Bringing It All Back Home (13 page)

Back then, most everybody went to three-year-diploma hospital schools of nursing. I'm not sure there are any more. They were very inexpensive, so if you came from a lower-middle-class family like I did, where there was not a lot of money, it was a very economical way to get a good education.

In retrospect her choice was strangely appropriate. During World War II, the War Department had taken over Pilgrim State and expanded the facilities. At one point it was so large that its land area actually touched on four municipalities: Huntington, Babylon, Smithtown, and Islip. Part of the facility was renamed Mason General Hospital and was used to treat combat-traumatized soldiers returning from World War II. John Huston took a film crew to the hospital and documented its activities in a movie titled
Let There Be Light
, which is about how the War Department treated, with as much compassion as psychiatry had to offer at the time, the psychiatric casualties of World War II.

At that time “combat fatigue” was a recognized psychological problem associated with exposure to military combat. During the Korean War, the American Psychiatric Association published the first edition of its
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual
(
DSM-I
), which contained an entry for “gross stress reaction.” This was something that could occur to soldiers in combat—a “temporary condition produced by extreme environmental stress,” according to the sociologist Wilbur Scott.
2
But in 1968, when
DSM-II
was published, “gross stress reaction” was omitted. It took an alliance of psychiatrists and Vietnam veterans until 1980 to get a replacement diagnosis inserted into the manual. In the end, that diagnosis would become known as post-traumatic stress disorder, a condition that Furey would, to some degree, suffer from.

For Furey, a mystique surrounded the role of nurse and it made her feel important.

I remember after your freshman year you got to put on this white apron. We wore striped dresses, and then these really starched aprons. You had to learn how to sit down with them. I can just remember feeling really special when all that happened. It instilled in you a level of pride.

Furey did well in nursing school, taking a leadership role there. At the time, the military began actively recruiting Army nurses. Furey finished her nursing education while resisting recruiters' offers to pay tuition and a stipend. Instead, to earn money, she worked at several part-time jobs, including one in the hospital kitchen. After graduation in 1967, as the “big” war in Vietnam was under way, Furey continued to work at Pilgrim State but began to itch for a change. She considered a possible move to Manhattan, among other ideas.

There are so many factors that are going on in your head when you make the decision [to join]. One of the things I wanted to do was to get away from Long Island and see the world and have some adventures. I had never been away from home in my life.

There were other motivations. The Army had begun placing advertisements in
The American Journal of Nursing
, and they were a powerful draw. They suggested that Army nursing could fulfill her desire for a satisfying professional career, permit her to get out of Long Island and see other parts of the world, and at the same time act on her patriotic impulses. She still remembers one advertising slogan: “How to bandage a war: one soldier at a time.”
3
She began to think about it. Perhaps it was something she should do; she could give back to her country in the same fashion that her father had during World War II. She thought that because there were no sons eligible to go fight—her brother was still too young—she had a responsibility to take the family spot, so to speak, playing a role that no one else could fill.

There was the matter of American domestic politics.

It was really the peak of the war, and all these college students were demonstrating. I was very angry about all that. I guess all those kinds of events came together at one point for me, and then I just thought, “I should … I need to do this. I have a responsibility. I'm a nurse. I can help these people who are being injured.”

She also felt the impact of the political climate of the time. She recalls the anti-Communist sentiment that seemed to be in the air. Communism appeared “on the march,” threatening to take over the world, with Vietnam as one component of that larger struggle. And a part of her motivation was deeply personal.

There were questions about myself that I needed to have answered. I felt an obligation as a nurse and as a citizen, but also there was this other part of me that really needed to strike out on my own, to find out something about myself, to put myself to some sort of test. That was certainly a big part of it—that was for sure.

This combination of factors led her to a decision. On the way home from work one day she stopped by the Army recruiter's office in Patchogue. She remembers saying something like,
“I'm a nurse, and I want to go to Vietnam.” They said, “Sign here.”
Obviously, it was not quite that simple, but she remembers it happening very quickly. Naturally, the next step was to go home and tell her parents. She walked in and announced:
“I joined the Army, and I'm going to Vietnam.”

There had been no discussion. Her parents were stunned.

Meanwhile, her friend Lorraine, who had joined the Army right after graduating from nursing school, was back from Vietnam. Joan recalls people talking about her strange behavior. In fact, when Furey tried talking with her, Lorraine would not speak about Vietnam. Furey didn't understand her attitude. In time, she would understand all too well.

Furey entered the military at Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn in June 1968 and reported for basic training in July. After her basic training, the Army sent Furey to San Francisco for advanced nursing training. Furey remembers being fascinated with the 1960s counterculture. She remembers fondly the nightclubs, the music scene, and the dancing. It opened her up to a world that she had never known before, but she didn't falter in her commitment to the U.S. military and its servicemen.

I was one of these people who believed in the war. I believed that if our government was sending us to war, it was good. We needed to be there, and we were fighting for freedom and democracy. I bought it hook and line. I was brought up to buy it hook, line, and sinker. No question about it.

The hospital where she was assigned, Letterman General Hospital, at the Presidio, was a tertiary-care hospital. They received casualties who had been evacuated from Vietnam to Japan and then on to the United States. This was Furey's first exposure to war casualties. She worked first in the emergency room. The wounded came in from Japan in the middle of the night and would be triaged into the various units for the kind of care that they needed. She was then transferred to a post in the intensive care unit (ICU), which was where she really wanted to be. It was here that Furey began to see the reality of what combat could do to a human body. The hospital did a lot of reconstructive surgery. Furey cannot escape the memory of the youth of the patients, all of them amputees. She recalls the pain, both hers and theirs, and it is still apparent when she speaks about it.

