American Veteran: Unforgettable Stories

MEEKS: My last day in country--in Vietnam, I was sitting outside and somebody came and said, “Oh, you have to come to the officer’s mess.” They had a TV there, and they were going to walk on the moon.

Audio: from TV coverage of moon landing, “Okay, I’m gonna step off the land now..”

MEEKS: And I said, why would I want to do that? That’s nothing. Our guys are dying over here. I could care less if somebody walks on the moon. Why don’t they stop this?

Audio: more pan “That’s one small step for man…”

MEEKS: So I didn't even look. I didn’t--it still means nothing to me.

Audio: “...one giant leap for mankind.”

KLAY: From Insignia Films and PRX for GBH, this is American Veteran: Unforgettable Stories. I’m Phil Klay.

I’m a veteran myself. I served in Iraq with the Marines, from 2007 to 2008, and now I write books about war. 

In each episode of this podcast we’ll hear one American vet tell us who they were before they joined, what they did, and who they became. These are their stories.

KLAY: Edie Meeks was interviewed in a TV studio in New York, for the American Veteran documentary series...

MEEKS: Back then they would take anybody and there was this one fellow there--I’m just going to ramble if it’s okay with you. There was this one fellow there who had a band around his arm...[fade under]

KLAY: In the late 1960s, Edie Meeks was an E.R. nurse in her home state of Minnesota. The Vietnam War was at its height, and two of her brothers were of draft age. “Tom” volunteered for the Marines, but the other brother chose a different path…

MEEKS: Charlie. He was five years younger than I am, and he was a war protester. He actually was arrested for protesting, and one of the things I knew about Charlie was he loved me and he loved Tom, but he hated the war. They each were doing what they wanted to do. Tom wanted to be a Marine, and Charlie wanted to protest.

KLAY: There should be no conflict here. The right to protest is one of the freedoms Marines swear to protect. In theory, Tom was fighting to protect Charlie’s rights. Still, it must have been strange for the brothers, and for Edie, the sister caught between them. 

MEEKS: Tom and I were close. We’re two years apart. He’s younger than I am, and Tom was very proud that he was a Marine, and that was when I really thought, you know, I’ve been places where I’ve nursed where the nurse hasn’t really wanted to be there. Therefore, the care might not have been the best, but I thought if something happened to my brother, I wanted the best. So I thought I better join, and do my part.  

KLAY: And so she did. 

Army nurses Film: “Army nurses. They come from every walk of life. From every state in the union. Some are just beginning their work…” [fade under and out]

KLAY: More than 10,000 women served in Vietnam during the war. Edie joined the Army Nurses Corps.

Film: “There is a common bond which draws these men and women together”

MEEKS: I enlisted in February of 1968 in Minnesota. I really had no idea whether the war was right or wrong. Midwesterners wanted the United States to be right. When I joined, it was not a negative thing at all.

Film: “Welcome to the United States Army Medical Field Service School. For the next few weeks, while you are here at Fort Sam Houston, Texas, you will be learning about the Army and its organization…” [fade under]

MEEKS: They taught us things like how to do tracheostomies and how to do cut-downs in case there were so many wounded that you needed to step up a notch in your nursing. My brother was shocked when I told him what my basic training was like, because he had gone through boot camp in the Marine Corps, and I said, well, it…you know, basic training isn’t all that bad. They come in and they make your bed and you know, polish the room up (laughs), and he said, uh, what basic training were you in? (laughs) And I said, well, it might have been different than yours (laughs).

KLAY: Yeah, in the Marines, at least in my experience, the sergeant instructors don’t come in and make your bed for you. I have seen them tear a mattress from the bunk and throw it at a Marine candidate though…So I get why Edie’s brother found that funny. 

Film: “There is much to learn about field equipment, and how nurses adapt their knowledge of nursing to the care of patients in the Army’s mobile field hospitals….”

