A CALL FOR HELP
by Theresa Morel Hudler
A rainstorm had just ended that late January
1968 morning when the
UH-1 "Huey" helicopter settled into the mud by
the 12th evacuation hospital
at Cu Chi, South Vietnam. The chopper was
a troop carrier, a "slick," not
the medevac type we were used to. It was
full of wounded men who only
minutes before had been in battle. Their
comrades had hastily loaded and
flown them to us. Most would remain with
us, but the urgent cases would be
flown to another unit not far from Cu Chi.
Nurses and medics ran under the rush of blades
to lift the wounded
through the open sides of the helicopter.
Triage was begun. There was the
sickly smell of blood and mud, the shouts of
medics, the moaning of men in
pain, the down-winding whine of the chopper's
engine.
I had just finished a 12-hour shift and should
have been headed
back for the "hooch," the nurses' barracks, but
someone called to me.
"Lieutenant Morel, come here, please!
Tell us what to do with
this one!" I slopped through the mud to
a medic standing beside a low
stretcher.
Crouching beside the soldier on the stretcher,
I observed a massive
head wound. He would die if we did not
get him to a head-trauma unit. I
motioned for the IV equipment and leaned toward
the soldier's ear. "Don't
worry, sweetheart. We'll get you out of
here. We'll get you someplace
safe. Just hang on."
Glancing up through the confusion, I saw crew
members heading back
to their slick.
"Wait!" I yelled. "We have to take
this man on and take him up
north!"
I jumped to my feet and ran toward the chopper,
waving. The pilot
glanced at his crew; flying the wounded was not
their usual duty. He
looked back at me and nodded.
Soon hands lifted the litter and slid it into
the open chopper,
loading it against a projecting bulkhead near
the rear. It took up all
but a few inches of the width of the chopper's
floor. The door gunners,
heads bulky in huge protective helmets, climbed
onto narrow benches behind
the litter, facing outward, sliding in behind
mounted M-60 machine guns.
It was not common for nurses to fly evacuation
runs, and I had
never been in a helicopter before, but there
was no one else free to go.
I scrambled up to the metal floor behind the
pilot and copilot's seats.
Someone tossed me a flak jacket and a standard
steel-pot helmet. I noticed
the gunners and pilots hooking their helmet headsets
into connectors. The
crew would now be able to communicate with each
other. I had no headset,
no ear protectors. My helmet flopped back
and forth as I struggled to
snap the flak jacket on over my fatigues and
then checked that the patient's
IV was securely attached to a hook overhead.
The copilot told me to bang on his seat if I
needed something once
we were airborne. He would then swing his
helmet mike out so I could speak
into it.
\\e sat down flat on the vibrating metal floor,
my back to the pilots'
seats. The doors had been left open; it
was as if the chopper had no sides.
Sweat trickled down my face and under my uniform.
I watched my patient
closely as the engine wound up to full pitch.
The helicopter lifted up
slowly just above the trees, the nose dropping
a bit. It moved forward.
We were flying.
The engine and rotors throbbed through the metal
roof, and the wind
rushed past the open doors. The sounds
were deafening. The roar increased
as we began to move a hundred miles an hour.
We bobbed just above the
contours of the terrain, up and over the jungle,
down over rice paddies and
canals.
Suddenly the pilots shouted something about enemy
troops below.
Simultaneously the gunners opened up with their
machine guns. The pilot
began to fly evasive maneuvers--banking the chopper
steeply, first to one
side and then the other. The staccato pounding
of gunfire, the roar of the
wind and the whine of the engine mixed in an
earsplitting clash.
I forced myself to concentrate on my patient.
Hours earlier, I
had begun my shift with my daily visit to the
chapel area. Now I prayed
again, crying out silently: O dear God!
Don't let my patient die here in
all this! Let us get him to a safe place!
Suddenly I noticed the IV had come loose from
his arm. He would
die! I banged on the pilot's seat to get
him to level off, but he did not
hear me.
