2 weeks Ago By Steve Liewer Omaha World-Herald
First Lt. Angie Naiman’s Vietnam War tour got off to a rough start the moment her military transport plane touched at Bien Hoa Air Base, on a runway pockmarked with craters from mortar shells. Angie Naiman, 81, was an Army nurse at the 24th Evacuation Hospital in Long Binh, South Vietnam, from 1970-71, during the Vietnam War.
Today she lives in Papillion with her sister. The 26-year-old Army nurse from Hebron, Nebraska, had never felt anything like the blast of heat that hit her as she stepped off the plane that night in July 1970. The rank, wet air smelled of smoke and jet fuel, the humidity quickly soaking the Class A dress uniform, including heels, that Naiman was required by the Army to wear.
Military police hustled her onto a bus with blackened windows that took her to a trailer where she would stay, alone. She could hear shelling in the distance. “It reminded me of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’” said Naiman, now 81 and living with her sister in Papillion.
“I crawled in my duffel bag with my fatigues on. I was scared.” Naiman served a year at the 24th Evacuation Hospital in Long Binh, a sprawling Army logistical hub 12 miles northeast of Saigon, before returning to Nebraska for a career as a public health nurse.
She felt a pang of recognition recently when she read about Lt. Frances “Frankie” McGrath, the fictional heroine of Kristin Hannah’s latest novel, “The Women,” about Vietnam War nurses. McGrath steps off the plane under circumstances nearly identical to Naiman’s, and familiar to most of the more than 7,000 women who served as nurses in Vietnam.
Nebraskans recall fun but dangerous duty as Red Cross ‘Donut Dollies’ in Vietnam “The first part, I really identified with,” Naiman said. “After that, I had to put it down. I said, ‘I don’t want to go through this again.
’” “The Women” has shone new light on a group of veterans who got little attention during and after war, and who spent years battling for recognition by the federal government and the public at large. To date, 3.7 million copies have been sold and the book has been at or near the top of the New York Times bestseller list since its release in February.
Omaha World-Herald “I’ve just been stunned and blown away by how this book has been embraced by big groups of people — by women veterans, by nurses, by men, by young people,” Hannah said in an interview from her home on Bainbridge Island, Washington. “(These women) are the real heroes. It’s so important to keep talking about them.
” The book traces McGrath’s transformation from a naive young woman barely out of nursing school who volunteers for Vietnam after her beloved brother is killed there in a helicopter crash into a highly competent trauma nurse — and, eventually, a disillusioned veteran betrayed by the indifferent nation that sent her to war. McGrath is haunted by the memory of the young soldiers she comforts as they die, and drinks to cope with her post-traumatic stress. She takes comfort in the friendship of nurses she served with, and finds redemption in helping others.
“I was looking for the universal story, the one that represents the most women,” Hannah said. The inspiration for her first Vietnam War novel is rooted in her own childhood in Washington state during the 1960s. When Hannah was 6, her best friend’s father, Capt.
Robert Welch, went missing when the F-4C Phantom jet he was piloting was shot down over North Vietnam. After the war, he was declared dead. Hannah wore a POW/MIA bracelet bearing his name.
“I never took it off, for years and years,” she said. “It was imprinted on my brain, the men who didn’t come home.” Even as a youngster, Hannah observed the protests over the war and the ill-treatment of many service members when they came home.
“The storyteller in me was always interested in making sense of that experience,” she said. Hannah earned an undergraduate degree in communications, and, later, a law degree. She worked as a lawyer until the early 1990s, when she began writing novels full time while caring for her son.
She gained success writing romance novels, and later moved into deeply researched historical fiction. Her top-selling book, published in 2015, is “The Nightingale,” about two sisters in the French Resistance during World War II. Hannah’s longtime idea of writing about the Vietnam War crystalized into “The Women” during the COVID-19 pandemic, when she saw nurses and medical personnel shouldering much of the burden — and trauma — of fighting the battle against a baffling disease while a polarized country bickered.
Capt. Norma Small turns a patient in a hip cast at the 8th Field Hospital in Nha Trang, South Vietnam, on Feb. 23, 1966.
“I felt often they weren’t getting the respect they deserved,” Hannah said. “I thought, ‘This is the moment.’” She became friends with Diane Carlson Evans, a Vietnam War nurse who fought for 10 years against fierce resistance to add a statue commemorating the service of women to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.
C. It finally was dedicated on Nov. 11, 1993 — Veterans Day.
“Diane Carlson Evans was really my guardian angel. She was very much there to talk me through this and guide me,” Hannah said. “She was so grateful that this novel has in some ways put words into the mouths of these women.
” Phyllis Scholz is grateful, too. Omaha World-Herald Phyllis Scholz wore this cap as an Army nurse during Vietnam War. Scholz, 79, was an Army nurse at the 8th Field Hospital in Nha Trang for a year in the late 1960s, when the war was at its peak.