KLAY: During basic training, Edie had her first inkling that her goals were not perfectly aligned with the goals of the military…

MEEKS: You were there learning how to take care of these guys, especially in tragic situations, and then they had a colonel come and tell us about the wound power of all of the explosives that we used, and I thought, this is really bizarre. This guy loves this, and I’m here because I want to take care of these guys, and I found that difficult in my service over there, too, you know, the whole thing was: preserve the fighting strength. I wanted to preserve the fighting strength so they could go home, not that they could go back to fight again.

Film: “Five weeks of orientation program go swiftly by for the new Army Nurse Corps Officers. Then it’s goodbye to Fort Sam Houston, and on to the first duty assignment, as a member of the Army medical department team. As they leave, they will be headed for all parts of…” [fade under]

MEEKS: Well, you got on the plane. And you could feel this feeling of we’re going to help, because Americans are really good people, and these guys wanted to help. They’re between 18 and 23, and they wanted to help, and then when we got over there, it was so different from what we thought it would be.

KLAY: Most soldiers go overseas with at least a little idealism. But war has a way of bruising, battering, and sometimes destroying that idealism pretty quickly.

My first month in Iraq, there was a suicide bomb outside our main gate. The bomber exploded among families going to mosque, and I helped carry a child, his body riddled with shrapnel wounds, to the Navy doctors. Seeing a child, with injuries far beyond anything I’d ever seen in peace-time or could even have imagined…it made all my pretty notions about war disappear.

MEEKS: I was assigned to 3rd field hospital in Saigon, and we stayed in…I think it must have been an apartment building. There was no air conditioning there, you had a fan, and you had a mama-san that cleaned your room, and washed your uniforms, and at that hospital, we wore white uniforms. I was told it was because that was supposed to be the showplace of the hospitals in Saigon, and you know, the Congressmen, whoever would come through there, so I guess we had to be fancy...but we got the same patients that everybody else did. You know, they’d fly them in from the field, and the injuries would be just like you’d see them out in the field, so it wasn’t like we got really clean patients coming in. (LAUGHS) So that was bizarre. The whole situation in Saigon was bizarre.

MEEKS: The first days, the guys came in, we worked 12 hours a day, six days a week, and you just keep going, and then after the newness wears off, then I started seeing these guys and how young they were and how much like my brothers they were. Every one of these guys was my brother. I could see the wonderfulness of these young men, and yet, they were being thrown away.

KLAY: This is something Edie gets right and Hollywood gets wrong about war. On screen, it’s always men fighting. But you can’t look at a platoon of marines heading off to war, some of them too young to even buy alcohol legally, and not think ‘these are just boys’.

MEEKS: The Huey was a lifesaver for the guys out in the field, and I remember talking to a friend of mine from the 1st Cav Association. We were talking about the Huey, and he said, oh, the Huey was just you heard that and you thought, I’m saved, and I said, you know, we’re like the negative of that picture, because when we heard the Huey, we thought, oh no. More casualties.

MEEKS: This one fellow. He came in with a terrible groin injury, and we weren’t sure what the repair was going to be, what his function was going to be, but at one point, he said to me, “Lieutenant, what, what’s happening?” And I said, Well, you, you have a groin injury.” He said, “But I haven’t even had a girlfriend” and my heart just broke for him.

MEEKS: Some of these guys had never seen the enemy. But they’d walk them through a patch that had all these landmines, and they’d get blown up and go home.

KLAY: A landmine doesn’t give you many opportunities for heroics, no chance to throw yourself at an enemy soldier. It’s just a blast in a field or a stretch of road. And in the current wars, land mines and homemade explosives are the largest killers of Americans. 

MEEKS: This young man was about 19 years old, and he came from a farm in Kansas, and he I think had stepped on a landmine, and it had really given him a terrible abdominal wound. We worked on him, and he had been there a couple of days, and he got a letter from his mother, and he asked me if I would read it to him, and I said sure. Now, coming from Minnesota, we have a family farm down in Jackson, Minnesota, and we used to go pheasant hunting down there, and his mother wrote and said, your dad just came in from pheasant hunting with the family dog and then went on to chat about what was going on locally and…but at the very end, she said we’re so proud of you, son...and three days later, he died. And...he was so my brother... that it’s one of those that I never forgot. He was the one that I never--that kept haunting me.

