Huey: Appreciating the underappreciated on Memorial Day

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Originally called Decoration Day, Memorial Day is a federal holiday that was created to honor military personnel who died while serving in The U.S. Armed Forces. Observed on the last Monday in May, it’s the unofficial beginning of summer and a time to place American flags atop graves of soldiers who were killed in action.

This is the story of one Captain Janet Reichert RN who joined the army so she could serve our boys in the struggle against communism, so she volunteered for Vietnam and served in the 18th MASH unit at Pleiku. Janet gave a year of her life to those soldiers.

When the inclined ramp on that C-130 cargo plane opened at Tan Son Nhut Air Base, Janet could barely breathe when she got her first taste of a Vietnamese summer. The heat was stifling. She stumbledg across the boiling-hot tarmac toward the building on the grassy hill and assumed it would be cooler inside, but it was hotter than the outside.

There was never a dull moment at Tan Son Nhut, daily strafing, short supplies, and sapper attacks. Relief came when she was shipped out to the 18th MASH at Pleiku, or so she thought. It was like jumping from the frying pan into the fire, with patients on every table, blood on the floor and even on the ceiling fans, while geckos watched from the walls and wounded soldiers were hauled in every minute.

After the patients were triaged, nurses worked on men with exposed intestines as well as mutilated faces and missing limbs. Incoming choppers were more like deathtraps than flying machines, and nurses just in from the world were often the last thing those soldiers ever saw.

Just after evening chow, a young corporal was rolled in with a glut of blood-soaked bandages on his chest, but Janet knew right away that his wounds were too severe for him to survive. Surgeons never even approached him. She held his hand for a moment until he slipped away into the darkness, then she kissed him on the forehead and pulled the wool olive-drab blanket up over his face.

Janet doubted she could mentally survive the Vietnam experience, but she did. Finally back home a year later, those shameless hippies at the airport treated returning nurses like they were murderers, even though they saved lives rather than took them, calming soldiers who were in so much pain they were screaming for their mothers.

Trying to get over her Vietnam experience was like clawing her way through a dark tunnel all alone with no sight or sound, but what made it worse was that she had nobody to tell her troubles to because everybody thought she was fine by the way she acted. Nobody thought to ask how she felt.

Janet’s psyche abruptly paused with a thoughtful sorrow when she heard about The Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The UAB graduate wondered if she had comforted any of the guys who were chiseled into the black marble wall, especially after a Vietnam veteran told her that those tender nurses at Pleiku were the lifeblood of dying soldiers. Wounded men felt better knowing there was a woman around, and they couldn’t even explain why.

The Army captain was so full of anger because she had never shed a tear over her time in that decaying Asian pit of putrefaction, and until someone explained it to her she hadn’t realized that her mere presence was all a wounded soldier needed sometimes. It wasn’t always for her medical abilities, but simply because she was a woman.

Out of all those women who’ve felt even a twinge of national pride, many stepped up to do what they could, and the ones who served in Vietnam finally got something that recognized their efforts, The Vietnam Women’s Memorial. They needed it badly too, because most people here at home didn’t even know there WERE American women in Vietnam.

In the end, The Vietnam War was a total waste of resources, costing so many American lives then seeing the very thing the war was trying to prevent, happen anyway. With that, it’s easy to understand the bitterness of Vietnam veterans. Time heals all wounds though, but the wounds contracted during that useless war have continued to fester for decades, and won’t heal anytime soon. Janet died on her 80th birthday in June of 2020.