Of course, these were young men, still kids in many ways, and they sometimes played that way. Furey recalls how the soldiers would race down the long halls in their wheelchairs, up and down ramps, knocking people over, riotous, upbeat, and full of laughter.

One memory stands out as she recalls seeing a handsome young soldier.

I was twenty-one. He was standing sideways, just kind of staring out. The hospital was right near the ocean, right underneath the bridge. I was staring at him when he turned around and looked in my direction, and I saw that the whole right side of his face was just scarred. And gone away. Literally, the right side of his face had been blown away.

Ultimately, Furey would take care of this man in the intensive care unit as doctors tried to graft skin and attempted to rebuild his face. Furey estimates that he may have had as many as seventeen or eighteen operations.

In seeing the guys with amputations and the other kinds of injuries, it only made me want to go more. I wanted to take care of them, I wanted to help them. I got to Letterman in August of '68, and by November '68 I went and volunteered to go to Vietnam. I just wanted to go. That's why I joined the Army. I didn't join the Army for any other reason. I joined the Army to go to Vietnam … I really wanted to go to the war zone, very honestly. I wanted to help take care of these soldiers. I wanted to do my part. By virtue of my own family history, with my father having been in World War II, I felt I had some kind of obligation to serve in a war. I wasn't in the Army to make it a career. Then I was afraid, when they started sending people to Korea from our hospital, that if I waited, I could end up in Korea, and that's not what I was there for.

She came home for Christmas in 1968 and told her parents that she had orders for Vietnam with a January departure. Her mother cried. She dreaded worrying about a loved one away at war again. Furey's father became a little teary-eyed but was very proud. Of course, they both feared for her safety. But Furey had set her course. She returned to Letterman, packed her belongings, and took the long flight to Vietnam. She remembers the trip clearly. Traveling on Flying Tiger Line, a contractor taking American passengers to Vietnam, she recalls being the only woman on the aircraft filled with 140 men on a trip into the unknown.

I was sitting in a row with a pilot. Of course, you understand, the only other time in my life I had flown was when I flew back to New York from San Francisco on R&R. Back then, people didn't fly like they fly today. I had been on a plane once in my life. Now I was on a plane. I was going to be on this plane for twenty-four hours. And the last people you want to be on a plane with is a bunch of pilots because they tell you all these stories about flying. Oh my God. I was very scared, anxious, and a nervous wreck.

Furey recalls writing a letter home to her mother on that plane ride, in an attempt to explain her decision. She told her mother that the antiwar demonstrations upset her and that she felt, as an American citizen and as a nurse, that she had to take some sort of stand. To her, she could best demonstrate her patriotism by going to Vietnam, though she says:
I'm sure I didn't use that word
.

She also recalls telling her mother that the journey to Vietnam represented an experience that would
help me learn things about myself that I needed to learn. I thought it would be a personal challenge. I felt it was important that I put myself in a situation where I don't have all the so-called luxuries that surround us in this country.

At the remove of forty years she views this as a
typical twenty-one-year-old statement.

She went with a noble intention but found herself unprepared for the reality of Vietnam. One of her first realizations that Vietnam would be far different from what she had imagined was the bus ride from the airport.

I remember getting on this bus. And all the windows were wired. They had screens and wires on them. This is Vietnam. It's hot, you know. I'm thinking, “Why is everything so weird?” So I'm writing, and again I'm the only woman on the bus, so I said to one of the guys, whispering, “Why do the windows have wires on them?” and he said, also whispering, “That's so when they throw grenades, they bounce off.” I went, “Oh, shit! I would have never thought of that!” It's like you start to realize what this really is. Until you've actually been there, I'm not sure anybody really gets what war is. It's a whole other experience
.

And then began a series of events that would slowly chip away at her naive patriotism. She remembers spending several days at the replacement center at Long Binh where all new arrivals took a class intended to teach the American mission in Vietnam. She recalls some of what they were told.

They spent a lot of time on the fact that one of our jobs was to “win the hearts and minds of the people.” This is, believe it or not, the first time that I heard this. I remember thinking that was kind of odd. I'm still stuck in the World War II mentality. These were our allies. We were there to help them. They want us here, so why are we trying to win hearts and minds? I remember being just so totally confused.

Furey confesses readily that at the time she was not a deeply politically aware person.
All I saw was what was on TV: people were getting injured and hurt, and we were fighting Communism, and that was enough for me.

Entering the war zone was undoubtedly exciting, although it produced anxiety as well. Furey remembers her first night in a trailer at Long Binh, before she received her assignment. As she listened to the rockets go off, she couldn't sleep. She asked a friend what was going on, and her friend reassured her that the rockets were probably outgoing rather than incoming.

On the advice of a friend who was an Army captain, Furey requested to be stationed at the Seventy-First Evacuation Hospital in Pleiku, in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. The captain explained how hot Vietnam was and told her that being stationed at Pleiku, located at the base of the mountains in the Central Highlands, would be cooler. Furey didn't know that Pleiku was an evacuation hospital in the middle of one of the most active combat zones in Vietnam.

For Furey, as with so many veterans, the trip to her new unit in the field remains an indelible experience. She recalls that rather than taking a scheduled flight, you went to the airfield and announced your destination. You would be placed on a list and then begin the wait for an aircraft going in your direction. At least that's the way it worked most of the time. But Furey was traveling with her friend the Army captain, whose first name was Barbie. Barbie's brother was a helicopter pilot, a distinction that enabled her to move among the helicopter pilots at the airbase and ask if anyone was headed to Pleiku. Apparently, someone was, and Barbie asked for a ride.