MEEKS: It was really hard, and it got harder. As time went on, I got so angry at the Army and at the government for what I called misusing my boys that finally I, I had to just shut down because the rage was becoming so huge that I couldn’t handle it. I couldn’t let that interfere with the care that I was giving these guys. I wasn’t angry at them, I was just angry…You didn’t have any time to process. Somebody said, well, did you talk about…we didn’t talk about anything. The last thing we wanted to do when we had our time off was talk about what was going on and feel our feelings. (LAUGHS) You know, we just wanted to survive.

KLAY: This is the psychological bind veterans can find themselves in. If you don’t talk about these experiences, they can fester. If you do, it’s like ripping the stitches out of a wound. And do you really want to do that when the horror is still rolling in? 

Edie tried to compartmentalize. She had a boyfriend in Saigon she had met stateside back in training. His job was to keep track of medical supplies coming into the country…

MEEKS: So the first couple of weeks, he would say, let’s go out to dinner. I’d say, oh, okay, and so after working 12 hours with these guys that were all blown up and then getting all dressed up, and they still had four-star restaurants over there because the French had been there for so long, and so you’d go to this fancy restaurant where people were eating like there was nothing wrong, and after a couple of weeks, I just thought, this is too bizarre, that for 12 hours, I’m taking care of these guys are coming dirty and you know, in pieces and then I go out to dinner? And talk about what? So I told him that I couldn’t date him anymore. I just couldn’t do it.

KLAY: The contradictions of life in Saigon eventually came to an end for Edie. She asked to be transferred, and after six months, she went three hundred miles north to a field hospital in Pleiku…a city in a region so defoliated by Agent Orange she thought it was a desert. In any case, it was much more dangerous...

MEEKS: We were rocketed there quite often so that when you went to work in the evening, you always took your flak jacket and your helmet because you never know if you were going to be rocketed, and if you were, you had to get all your patients underneath their beds, and if you couldn’t move the patient, if he was too severely injured or something, you put a mattress over him just in case the debris was to fall.

MEEKS: We also had in our hooches, which was the place where we stayed, they built the beds extra high so that we could crawl under them. One night I had like five gals underneath my bed. We were all chatting away there, and I thought if the rocket hit here, the hospital will be a little hard up.

MEEKS: I always put my hair up in rollers. I had done that always, because you’re supposed to look nice for your patients. I thought the worst thing that would happen is some poor guy comes in from the field, he’s all blown up and sees this hag standing there, you know? At least you could look half decent...

KLAY: You’d think that if you’ve been blown up by a land mine the last thing you’d care about is how your nurse looks. Though, given some of the soldiers and Marines I know, I bet this was appreciated. And more importantly, for a soldier or Marine coming in from blood and chaos, there’s something calming about being in an orderly place, being taken care of by someone who looks put together. It’s a subtle way of letting them know, you’re OK, you’re in a safe place, and you’re in good hands.

During this time, Edie also started reconnecting with that boyfriend back in Saigon. Somehow, the distance between them made it easier.

MEEKS: One night, I was on the ward, and I got a call from him. He started calling every night, and we would just talk about anything but. But I didn't have to get dressed up and go out and be polite and look in his face, and you know, I just had somebody to talk to, and it was wonderful. He really saved my sanity.

KLAY: That man would eventually become Edie’s husband.

[MIDROLL]

KLAY: Edie’s tour of Vietnam lasted one year, which was the usual length of deployment at that time. As her DEROS, or “Date Estimated Return from Overseas,” approached, she found it increasingly difficult to think about leaving…

MEEKS: It was surprising to me because everybody was always talking about their DEROS, when they were going to leave, how many days it was, but as the time got closer and closer, you almost felt like maybe I should re-up for another year over here. You hadn’t finished. You felt they still needed you. It’s a desperate need, you know, that these guys have, and you thought, but I haven’t finished. I haven’t stopped this. And so I felt kind of guilty. At first (LAUGHS) when I thought, oh, I should re-up for another year. I thought, are you out of your mind? You know, I really had to hold onto myself so I wouldn’t put my little hand to pen there.

