Program to share stories of Vietnam War nurses
By Phyllis Moore
Published in News on April 26, 2015 1:50 AM
It all seemed so simple to the nursing student who decided to enlist in the Army while still in college.
Martha Roed Bell wanted to serve her country and help her parents after overhearing them talking about taking out a second mortgage to pay for her younger brother's education.
Because she was under 21, her mother had to sign papers for her enlistment.
"Just before she put her signature to paper, she asked the recruiter, 'Uhh, what about this war going on over there?'" Mrs. Bell recalls. "This was the fall of 1967 (during the Vietnam War).
"His reply was classic -- 'Mrs. Roed, the war will be over by the time she graduates,' which was 1969."
Less than a year after becoming a nurse, though, the war was still going on when her orders came.
"I remember it well, mid-May 1970. I watched 'General Hospital' as I was getting dressed for evening shift duty," she said of the fateful day the call came informing her she was being sent to Vietnam.
She was 23.
Jack Kannan, executive director of the Wayne Community College Foundation, is also a Vietnam vet, having served there earlier, in 1965.
"I didn't see any nurses over there," he said. "I was there at the beginning of the war. What I saw were medics, the men in the field with us."
Today he calls nurses who joined the ranks and served military men and women during that era "unsung heroes."
"These are the people that would have taken care of (retired Army colonel) Joe Marm. Medevac would have taken him out and got him to the hospital," he said of the Fremont native who went on to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor for bravery in combat in 1966.
"Students in college have no idea what this country went through then. Nursing students are not familiar with what nurses who served in the war did taking care of our military men and women."
Because of that, the Foundation is hosting a program this week saluting Vietnam War Nurses and the role they played patching up the wounded and keeping up morale among the troops.
Two retired Army Nurse Corps colonels who now live in North Carolina will share some of their experience in the field Wednesday evening and the following day will speak with nursing students at the college.
Mrs. Bell retired from the Army in 1995 after 28 years of active duty, taking a civilian post as director of nursing at a retirement community in Chapel Hill before retiring again in 2012. She has earned many military awards and civilian recognitions, including the bronze star for meritorious service, Legion of Merit and second Oak Leaf Cluster.
She says she still has a collection of letters, diaries, photos and audio tapes she formerly sent home to her family, which she intends to one day turn over to the Library of Congress, where some of her messages shared with high school audiences about her wartime experience was previously archived.
Diane Corcoran, who now lives in Durham, served in the military for 25 years, starting in Vietnam and ending as chief administrator in Frankfort Army Medical Center during Desert Storm. She earned such awards as the bronze star medal, meritorious service medal with four oak leaf clusters and other service ribbons.
The president of Corcoran Consulting has been president of International Association of Near-Death Studies since 2008 and travels around the country giving presentations on a variety of topics related to near death experiences, management and grief.
The women will be speaking Wednesday in Moffatt Auditorium at WCC at 6:30 p.m. following a 20-minute documentary on Vietnam nurses.
Prior to that, however, the community will have an opportunity to see a plane actually used in Vietnam to transport the wounded. It will be on the lawn of the WCC campus for the public to tour starting at 5:30 p.m., Kannan said.
"We have an original Medevac from Vietnam that Dr. Sam McLamb is bringing to the campus to go through," he said. "Dr. McLamb was a chopper pilot in Vietnam and will introduce the speakers that evening.
"We're proud to have the (nurses) and pleased they are going to be here. Being in this community, knowing that everybody in our community is very strongly supporting of all our military people."
The event is free and open to the public. Local veterans groups have also been invited to attend, Kannan said.