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On 7 December 1998, results of the morbidity study of female Vietnam veterans were released by the Minister for Veterans' Affairs (Bruce Scott). The study reported 16 conditions with a statistically higher occurrence than in the general community. It further reported that the number of female veterans who never married greatly exceeds expectations, which could signify that their Vietnam experience had greatly affected their ability to form relationships. For those women who did marry and have children, many report congenital defects in these children. The nurses and other female personnel on the civilian surgical teams were included in this study, but were listed, along with others, as not being eligible for benefits under the Veterans' Entitlement Act.
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Maureen McLeod Spicer:
Civilian Nurse who served at Bien Hoa in 1966
"I felt that I had a responsibility, aged 22, to go and look after the civilians. I was at that age when you feel you can change the world, you know, I was going up there to "save them all". Mind you, you come a thud once you get there! Unless you've been in a war zone you don't really have an appreciation of how difficult it is to achieve anything. There's no infrastructure. At every twist and turn there are these obstructions: supplies don't arrive, the water supply stops for a day, the power goes off three times in a day - and that's just when you think you're getting somewhere."

Von Clinch:
Civilian nurse, also served at Bien Hoa Hospital in 1966.

"At one stage we had 40 patients in the 5-bed ward. We had relatives sleeping under the bed, 2 or 3 patients on the bed, an army stretcher on top of each bed (supported by the bed head and the foot plate) with patients in it. There were army stretchers spread over the floor with patients in them. If you had to run down to the other end of the ward to change the blood or put up another flask of saline, you'd almost break your ankles on the stretchers. But you got to the stage of just accepting it."

The CN-ASTV now has its own web pages on this Web Site! Click here for the latest UPDATES

NEW THESIS: "Breaking the Silence: The Experience of the Civilian Nurses in Vietnam" By Dorothy Angell, PhD, DipAppSc(Nurs), MEd, Manc. Inquiries:La Trobe University Library Melbourne, Australia

Maureen McLeod: "There was nothing that prepared us for the filth of that hospital. And the smell - the smell will never leave me! They didn't tell us about how, when it rained (the Monsoon season), when we walked through the water in the hospital compound all the dirty bandages and dressings would be floating past you in the water. Horrendous."

Sr McLeod nursing patients on the floor
Bien Hoa hospital, Vietnam.

Recognized Conditions amongst civilian nurses:
By the year 2000 several of the civilian nurses have already died from some of the recognized Vietnam related conditions (cancer, brain haemorrhage etc.) and today many surviving members now suffer from non-Hodgkins Lymphoma, Auto immune disease (thyroid), other immune system disorders, multiple sclerosis, various cancers, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and other anxiety disorders.

Trauma - feeling threatened:
McLeod: "We were just 5 Australian nurses and 40,000 Americans in Bien Hoa at the Air Base. There were 2 female Red Cross workers and that was it apart from some American nurses. Western women were definitely in the minority and there was all this testosterone out there. There was a lot of drug taking amongst the military, so our personal safety was a factor. At times I felt we were more in jeopardy from the American military than from the Viet Cong. That fear was borne out one day when we were walking back from the hospital - I felt really threatened. We were in a lot of danger, a lot of danger, but we were rescued by a Vietnamese shop owner."

Clinch: "One night the surgeon and I were just about to leave the ward to go back to the house when we heard this army truck pull up. We thought: Here's trouble and we heard the clump of heavy boots. These Vietnamese Army troops came in and dumped about 6 or 8 stretches on the floor, and one of the wounded soldiers died just as they put him down. The troops immediately raised their guns at us, because one of their men had died. The fact that we hadn't had time to do anything for him didn't matter to them. We eventually convinced them, after a lot of arguing, that they shouldn't shoot us because if they did we wouldn't be able to look after the others. My hair stood on end that night. We found out later that their behaviour stemmed from the fact that if one of the South Vietnamese troops died in a civilian hospital, their wife didn't get the pension."

Maureen McLeod Spicer was also present when a motorcyclist was hit by a convoy truck. He was knocked off his cycle, which fell on him. Just as Maureen and her companions reached him in order to help him, the petrol tank exploded and the cyclist burst into flame. Maureen and the medicos were unable to shift the cycle and had to stand by watching helplessly while the man burned to death. "I can still hear the screams," she says, "The screaming, screaming, screaming, and then it finally stopped. I still experience flashback of this incident. I smell burning flesh, then I want to be sick."
 