KLAY: I know so many vets who feel the same way. In neverending wars like the ones we’ve had in recent years, service members have had to either make their own private peace with leaving, or just keep going back. In my case, I left the Corps for a comfortable life in New York as a student, a life totally disconnected from the wars. Except, of course, every once in a while I’d be in a bar and get a call, and I’d learn that a Marine I’d known, a Marine who’d chosen to stay in and deploy again, had been blown up. Had been shot. Had been killed. It’s a hard thing to wrap your head around. 

Ultimately Edie was grateful she resisted the urge to re-up.

MEEKS: Years later when I saw what the one year did to me, I don’t know what would have happened if I had been there two years. I don’t know if I could function. I remember there was a gal that I went through basic training with, and she was known for her ability to start an IV no matter what condition that guy was when he came in. And she said about the seventh or eighth month that she was there, all of a sudden, she couldn’t start a single IV. She couldn’t make it work. Her commanding officer changed her to a different area. She said, I think you’ve had enough here.

KLAY: Everyone has a breaking point. It doesn’t matter how tough you think you are. War has a way of asking of people more than human beings can give.

At the end of Edie’s tour of duty, she started getting an inkling of what awaited her back home, from new personnel arriving in Vietnam. The war was increasingly unpopular. People were NOT thanking returning soldiers for their service… 

MEEKS: Nurses were coming in and saying, whatever you do, when you hit the states, take your uniform off. Bring a set of clothes with you so you can change when you’re there, and that was the first time that I was really alerted that something was really different with the attitude of the people toward the soldiers.

MEEKS: And when I came back on the plane, and I think there were only two females on that plane, all the rest were GIs who had been there for a year, and the feeling was just totally different. It was like down...it was...I think it was disappointed, it was really kind of sad.

KLAY: Edie had still had six months of military service to do. She went to Madigan Army Medical Center in Washington State. She mostly stayed on the base, and when she left she was usually in civilian clothes. She didn’t want to talk about her experiences in Vietnam. There was so much hostility back then, not just toward the war, but to the veterans who served in it as well. Returning vets told stories of being insulted to their faces, rumors spread of anti-war protesters spitting on soldiers, and even veterans of previous wars looked down on the Vietnam generation, who’d ended America’s military winning streak. But for Edie, there was something else as well...

MEEKS: I was in this patient’s room, and she said to me, “(GASPS) Edie, I heard you were a nurse in Vietnam. What was it like?” And I stood there, and I turned around, and I walked out. There is no way you can explain in three minutes what it was like, so you don’t say anything, and that’s mainly what it was. I just didn't say anything for years.

I don’t think I even knew what was happening to me. I thought I had a great life, and yet, I kept getting more and more depressed, and I didn't know why.

KLAY: She did have a great life, on the surface. But inside, the war was far from finished with Edie. Her depression eventually led her to seek professional help…

MEEKS: And you think that maybe you’ve got a handle on these things, but sometimes too it’s like with songs, the songs--the music during that time was very important to the guys, and to us too, but I can remember driving down the road, and one of the songs came on that had been played over there a lot. And all of a sudden, I had a flashback, and after that, I was so scared because I was back there, and so I had to pull over. And I immediately called my psychologist at the VA and I said, this is what’s happened, and he said, yeah, that’s not a surprise. He said, you might not want to listen to that station, (LAUGHS) and I said, you’re right. I mean, I was so surprised, but it just triggered it.

KLAY: Memory is such a strange and powerful thing, and as you get older, experiences you thought were buried have a way of resurfacing. As happened with Edie in a conversation with her friend Diane, who also served in Vietnam. Over dinner one evening, Diane talked about a sexual assault she had experienced there.