I clawed across the pitching deck to the litter.
As I leaned over
to reach for the IV needle, my helmet slipped
forward. It would come off
and hit the wounded man! I pulled it off
with one hand and flung it behind
me.
Now I was bent over, helmetless, tearing tape
with my teeth and one
hand, trying to hold the IV in with the other,
screaming silently over and
over, O dear God, don't let him die here.
Don't let him die here!
Suddenly the gunner on my left stopped firing.
He pivoted sharply
90 degrees and bent over until his head covered
mine and his mouth was
within an inch of my ear. Why is he here?
Does he want to speak to me?
I wondered in the split second he was poised
there. Then there was a ping
and a pang. A bullet headed for my left
temple ricocheted off his helmet
with enough force to knock him out. The
gunner slumped unconscious over
me and my patient.
His weight was suffocating us. I shoved
his body to the left and
rolled onto the litter handles, inches from the
open door. I didn't know
if he was tethered or secured in some way or
not, so I grabbed him with my
left hand, still holding the IV needle with my
right. I was crying.
O dear God, he'll fall out! Don't let him
fall out! Help us,
dear God! The prayer screamed through my
heart.
It was a little while--a minute? an hour?--before
the other gunner
realized what had happened. He spoke to
the pilots on his mike, and they
broke off firing and flew straight to the hospital.
We landed. I
unclenched my cramped fingers from the gunner's
fatigues and the patient's
IV.
Medics pulled the gunner down and placed him
on a stretcher, then
slid the patient's litter to the ground.
I headed first to my patient.
The IV was still attached and he was stable,
still alive. I touched his
arm. "Peace," I whispered.
He was rushed off. I never learned if he
survived.
I ran to the other litter and bent over the gunner,
grabbing his
wrist, feeling for a pulse.
With his helmet off, there was no sign of a wound.
In fact, he was
only dazed. His eyes opened and focused
on me as I bent over him.
"What is it?" he asked. "What do you want?"
This was the soldier
whose helmeted head covered my bare one in a
single bullet-splintered
second. I just looked at him; what did
he mean?
He spoke again, struggling to rise up on his
elbow: "You called me!"
A few days later the gunner and I met to talk
over what had
happened. The Tet offensive was now fully
under way. He offered me the
bullet-scarred helmet as a souvenir, but I insisted
that he keep it. I
do not remember his name. But over the
years, even as I repressed most of
my Vietnam memories, I always remembered that
when I needed protection, a
gunner heard my call for help so loud and clear
over the cacophony of noises
in the helicopter that he stopped firing, turned
and bent down to see what
I wanted.
Tearing tape with my teeth, I had not spoken
a word. I had only
prayed in silence, to a God who heard and answered
me.
SPECIAL NOTE
******************
DOC DENTICE SERVED WITH THE 25TH DIV.IN CUCHI
2/14INF & 25TH MED BN.
DOC BROUGHT MANY WOUNDED TROOPS TO THE 12TH EVAC
1967/68
OUR
GUARDIAN ANGELS
Rosemary Hogan, Captain
- Army Nurses Corps WW-II
Born May 12, 1912 at
Walters, Oklahoma. Entered service August 1, 1936 at Fort Sill Oklahoma
and served there until
1940. Captain Hogan served\ in the Asiatic Pacific Theater of War,
and participated in
the battles of Bataan and Corregidor. She was held POW by the Japs
from May 1942 to February
1945 and was wounded by shrapnel in the bombing
of Hospital # One at
Bataan, April 1942.Decorations: Asiatic-Pacific Medal, Pre-Pearl Harbor
Medal, Philippine
Liberation Medal, American
Defense Medal, Purple Heart, Bronze Star,Presidential Citation w/2 Oak
Leaf Clusters, 6 Overseas
Stripes.NOTE:Captain Rosemary Hogan is one of the nurses that volunteered
to
stay with the wounded
American soldiers. They knew that they would be overrun, captured and taken
prisoner by the Japs
and they were ordered to
leave the wounded, and they did so.She was taken
prisoner, she survived
the awesome ordeal of being a POW for three years. She returned to the
states and was
promoted to Colonel.
