An Iowa Veteran Describes Her Experiences as a Nurse During the Vietnam War

The Vietnam Women's Memorial Foundation estimates that 11,000 military women were stationed in Vietnam during the conflict, and approximately 90 percent of them served as nurses. This video includes archival footage and an interview with Iowa veteran Grace Lilleg Moore. Moore describes her experiences as a nurse in the 12th Evacuation Hospital near Cu Chi, Vietnam, in 1968, and explains the emotional impact of this work during and after the war.

Prior to graduating from nursing school, Grace Moore, formerly Grace Lilleg, from Dewar, Iowa, made a two-year commitment to the Army. Halfway through her hitch, she received orders for Vietnam. 

"I'm like, 'Okay, thank you', and hung up. And I chain smoked almost a whole pack of cigarettes before I had nerve enough to call home. I didn't even call my mother. I called my sister. And I said to her, 'Don't tell mom.' She goes, 'Don't tell mom what?' I'm like, 'Just don't tell mom, don't tell mom.' And she said, 'Don't tell her what?' I said, 'I'm going to Vietnam.' And she says, 'Well, what am I supposed to tell her, you fell off the edge of the Earth?'

More than 7,500 U.S. women served in Vietnam. Eighty-five percent were nurses and eight died serving their country. 

Lieutenant Moore was assigned to the 12th Evacuation Hospital at Cu Chi where some of the bloodiest fighting of the War took place. 

Eventually, she became head nurse of the orthopedic ward.

"You tried your best to distract, to help. We wore eye makeup because we just felt like that was something that would be uplifting to these young people. In the morning, we would get up in Vietnam in 120 degrees and put on mascara, that kind of stuff, those little things like that, you know."

For Moore, the stress of Vietnam bubbled to the surface only once, when she learned a friend had been wounded and was in route to Cu Chi for treatment. 

"And so I didn't get to see him until he came out of x-ray and he was burned, not severely. I mean, he wasn't even admitted to the hospital. He was treated and sent back to his unit. But he was the first person that I knew, I mean, I knew this person not just as a soldier, I knew him as a person. And that was the first time I cried in Vietnam. I went outside behind the Quonset hut and I vomited and I bawled. And I think that was the only time that I remember really crying."

During her seven-month tour of duty, Moore felt like she was working on an assembly line because patients stayed on her ward for no more than three days.

"The wounds were just horrific. We didn't close them so the wounds would be open and you would change the dressings two or three times a day because they would drain. But you couldn't close them because when the guys came into the ER they might have pieces of rocks, shrapnel, dirt, leaves, their uniform, in their wounds, blown into the wounds and if you would close that it was like a perfect medium for bacteria to grow and they would get horrible infections. So the wounds were left open. So you were constantly changing dressings, giving pain medicine, typical things."

Moore quickly developed strategies to help her cope with the horrors of war.

"They call it psychic numbing and it's something you don't consciously do, it's just your body's way of protecting yourself from what you have to do and how you would feel. So your feelings are just, they're just kind of, you don't have feelings when you're working because we were busy. And when somebody asks you years later, how did you do that? You're like, I don't know. I just did."

"I quit going to church. I had no faith. I lost everything. It was a bad time with lots of casualties that you can't fix them, you can't fix them, you can only help. And I'm like, no, my God wouldn't do this. So I said, I'm done with you. And I didn't start going back to church until after I got back from Vietnam."