MEEKS: And all of a sudden, I said to her, I was raped...but I was so surprised, and when I talked to my psychiatrist about it, she said, this is not a big surprise. You were so inundated with things that you didn't have time to process the patients you were taking care of, not only that, but you knew that even if you took it to someone, it wouldn’t go anyplace because the female officers higher than you probably wouldn’t have done anything with it, and so why even tell anybody? And so I just stuffed it away. I thought, I’ll think about that later. And then it just got so pushed back and so pushed back that I didn't even remember. It was--it was really, really a surprise (LAUGHS). But this was not uncommon over there for the women that served, not uncommon at all.

KLAY: Edie was dealing with complex trauma. It’s shocking to hear that her rape was something she could stuff away. But she was in an overwhelming environment, where she couldn’t trust her own leadership to take care of her. In an intense time, what’s really important can get lost, for our own protection. 

Edie and her husband settled in Garrison, NY. Edie continued working as a nurse. They had two children, and eventually those children went off to college. All in all, a normal, productive life. But… 

MEEKS: My daughter, who was going to Mount Holyoke, was taking a course on the 60s,and I said to her, is that history already? But there was also a gentleman who was teaching a course on Vietnam that a friend of hers was taking, and he would start the course by saying “you women will never know what it’s like to be at war.” Well, of course my daughter was a budding feminist, called me up and she said, “Mom, can you come up here and talk?” So I went up there, and I had never talked about it before.

Audio clip from Letters from Home: “Dear Mom and Dad, I guess by now you are worried sick over my safety…” [fade under]

MEEKS: First we saw a film called Letters From Home, it practically tore my heart out, and then I was supposed to get up and speak (LAUGHS), but my daughter gets up, and she said, “I want to introduce you to my mother, Edie Meeks. She was a nurse who served in Vietnam, and I’m so proud of her.” It’s still really…because no one had ever said that, so I got up and I said to the young women, “I don’t know anything about the politics, but I’ll tell you what it felt like to be a woman over in Vietnam”, and at the very end, when people were coming up and saying, thank you so much, whatever, the last little gal came up to me and she said, “Oh, Mrs. Meeks. I would have welcomed you home”, and I thought maybe it’s going to take the next generation, because to this day, my generation is still very conflicted about it.

KLAY: In 1993 Edie attended the dedication of the Vietnam Women’s Memorial, which provided the recognition she’d been denied when she first came home.

Ceremony audio: “Let us begin with a moment of silence, a moment to allow ourselves to be truly present to this place, to this time, to one another, and to God.” [fade under]

KLAY: From the outside, military ceremonies can seem like so much pomp and circumstance, but imagine how it looked from Edie’s perspective. What we honor says a lot about who we are as a nation, and what we value. And for a long time we’ve undervalued the contributions of women in our military. 

Ceremony audio: “We who went into the hill with a willingness to touch, to hold, to listen, to care, came home forever changed. We were and we are every woman.” [fade under]

MEEKS: It’s VERY moving, the ceremony, if you ever get to see one, is very moving, and all of a sudden, I felt so proud that I had served, that I had been an Army nurse. And what it really showed me was that I didn't sit on the sidelines and gripe. I took a stand. I took…I was an active participant in history, and I believe that’s what we all were, that joined the service. And so were the protesters. We were active participants in history.

[Credits]

KLAY: American Veteran: Unforgettable Stories is a production of Insignia Films, and PRX for GBH. The lead podcast producer is Curtis Fox, the composer and sound designer is Ian Coss, and the executive producers for Insignia Films are Amanda Pollak and Leah Williams. Stephen Ives did the interview with Edie Meeks. Thanks to Kathleen Horan and Matt Gottesfeld for their research. For GBH, Devin Maverick Robins is managing producer, and Judith Vecchione and Elizabeth Deane are the executive producers.

KLAY: Funding for American Veteran: Unforgettable Stories was provided by The Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Additional funding was provided by The Wexner Family Charitable Fund, Battelle Memorial Institute, JPMorgan Chase, and Analog Devices.

KLAY: For more powerful memories from veterans, visit PBS.org/American Veteran, where you can also watch the American Veteran television series and digital short films. You can also learn more by using #AmericanVeteranPBS.”

I’m Phil Klay. Thanks for listening.

[GBH Sting]

Note: Red text denotes Archival Transcription.