Rosemary died in 1964 at the age of 52. I thank her for leaving me a free
country to live in.
If it were possible
to talk to the wounded men she volunteered to stay and care for, they would
say.
Thank God for the women
in the military.
These wounded men were
Hogan's Heros. She definitely was their Hero.
Rosemary Hogan and
the other American nurses were moved from Bataan to Corregidor just before
the surrender to the Japanese.
Some nurses and other
peronnel were evacuated from Corregidor before it was surrendered, including
Rosemary Hogan, who was, as
you mentioned, wounded
at Bataan. (She was wounded when a Japanese bomb fell on her hospital.
Nurse Rita Palmer was wounded
in the same bombing.)
The plane on which Hogan, Palmer, and other evacuees were flying had to
land on another island to refuel, and was
damaged. While the
pilots repaired the plane, the evacuees found shelter elsewhere. After
the plane was repaired, the pilots couldn't find
their passengers, and
had to leave them behind. The passengers eventually surrendered themselves
to the Japanese, as
they did not believe they could avoid capture.
Rosemary's
Story from Arlington
1st Lt. Rita G. Palmer
'It Was Terrible'
Former Army Nurse Reflects
On Horrors Of Being A War Prisoner
By Lara Bricker, Staff
Writer
The Hampton Union,
Tuesday, May 30, 2000
[The following article
is courtesy of The Hampton Union and Seacoast Online.]
1st Lt. Rita G. Palmer
Only one small section
of my ward remained standing.
Part of the roof had
been blown into the jungle.
There were mangled
bodies under the ruins; a bloodstained hand stuck up through a pile of
scrap;
arms and legs had been
ripped off and flung among the rubbish.
Some of the mangled
torsos were impossible to identify.
We worked wildly to
get to the men who might be buried, still alive, under the mass
of wreckage, tearing
apart the smashed beds to reach the wounded and the dead....
The bombing had stopped,
but the air was rent by the awful screams of the new-wounded
and the dying. Trees
were still crashing in the jungle and when one nearby fell on the
remaining segment of
tin roof it sounded like shellfire.... I saw Rosemary Hogan being helped
from her ward. Blood
streamed from her face and shoulder; she looked ghastly.
"Hogan," I called,
"Hogan, is it bad?"
She managed to wave
her good arm at me. "Just a little nose bleed,"
she said cheerfully
..."How about you?"
... Then Rita Palmer
(from Hampton) was taken from her ward. Her face and arms had been
cut and her skirt and
GI shirt had been blown (open).
In fact, Rita Palmer
had more than a few cuts. "I remember coming to and having long beams of
the roof over
me and struggling out
from under those," she said. "I have no idea how long I was knocked out.
I could breathe
all right, but one
finger of one hand was incapacitated. I didn't even know about the piece
(of shrapnel) in my chest
for several hours.
It didn't penetrate my lung. I had shrapnel in my legs too."
{From "We Band of Angels:
The Untold Story of
American Nurses Trapped On Bataan by the Japanese"
Elizabeth M. Norman
-- 1999}
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Rita Palmer doesn't
like to talk about her three years as a prisoner of war in Santa Tomas
in Manila.
The memories don't
come hack easily. She prefers that they don't sometimes.
"I haven't talked about
it very much," the 82-year-old Hampton native said last week.
Palmer and Rosemary
Hogan were the first two women awarded a Purple Heart for their service
in World War II. T
hey were awarded the
military medal in San Francisco in 1945. Palmer keeps mostly silent about
the honor.
"It didn't mean anything,"
she said. "They all did things so much more than we did."
Palmer never anticipated
the deadly turn of events when she enlisted as an Army nurse with the rank
of Second Lieutenant in March 1941.