She heard about “The Women” from friends in The Brant, the Gretna retirement community where she lives. “I love that novel!” Scholz said. “Halfway through, I couldn’t put it down.
” Scholz grew up in Stuart, Nebraska, one of eight children in a farm family. Her father died in a tractor accident when Phyllis was 9 years old. When Scholz graduated from high school in 1963, she decided to go to nursing school, one of the few career options open to women at the time.
“My mother gave me $350,” Scholz said. “She told me: ‘Don’t come back if you flunk out or get pregnant.’” She attended St.
John’s School of Nursing in Huron, South Dakota. It was a struggle financially. She learned from another student that the Army would pay for her schooling if she committed to serve after graduation.
“I thought that sounded pretty good,” she said. Scholz was sent to Fort Sam Houston, Texas, for training in 1966. Then she worked as an obstetrics and delivery nurse, taking care of premature babies at Fort Hood, Texas (now known as Fort Cavazos).
She had been there a little more than a year when she got a surprise. “I got a letter saying, ‘You’re going to Vietnam,’” Scholz said. “I was devastated.
” Omaha World-Herald Phyllis Scholz holds up a faded photo of her, right, and a friend dressed in uniform while on duty as Vietnam War nurses. She served at the 8th Field Hospital in Nha Trang, South Vietnam, for a year beginning in June 1968. The nurses received minimal training for combat — a day or two in the field, an afternoon at the rifle range, some training on how to avoid mines.
Her military transport landed at Cam Ranh Bay, a naval port on the South China Sea about 180 miles northeast of Saigon. It was 110 degrees when she arrived. She was assigned to Nha Trang, about 30 miles up the coast.
Scholz said she and her fellow nurses lived in marble villas from the French colonial era — a huge step up from the dirty bug-infested “hooches” occupied by the nurses in “The Women.” They could shop in the town and walk to a beautiful beach where Vietnamese “mama-sans” sold pineapple on a stick. But Vietnam was far from a cushy gig.
Scholz worked 12 hours a day, six days a week, in a crowded ward with no air conditioning. “We could hold 50 or 60 people on cots that were spaced inches apart,” she said. “They were draped with mosquito nets.
There was no privacy whatsoever.” Scholz’s ward received some battlefield trauma patients, but mostly she treated soldiers who were sick with dysentery or tropical diseases. She spent much of her time inserting IVs, taking temperatures and blood samples, dispensing aspirin.
Soldiers with malaria typically received a 14-day treatment, then returned to their unit. They would sometimes get anxious when their time was short and couldn’t sleep. “We sat up and visited with them,” Scholz said.
“They would talk about their fears.” Omaha veteran reunites with long-lost soldier who saved his life in Vietnam Nha Trang was in a relatively safe area, but sometimes the compound was placed under “red alert.” “Then you had to run over to your place of duty,” Scholz said.
“If your hair was in rollers, you had to put your helmet on and go over there, anyway.” After a year in Vietnam, she finished her tour and was discharged from the Army. She came home to Stuart, restless from all she had seen.
“Nobody ever came over and congratulated me,” she said. “You think you’ve changed, but they’ve all gone on with their lives.” Scholz worked at hospitals in Atkinson and O’Neill, and did some travel nursing in Texas.
She married Marvin, a local rancher, in 1970, and they raised four kids. “I never told anyone that I was a Vietnam nurse, not for years,” she said. Omaha World-Herald Phyllis Scholz of Gretna flips through photos from her time as a Vietnam War nurse.
In 2018, her family urged her to sign up for an honor flight to Washington, D.C., made up entirely of female veterans.
She got her photo taken with Loretta Swit, who portrayed a no-nonsense Korean War Army nurse in the popular 1970s TV series “M*A*S*H.” Crowds of people cheered for the women when they returned to Eppley Airfield. “I felt very special, honored.
It was a big thing,” Scholz said. At the urging of her daughter and sisters, who live in Omaha, she and Marvin moved to the city several years ago. Some of her friends at The Brant think she should tell her story there this Veterans Day.
“I don’t think my story’s very exciting,” she said. The millions of people who have read “The Women” might disagree. Scholz was ordered to go to Vietnam, but Naiman volunteered for combat duty.
Omaha World-Herald Angie Naiman poses in front of a jeep at the 24th Evacuation Hospital at Long Binh. She had grown up on the family farm east of Hebron, near the Kansas border, the second oldest of five children. After high school, Naiman attended junior college for a year before studying nursing at the St.
Elizabeth School of Nursing in Lincoln. She graduated there in 1965, then took a job with the county health department in St. Louis while earning her master’s degree in public health.
