Proud of Her Vietnam Service
Graduated from Porterville High
Nancy Chadwell had a long and distinguished career as a nurse, but what she is most proud of in those 40-plus years is the year she served as a nurse in Vietnam. Chadwell retired in 1995 and is probably the only person to have been a nurse on opening day of both the Porterville State Hospital on June 3, 1953 and then at Sierra View Hospital when it opened its doors on March 1, 1958
However, she calls her year serving as a surgical nurse in Vietnam in 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War, the most important year of her life.
A 1952 graduate of Porterville High, Chadwell, who was born and grew up in Porterville, began nursing school at French Hospital in San Francisco in 1954.
She worked as a nurse there for a number of years before joining the Army in 1967 with the sole intent of serving in Vietnam.
In 1967-69 some of the fiercest fighting occurred in Vietnam. It was during that period the Tet offensive occurred when the United States saw some of the most causalities of that long war.
“I had been thinking about it for years,” she told of joining the Army at the age of 32. “I just thought to do it,” she added during a recent interview at her Springville area home.
After joining in August of 1967 and soon completing basic training, she asked to be sent to Vietnam.
“I kept going into personnel and said I wanted to go to Vietnam. Everyone (nurses) wanted to go to Vietnam,” she added.
She served at two locations in the Southeast Asian country. She first served for seven months at a MUST (Mobile Unit Self Containable Transportable) at Dong Tam, then for another five months at the 12th Evac at Cu Chi. She was a scrub nurse.
She returned home in December of 1969.
She saw more wounded than she’d care to remember.
“Oh yeh, they (wounded) came in all the time,” she said as they would operate on as many as possible, then those who survived were flown out to hospitals later that day.
“They’d bring them in by choppers,” she said, agreeing the choppers looked just like the one now erected as a memorial to that war in Veterans Park on West Henderson Avenue.
She said the wounded, sometimes scores of them, would be triaged as to priority for surgery, which most needed.
However, not all got surgery. She explained there were four stages of wounded. “The fourth stage, you just put them in a back room because they were going to die,” she explained solemnly. One nurse would be assigned those mortally wounded.
Chadwell said they would operate on a solider and then move to the next. The floors of the operating rooms were covered in blood.
They seldom got to know any of the wounded, as they would be flown out within a few hours of surgery, unlike the popular TV show MASH which was about a mobile surgical hospital in Korea.
She recalls because they were in a combat zone, they had to wear flak jackets because the threat of mortar attacks was every day. Sometimes, they would remove their flak jackets and place them over the wounded to protect them in an attack.
Chadwell said they saw wounded almost every day, but they tried to relax and lift each other’s spirits as often as they could.
She said they would gather and have fun. One particular event that stands out for her was a football game between the nurses and soldiers. She scored the winning touchdown.
Proud of Service
Chadwell, who served 20 years in the Army and re-