Following her graduation
from the New England Deaconess Hospital in Boston, she saw the Army as
an opportunity to travel and see the world.
Opportunities for travel
were not as accessible to young people during that time as they are today,
her brother Ansell Palmer, 80, of Hampton, explained.
Rita Palmer wrote of
her feelings in a letter to her brother.
"After several months
an opportunity to transfer to the Philippines came along and being young
and eager to see the world, I volunteered," she wrote.
With five other nurses,
she left on September 26, 1941 and arrived in Manila on Oct. 23, where
she was stationed at Fort Stotensburg, 60 miles
north of Manila. Clark
Field was close by and Palmer wrote of her memories of the first day of
war.
"The horror of that
first afternoon of war is burned in my memory - the dead, the dying, the
dismembered who filled every inch of our small hospital
are epitomized for
me by a legless 16-year-old who had lied about his age to get into the
Army," she wrote. Clark Field was evacuated and the troops
and nurses were moved
south to Manila and by Christmas she was on Corregidor.
"Everything they bombed,"
Palmer said last week. "We were scared in a way. We didn't have time to
think about anything."
The nurses worked 18-hour
shifts and soon ran out of medical supplies. They rarely slept.
"It was almost constant,"
Palmer said.
From there, she worked
on the Bataan Peninsula where she was wounded, as described in the excerpt
from the book. Her brother explained
that she was then taken
back to Corregidor and was one of 12 army nurses who were to be taken at
night to Australia by Navy flying boats, PBYs.
The planes needed refueling
often and the flight stopped on Lake Lanao on the southern island of the
Philippines, Mindinao. However, the plane's
belly was ripped open
by a rock and they were grounded.
"Her PBY had had it
and couldn't make it from there," Ansell Palmer said.
For six months, the
small group stayed on the island but were eventually captured by the Japanese
and returned by a cargo boat to
Santa Tomas prison
on Manila. She was imprisoned for three and a half years.
"That was a long time,"
she admitted.
At first getting food
was not that difficult, but soon they were eating only rice, cooked in
milk.
"It was terrible,"
she said. "Then it got so bad, our health was so bad."
Palmer and the others
were freed in 1945 after Gen. Douglas MacArthur's troops re-took Manila.
She remembers the day the Air Force
fighter planes flew
over the prison camp and tipped their wings. It was their first sign of
liberation. But some who had survived for the
entire length of time
were killed just before they were to be freed.
Meanwhile, Ansell Palmer
was stationed in Hawaii in the Navy Air Corps, where he was repairing planes.
What he knew of his sister was through
his mother and he learned
of her liberation when reading the base newspaper. He read that some of
the nurses were being brought to Hawaii and
after three hours of
calling different places on the phone, he was able to get through and talk
with his sister for the first time in four years.
Two hours later, he
received a phone call from the officer of the day who informed him that
a high ranking official had ordered Ansell Palmer to
be sent to his sister
in Honolulu "the fastest way possible."
It was February 23,
1945, which is also Rita's birthday. He was shocked when he saw her at
only 85 pounds. She returned to Hampton in August 1945
and later went on to
the University of Chicago, where she met her husband, Bud James, who also
received a
Purple Heart after
he was wounded in Italy.
Today, Palmer lives
in Minneapolis, Minn., and returned to Hampton last week to visit her brother.
She hopes when people think about the
nurses who served in
World War Il, they realize the significance of using women in combat, which
wasn't seen much before WWII.
Today, she said, women
have more opportunities for their careers and in leadership roles. She
credits the nurses with
opening up the future
for modern day women.
But she still is haunted
by the vivid memories of war.
"I have not successfully
come to terms with everything that happened in those years," she wrote
in a letter to her brother. "I learned some
valuable lessons, a
great deal about human nature under extreme conditions and the recognition
that little is gained and nothing is resolved by war."
Courtesy photo Hampton
native Rita Palmer was imprisoned in the Philippines for three and a half
years during World War 11.
She was
one of the first two women awarded a Purple Heart.