At the time, her older brother, Leslie, was a Marine serving in Vietnam. She heard that nurses were needed there. That awakened her sense of service and adventure.
“I visited an Army recruiting center and said, ‘I’d like to go to Vietnam,’” Naiman recalled. “They said, ‘You’re in.’” Her family was stunned.
“Mama already had a son over there,” said Marilyn Hill, Naiman’s younger sister, who now lives with her in Papillion. “Then (Angie) just ups and makes her mind up to go. I didn’t think my mother was going to live through it.
” Naiman’s assignment at the 24th Evacuation Hospital involved treating a lot of malaria and skin diseases, setting up IVs and handing out meds. In the wards, she remembers rock ‘n’ roll music blasting most of the time — especially The Animals ‘ hit song “We Gotta Get Out of This Place,” which became a sort of anthem among U.S.
troops in Vietnam. Though she didn’t work in the operating room, Naiman helped out when mass casualty events brought in a lot of badly wounded patients all at once. Then it was all-hands-on-deck.
“I saw quite a bit of trauma — legs blown off, such as that,” she recalled. “The orthopedic wounds had to be dressed.” The women spent some off-duty hours at Long Binh’s Officer’s Club, though it wasn’t quite the frothy romance scene depicted in “China Beach,” the 1980s drama about Vietnam War nurses.
Still, she said, “You were real careful. Married men took their rings off.” Naiman longed to get back to public health nursing.
She never seriously considered extending beyond the end of her original tour in July 1971. Omaha World-Herald Angie Naiman in her office at the 24th Evacuation Hospital at Long Binh. Nevertheless, she found it hard to leave.
“I had made a lot of friends,” she said. “When I got home to the farm, I remember sitting there looking out the window. I was thinking of all the people I left behind.
” She stayed in the Army until 1973, assigned to public health duties at Fort Riley, Kansas. Soon after Naiman came home, a nurse in Holdrege invited her to help start a home health program. That led to a career with the Nebraska Department of Health, setting up and operating immunization clinics in towns across south-central Nebraska.
For several years, she also worked as a personal care nurse for a woman who was quadriplegic, and at a nursing home. About a decade ago, Naiman moved back to the farm in Hebron to care for her younger sister and brother, who were seriously ill and have since died. She had never married, and in 2020 she and her sister Marilyn, who lived in Bellevue, bought the house together in Papillion.
Through it all, Naiman’s Vietnam experience never left her. She was long troubled by nightmares. “I had a lot of flashbacks.
I had to go to the doctor about that sometimes,” she said. “My mental health was probably affected, seeing people die.” ‘We thought we were invincible’; Midlands helicopter pilots forged bond in bloody, nearly forgotten battle in jungle of Laos But she has no regrets about serving her country.
“If I think about it too long, I get teary eyed,” she said. “I’m glad I was able to go.” Finally, she finished reading “The Women.
” She appreciates the recognition it has brought to a generation of nurses whose service was long overlooked. “It feels good to know,” she said, “that somebody thought we did OK.” Wounded Marine Gunnery Sgt.
Jeremiah Purdie, center, with bandaged head, reaches toward a stricken comrade after a fierce firefight south of the DMZ in October 1966. Larry Burrows made this portrait, simply entitled "Operation Prairie Hill 484, Vietnam, October 1966." The April 16, 1965, Life magazine featured Larry Burrows’ award-winning photo essay, “One Ride With Yankee Papa 13.
” Burrows, who made his name early in the Vietnam War, was among the photojournalists killed when their helicopter was shot down on Feb. 10, 1971, across the border in Laos. South Vietnamese troops on the ground in Laos during Lam Son 719.
North Vietnamese artillery shells land near South Vietnamese troop-deployment area during the Lam Son 719, February 1971. South Vietnamese troops carry chickens to eat during the Lam Son 719 campaign in February-March 1971. South Vietnamese troops lined up for a flight into Laos during Lam Son 719, February 1971.
Wounded South Vietnamese evacuated to Khe Sanh during Lam Son 719, February-March 1971. South Vietnamese troops prepare to go into Laos during the Lam Son 719 campaign. Helicopter landing zone in Lang Vei, South Vietnam, during Lam Son 719, February 1971.
North Vietnamese artillery shalls explode near Khe Sanh, South Vietnam, during the Lam Son 719 campaign. A U.S.
Marine Corps helicopter strafes a hilltop during the Lam Son 719 campaign, February 1971. A South Vietnamese soldier walks through the haze at Lang Vei, South Vietnam, during the Lam Son 719 campaign, February 1971. In the back of a UH-1 Huey, minutes before takeoff on their last flight: from left, Keisaburo Shimamoto, Henri Huet, Larry Burrows, and Kent Foster during Lam Son 719, Feb.
10, 1971. [email protected] ; twitter.
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