I earned to the nuns to help care for their latest crop of children”  —many of whom had been affected y Agent Orange.

The book—Don’t Mean Nothing, based loosely on her military experience in Viet Nam—did indeed snag the dream of publication by a Big House, Ballantine/Random House. So, she became a periodic donor to the orphanage in Viet Nam.

“Unfortunately, the book came out a month after the attacks of 9/11/01, when patriotic spirit ran high and new wars were in the wings, and nobody wanted to read about that war we lost in the Bad Old Days. In spite of stellar reviews, it didn’t earn out its advance, so Ballantine refused to put it out in paperback. But UMass Press did.”

“Ballantine and UMass returned me my rights last year, and a small house in New Jersey, Serving House Books, recently put out a new version with two previously unpublished stories. They also put it out in Kindle, Nook and eBook formats, which was a big thrill for me; I now sell more books on Kindle than I do in paperback. Some History, Pop Culture and War Literature professors still use it in the classroom.”

Susan still writes fiction and non-fiction, maintains a humor blog on the Peace Corps writers’ site http://Peacecorpsworldwide.org, under the title “Off the Matrix,” and edit a literary magazine for “flash fiction”—stories with 500 words or less—called Vestal Review (http://vestalreview.net). “ I still do a lot of speaking about my piece of the war in colleges and high schools and historical societies—and, once, in the Library of Congress. I’ve worked as a volunteer for Hospice for 12 or 13 years.”

Susan is also a member of Veteran’s For Peace. “But I’ve only been to one of their protests, and I don’t plan to go to any more”. She found it profoundly disheartening: “ if protests seemed futile during the Viet Nam war, they actually are futile in the current confused, inflamed political atmosphere.”

“And that’s a pity, in my opinion. I thought, when I left Viet Nam, that “our war” would at least prove to be an object lesson over time—that we and our government would look back at “our war” and draw a lesson from it. That we would, in the light of what happened there, be careful to not start another war, driven by purely political motives, in a country whose culture we do not understand. That we would not send our children as so many pawns to destroy, and be destroyed by, the children of others for no reasons that are worth the loss of life. That we would not, once again, mask aggression as “patriotism.”

“Alas for us all: I was wrong”, Susan tells.