Civilian nurses' preparation to go to Vietnam:
McLeod: "I don't think we were prepared at all. We got a hand-out, written by someone who had gone up there prior to the first team going. What they gave us on the area and its people you could have got out of any text book, but it didn't prepare you for the cultural differences. I think that if we'd had people from, say, the Buddhist community to speak to us about what their health beliefs are, that would have prepared us much better. We went in with all our Western ideas about health and illness and how you approach it. Just by having those understandings I think we might have been more sympathetic towards them. We still would have done the same, but perhaps we would have gone about it in a different way."
 
 

Read about the nurses Who served at Long Xuyen Click on Graphic!

Australian teams of civilian nurses and doctors served in Vietnam for 16 years commencing 1964.
As a result the health of many of them has been permanently affected, both physically and mentally. A group of them calling itself Civilian Nurses - Australian Surgical Teams Vietnam (CN-ASTV) is campaigning for recognition as war casualties. At the moment the victims are getting no help from the Australian government or the military, they received no post trauma counselling or any other form of support on their return.
 

Our thanks to the Department of Veterans' Affairs for its grant to enable the writing of A WOMAN'S WAR - a biography of Wilma Oram Young under the project banner "Their Service Our Heritage" A prisoner under the Japanese she lived to become one of Australia's great heroes. Click here to email for further details. "A WOMAN'S WAR" AVAILABLE NOW! New Holland Publishers

The following  paraphrases a presentation prepared for the Australian Department of Veterans' Affairs in an attempt to bring the situation to the government's notice. The original presentation was written by Dorothy Angell but it has been edited under her supervision for the Internet.
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Click here for source references.

Background: Australian Civilian Medical Aid to South Vietnam:
Vietnam (then known as the Republic of Vietnam - RVN), a regular member of the Colombo Plan, had been getting civilian aid from Australia since 1954. In addition to this, as a Protocol State under the SEATO alliance, the Republic was also entitled to benefit under Australia's SEATO Aid program.

By the 1960s, partly due to the French withdrawal, civilian medical services in South Vietnam were in a state of crisis. There were disastrous side effects from the war too: increasingly large numbers of both civilian and military casualties, and a severe shortfall in the number of local medical graduates because of army conscription. Tuberculosis, intestinal parasites, leprosy and malaria, had always been major problems in Vietnam, but now within the overcrowding and squalid conditions there was an outbreak of plague in 1961. Cholera was on the rise and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) predicted the possibility of a widespread epidemic.

The RVN Government asked USAID for medical teams to deal with the rising health problems and it was decided to provide surgical teams to work at selected provincial hospitals.

In 1962 USAID relayed the RVN request for more medical support to the Australian Government. This request was endorsed and the Department of External Affairs approached a number of Australia's teaching hospitals to provide surgical services and medical care to the South Vietnamese population under the USAID program.

Aid arrives in '63:
The first foreign medical assistance arrived from USAID in 1963 with 3 American surgical teams. Other teams came from the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Spain, Iran, the Philippines, South Korea and Taiwan, while a German Hospital ship, the Helgoland, was moored in the Saigon river.

1,500,000 Refugees !
Added to this chaos a ragged tide of around 1,500,000 refugees straggled in from North Vietnam to find a dubious security in Saigon. Destruction of villages, the uncontrolled movement of groups of people, the squalor of the makeshift refugee camps: these broke down the barriers to the spread of disease. The plague outbreak that began in 1961, had spread to 24 of the 41 provinces of South Vietnam by 1967.

Loss of crops and the difficulty of food distribution, with railways blown up and roads unsafe, caused under-nutrition, especially amongst children.
 

What were the Aims of these Civilian Australian Surgical Teams?

•  to provide a diplomatic gesture by being seen to give Australian aid to the RVN
• to instruct Vietnamese medical and paramedical personnel
• to treat any person who presented at the hospital

 The CN-ASTV Group (Civilian Nurses, Australian Surgical Teams, Vietnam 1964-1972) has again submitted the case on behalf of the Civilian Surgical teams, making the following recommendation:
1.    That the Senate Foreign Affairs, Defense and Trade Legislation Committee of Inquiry into the Veterans' Affairs Legislation Amendment action the recommendation of the Review committee in regard to the Civilian Surgical and Medical Teams service in Vietnam.

2. That the Minister of Veterans' Affairs, under 5R of the Veterans' Entitlement Act 1986, be required to give notice of the Civilian Surgical and Medical Teams service, in Vietnam, eligibility for qualifying service under the Act.

