slatten49 Loc: Lake Whitney, Texas

I will be posting, for a few days, as a tribute to all military field medical personnel, a series of stories by a Vietnam combat nurse, Ann Watts. All of these stories are taken from VVA Veteran's Magazine...VVA representing Vietnam Veterans of America.
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At home in Wales, in September, 1967, I answered an ad in 'Nursing Time':

"Save the Children fund requires more nurses for their expansion programme of a rehabilitation and training centre for widows and orphans in Qui Nhon, South Vietnam."

I would serve two tours in Vietnam: one year in Qui Nhon, another in Kontum. Nothing prepared me for coming face to face with the ghastly evidence of what war does to a civilian population. The Centre housed fifty children. Of these 70 percent were war wounded; the remainder were ill with tropical disease and chronic medical conditions.

Even as a nurse who'd witnessed the tragic deformities caused by thalidomide and had worked with severely ill children and babies, my introduction to such cruel and avaoidable suffering was shocking and painful.

Yet Ken Shapiro, a correspondent for Stars and Stripes, described the SCF Centre as "the Oasis." It was indeed a refuge, a place of peace and calm, with two objectives: to provide nursing and convalescent care for children, thus, relieving the hard-pressed local hospitals and orphanages, and to provide child care and occasional training for young widows.

American personnel were drawn to the Oasis. First the doctors, who generously gave their time. Then others came by to be with the kids. Our living conditions...simple but adequate...were enhanced by service members "re-distributing Army goods." They installed a generator, an icebox, and a pump for the well. Others brought food and medicine.

A group of Seabees made little desks for our schoolroom, built a concrete paddling pool, and landscaped the garden, surrounding it with a white picket fence draped with scarlet bougainvillea. All in the two days their ship was in port.

I sometimes wondered how a war could be fought with well-stocked bars, jukeboxes, candy and the latest movies. It always seemed so at odds with the reality of the situation. The Americans seemed to take the United States with them where ever they went, but my mixed feelings were made more so by their tremendous generosity from which I and my colleagues at the Children's Centre often benefited.

PoppaGringo Loc: Muslim City, Mexifornia, B.R.

Very, emotionally, moving.