Between 1967 and 1968, Nancy Wells spent her waking hours stitching injured Americans back together amid the haze of the Vietnam War, treating wounds she’d never imagined seeing. 

When not on the hospital wards, Wells and her fellow nurses lived like other soldiers: They ate at the same mess hall, slept in the same Quonset-hut dorms, called hooches, and were jolted out of bed by the same alarms and explosions. Some nurses suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. And all were subject to the same upheaval and protests when they returned stateside. 

Yet after the war, there was far less support and community for nurses and little recognition from the public of what they went through overseas. On Veterans’ Day, nurses gather at the Vietnam Women’s Memorial, which was built in 1993 after years of advocacy, to honor the service of the “forgotten veterans.”

“It seemed like the choppers would never stop coming in”

About 7,000 American women served in Vietnam as nurses during the war. Many, like Wells, were recruited from nursing school. Those who completed the Army’s student nurse program and passed state nursing exams were commissioned as Second Lieutenants in the Army Nurse Corps. While overseas, they often served in multiple hospitals during one-year tours. Wells worked at the 85th Evacuation Hospital in Qui Nohn and at the 71st Evacuation Hospital at Pleiku. There, she said, red alerts that meant enemy and hostile fire in the area became a part of daily life. 

“You’d have to throw on your steel pot (helmet) and your flak jacket and go over to the hospital wards” when the alarm went off, Wells, now 80 and living in Michigan, told CBS News. “The siren would be blaring. Initially, it was a little frightening. You could hear the gunfire off in the distance. But after enough red alerts, you kind of became used to it.” 

Even when the world around them was calm, there were always soldiers in need in the hospital wards. At the 71st Evacuation Hospital, there often weren’t enough staff members to cover the 400 beds. Wells said she and her fellow nurses would work six or even seven days a week there, “depending on the casualties coming in.” During one period in November 1967, she said there were three weeks of nonstop casualties, coming so fast that medical personnel were flown in from other locations to help the 71st. During this period, the Battle of Dak To was taking place in Vietnam’s Central Highlands. It was one of the bloodiest battles of the war. 

“There were days when it seemed like the choppers would never stop coming in with the wounded,” said Wells. “Those were hard days, and the wounds the guys were coming in with were horrendous.” 

In January 1968, the hospital was in the path of the Tet Offensive, a major military campaign by Vietnamese forces. Some hospital wards at the 71st were closed because “it was felt that we were in too dangerous of an area to keep very many wounded” soldiers, Wells said. Meanwhile, Wells and her other nurses moved into the hospital, because it was deemed a safer place than their hooches. 

Even when the crises slowed down, nurses like Wells had duties that went far beyond what they might do at a hospital in the United States. Wells said doctors assigned to the wards might only be there once or twice a week, so nurses would write orders for infection treatment and pain medications. They also cared for delayed wound closures, which meant carefully monitoring a non-critical wound for a week before it was surgically repaired. Medical personnel also did outreach work, treating injuries and giving vaccinations to some Vietnamese civilians when conditions allowed. 

On top of that, the nurses passed medications, checked IVs and bandages, gave injections and did everything they could to keep soldiers’ spirits high. For Wells, caring for the soldiers she affectionately calls “her boys” meant sometimes skirting regulations. 

“One of my boys came up to me in his wheelchair, and he said, ‘Ma’am, is there anything to eat?’ I’m hungry.’ I told him ‘No, but I know where to get some food,'” said Wells. “This was late at night. I snuck down to the chow hall, and didn’t see anybody, so I took an entire sheet cake and took it back up to the ward so my boys could have a midnight snack.” 

“We didn’t send women to Vietnam”  

Wells came home from Vietnam on Easter Sunday in 1968. Her supervisor recommended she change out of her uniform to avoid negative attention in the airport, but she was determined to “walk tall” as she reunited with her family. 

Soon, though, Wells realized she was having a hard time adjusting back to civilian life. It took two months before she could bear to work as a nurse again, and she felt that she could no longer connect with her old friends. Whenever they talked about parties and beauty salons, she could only think about the conditions she had spent the past year in — the conditions her “boys” were still experiencing. 

She and her husband, a fellow Vietnam veteran, both struggled to talk about their experiences in the country — something she said likely contributed to their divorce. She struggled to sleep at night, and couldn’t bear being in a large crowd or hearing the sounds of helicopters. Wells would later be diagnosed with and treated for PTSD. 

In 1980, she felt she was ready to connect with other veterans, so she went to her local VFW. She had identification confirming her service but was rebuffed and told she could join the Ladies Auxiliary, a volunteer group for women and family members who did not serve. The organization was rebranded as the VFW Auxiliary in 2015. 

“I walked into the building, I was met by a gentlemen … and told him that I wanted to join. And he said ‘The VFW is for veterans,'” Wells recalled. “He couldn’t believe that I was a veteran, just the same as he was. I walked out and never went back.” 

That wasn’t an unusual experience for nurses coming home. Constance Evans, who spent a year serving at the 12th Evacuation Hospital in Cu Chi, said she was invited to join the Ladies Auxiliary, but not welcomed into her local VFW in Idaho. She spent months campaigning to be part of the latter organization and was eventually accepted. Evans, who is part of the Nez Perce tribe, said she was also excluded from a tribal ceremony honoring veterans for years. Donna Barbisch, a former Vietnam nurse and retired Army officer, remembered talking to a woman who didn’t know any American women had been overseas. 

“She was expressing negative sentiment about the war, and I told her that I thought she had some of the facts mixed up,” Barbisch, 77, who lives in Washington, D.C. now, recalled. “And she said ‘Oh, how would you know?’ I said ‘I was there.’ She said, ‘Oh, no, you weren’t there, we didn’t send women to Vietnam.'”  

“‘Yes, I am a veteran'”  

For decades, Wells and other nurses who served in Vietnam tried to put the war out of their heads and get on with life at home. Some, like Barbisch, went back to the Army. Others, including Wells, returned to civilian medicine. Many nurses who had served together lost contact. Some received services through the VA, though Evans said it took years of fighting and appeals to have her post-traumatic stress disorder considered a disability by the agency. 

All of the women interviewed for this story said that their work during the war and the struggles they experienced afterward were something they rarely talked about, even with close friends and family. 

That changed in 1984 when Vietnam veteran Diane Carlson Evans co-founded the Vietnam Women’s Memorial Foundation with two other former nurses. The foundation began lobbying Congress to erect a memorial honoring Vietnam nurses on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Congress approved the construction of the statue in 1988, and the memorial was dedicated on Veterans Day in 1993. Thousands of veterans, including Wells, participated in a march that culminated at the memorial, which shows three nurses caring for fallen soldiers.

“We marched down Constitution Avenue, and people were lining the streets shouting ‘Welcome home, welcome home,'” Wells said. “One woman came up to me and said ‘You saved my husband.’ And that was great. It was amazing, it was uplifting.”

The legacy of the Vietnam nurses is now remembered with statewide celebrations and annual gatherings at the memorial. It’s a welcome change from the silence and shame that accompanied their initial return home, Evans said. 

“It really helped me come out and say ‘Yes, I am a veteran, and I served in a war,'” she said. “I finally became very proud of what I did.”