"It is recommended that Australian Civilian Surgical and Medical Teams operating in Vietnam during the Vietnam War be deemed as performing qualifying service for repatriation benefits." This recommendation was made to the Australian government in February 2000 by Major General Bob Mohr RFD ED RL, Chairperson of the committee reviewing Service Entitlement Anomalies in Respect of South-East Asian Service 1955-75.

Links on this Site Brave Women  .  Vivian Bullwinkel  .  Wilma Oram Young  .  The Wah Sui Incident  .  The Banka Island massacre The forgotten prisoners of Rabaul  .  The sinking of the Vyner Brooke  .  The Tol Plantation massacre . Long Xuyen Experience .

Other related links Australian Nurses' Memorial  .  Australian War Memorial  .  Warlinks  .  UN in Vietnam  .    .  Women Served in Vietnam  .  Australian involvement in Vietnam  .  Australian Nursing Federation   .  Sharon Lane Memorial Clinic

 

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Further reading:
The words of the following scholars have been paraphrased in the above article with the aim of turning an academic work into an Internet page. This was done by the editor, not by the writer of the original article (which was produced for a purpose other than an Internet page). The Editor apologizes if any offense is caused but urges the readers of this Page to refer to the following sources for additional information:
 References
Angell, D. (2000) Australian Civilian Surgical Teams Vietnam 1964 – 1973 (Unpublished submission)
Angell, D. (1999) Breaking the Silence:  The Experience of the Civilian Nurses in Vietnam. Thesis for PhD, LaTrobe University, Melbourne.
Brass, A. (1967a) Foreign Medical Aid to South Vietnam.The New England Journal of Medicine, 277: 789-793.
Brass, A. (1967b) Medicine in South Vietnam Today. Sydney, Australasian Medical Publishing Co. Ltd.
Brass, A. (1968) Bleeding Earth- a doctor looks at Vietnam. Melbourne, William Heinemann Ltd.
Crowe, A. (1999) The Battle After the War: The story of Australia’s Vietnam Veterans, St. Leonards, NSW, Allen & Unwin.
Evans, B. (1968) Caduceus in Saigon. Melbourne, Hutchinson Publishing Group.
Grove, G. (1967) Background to the Australian Surgical Teams in South Vietnam. The Medical Journal of Australia, 2:331
King, K. (1967) Orthopaedic Aspects of Surgical Work in South Vietnam. The Medical Journal of Australia, 2:331.
Large, P. (1967) Trauma, Accident and War. The Medical Journal of Australia, 2:331
Macleish D.G.(1967)Surgery of Indigenous Disease. The Medical Journal of Australia, 2:331
O’Keefe, B. (1994) Medicine at War. St Leonards, NSW, Allen & Unwin in association with the Australian War Memorial.
Santamaria, J. (1967) The Wider View. The Medical Journal of Australia, 2:331.
Snell, J. (1967) Plastic Surgery in Vietnam. The Medical Journal of Australia,2:331.
Terry, S.(1966) House of Love. Melbourne, Lansdowne Press Pty. Ltd.
The Alfred Heritage Committee (1999) Faces and Places VolumeII.Box Hill, Victoria, Jenkin Buxton Printers.

A.H.A- Alfred Hospital Archival Box 8- Surgical teams South Vietnam.
( Contents of the box were not catalogued, numbering system evolved by the author)

1. Australian Surgical Teams in Vietnam- Background Paper from Dept. External Affairs.
2. External Aid Bulletin No. 15 Dec.1968, Dept. External Affairs.
3. Vietnam- Issued under the authority of the Minister for External Affairs, Nov. 1965
4. Report to Department of External Affairs- Professor Sydney Sunderland.
5. Feasibility study of Bien Hoa re: site for 2nd Australian team  7.6.65 Report of visit to Bien Hoa  23.11.65
6. DDMS Technical Weekend 18-19 Sept.’65- Care of Civilian Population Vietnam.
7. Epidemiological situation in Vietnam  23.1.68
8. Dept. External Affairs- Administrative Arrangements and Guidance Notes,
    Australian Surgical Teams, Vietnam Nov.1968
9. Team Reports
10 Slaughter, J (1997) Casual Recollections from a Distance. Unpublished paper

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  THE LONG XUYEN EXPERIENCE.
(Australian Civilian Surgical Teams in Vietnam)
See also Pat Deal's report.

Jan Rayner Mills
...was the first Nurse Educator to go to Vietnam for the Australian Government. The position was to act as advisor to the Vietnamese nurse instructors at the Long Xuyen Hospital in An Giang Province in the Mekong Delta. She arrived at Long Xuyen in the first week of September 1967 to join the team from Prince Henry's Hospital (Melbourne). This was about 6 weeks before that team's departure for home. They were then replaced by a NSW team. "As to what team I actually belonged to - I was just a member of the SEATO Civilian Surgical Teams. As to any orientation or post briefing - there was absolutely none."
 

The only orientation, she said, was a briefing by a colonel at the Australian Air Force base at Bien Hoa on her first weekend in Vietnam who informed the new arrivals that they had now "entered a theatre of war".  Jan spent just over 12 months in South Vietnam, mostly at Long Xuyen, leaving at the end of September 1968. "It was a challenging year," she says, and it included the Tet Offensive. "The horrific injuries to children in particular are memories I will never forget." In the midst of all this Rayner-Mills's mother died unexpectedly and she had to rush home and then back again to complete her year.  When the Tet Offensive occurred, Rayner-Mills had gone with an American US Aid nursing advisor, also based in the Delta, to see the Australian Surgical team at Vung Tau. This was while they were en route to a planned meeting with the Ministry of Health of Vietnam in Saigon on the Monday. "The Tet Offensive occurred on the first night we were in Vung Tau. I was sent out to the Australian Army base to the Field Hospital with the Australian Surgical Team members. Here the continual Medivac choppers arriving with dead and injured Australian soldiers was a memory that is also unforgettable." Her American friend had flown back to Can Tho in the Delta and subsequently spent 8 hours under a truck sheltering from mortar fire. "I don't think Lois had any orientation either for coming to a war torn country and she, too, was a civilian nurse with no military experience."

After the Tet Offensive:
After the Tet Offensive, life was never quite the same. Rayner Mills recalls even stricter curfews with guards everywhere - even on the verandah outside the classrooms. Machine guns were stacked inside the classroom itself, and hand grenades were hanging off the door knobs while the students were receiving lessons. There were guns in the Operating Theatre while surgery was in progress. "What would Work Cover and the OH&S Regulations say to that?" she asks ironically.

Long Xuyen was, she says, an unusual place. There were only about 60 American military and a few US Aid workers, plus the Australian Surgical Team. A South Vietnam Division (with their own military hospital) was based in the town. "It was known that R&R (Rest and Recreation) was available to the Vietcong in the Long Xuyen area - and it was impossible to know who was who."
 

Contributed by Jan (Rayner) Mills
©May 2001

The NSW medical team in Long Xuyen in 1968 was due to complete its tour in October 1968. The next team from Western Australia that was to take over was not due until February 1969 because the Department of Foreign Affairs had apparently made an error in dates. Neither team either wanted to extend, or could be ready earlier, so there was a need for an interim team to cover that period.

The NSW Department of Health called for volunteers. The Commanding Officer of my army reserve hospital, Col. Keith Harris, applied and became the senior doctor for this tour. I became the senior nurse, even though I did not work for the Department of Health. Members of this team worked with the Vietnamese staff of the hospital. We covered three wards: Children's, Medical and Surgical, plus Operating Theatre, X-ray, Pathology and Outpatients' Clinic.

There were 3 nurses in the team. Two worked in the Operating Theatre and I covered the needs of all the wards. our main casualties were from trauma associated with the fighting that was going on around us in the Delta. Gunshot wounds, napalm burns, head injuries and fractures were the most common on the operating lists. the lists did not start until well into the day because most casualties had to be brought into hospital by any means of transport. Most were in very unstable conditions by the time they reached us and a large number required stabilization before we could operate. This is turn meant that operations were continuing well into the night.
 

A nurse with a gun? Pat learning to use M16 rifle to protect herself in time of crisis. "We all had positions to take up and had posts to go to if evacuation was required."

The medical ward had a variety of cases; tuberculosis (one of the spine), heart conditions, leprosy, a case of rabies and various neurological conditions. The Children's ward contained mainly burns victims and victims of dehydration from diarrhoea. I worked alongside the Vietnamese nurses dressing wounds, attending to intravenous solutions and medications. We also admitted the elective surgical patients because the surgeon was always too busy operating. The patients' families always sent a family member to obtain food and to carry out the basic nursing needs of the patient. When necessary I assisted in the operating theatre. On 2 occasions the paediatrician, physician and I went into the distant villages to conduct clinics.