Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, November 12, 1993 TAG: 9311120099
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BRIGID SCHULTE KNIGHT-RIDDER/TRIBUNE
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
Fourteen years later, while examining a Vietnamese refugee family at a public health clinic, someone slammed a door behind her. In one sweep, she had the family on the floor and had thrown her body over them.
"There's just a particular sound you recognize as an incoming. The war was right there in that room," she said. "I had to excuse myself. I was trembling."
That's when the night sweats started. The jumpiness. And the recurring nightmares: "It comes in flashes. I see a bloody hand," Jansons said. "I don't know what it means."
Jansons, 51, is among thousands of retired military nurses who came for the dedication of the first memorial to the women who served in Vietnam.
Nearly 11,000 nurses were changed forever by that brutal war. Many have sunk into depression or alcoholism. Others have tried suicide. Some, like Jansons, suffer from post traumatic stress syndrome, have a string of failed marriages behind them - Jansons has two - or have worked three jobs just to keep from remembering.
Many feel they have been forgotten. The memorial, they say, will finally tell their story, and give the healers a chance to heal.
Ruth Sidisin of Sumter, S.C., turned 40 in Vietnam. She had been an Air Force nurse in Japan shortly after World War II and nursed the poorest of the poor in Turkey. But it's Vietnam she can't get out of her mind.
She served in Saigon in the mid-1960s and had never felt the aftereffects of Vietnam until 1991. Television scenes from the Persian Gulf War dredged up an image that continues to haunt her: hundreds of caskets stacked up at the Air Base in Ton Son Nuht that she saw one night, ready to be sent home.
"It keeps coming back and back and back," said Sidisin, 63. "I keep seeing those damn caskets on the flight line."
As with Jansons and her nightmares of the bloody hand, counseling at a vet center has helped. Counselors taught Sidisin tricks - patting her purse or rubbing a medallion embossed with the map of Vietnam - to banish the image from her mind.
The war changed them. They became independent thinkers. They learned to rejoice in unshakable human bonds, in quiet heroism - soldiers without an arm or leg singing in the showers of the Da Nang hospital, happy just to be out of the jungle, just to be clean. They came to realize in the most profound way how fleeting a life can be. How precious each moment.
But for years, they failed to see how the war also robbed them of part of themselves, their gentleness, their innocence. And that being mother, sister, confidante and sweetheart to thousands of wounded soldiers had taken its toll.
Brenda Jansons sits in her Washington hotel room, not far from the Vietnam Memorial, fingering her silver dogtags, a stethoscope and the battered first lieutenant's "butter bar" she wore in 1968.
To this day, she says, there are things she cannot remember about the war. A former roommate had to remind her how they had hit the dirt under enemy fire as they got off the transport plane on their arrival.
She does remember that the war started all too quickly. She had agreed to go to Vietnam to be with her fiance, a Green Beret. Two days after they arrived in Vung Tau, he was killed. "I wanted to say, `Wait, I'm not ready,' " Jansons says. "But you're never ready."
Jansons hopes the Vietnam Women's Memorial will complete some circle, close some dark, lingering chapter that opened the day she landed "in country."
With the help of friends and counselors, she has just begun to remember one of her first days in Vietnam. In her mind, she sees herself walking toward the hospital. A gathering of soldiers stands a few yards away from her. A small Vietnamese boy walks up to one and hands him a package. In the next instant, she hears a thunderous explosion.
Jansons stops talking, stunned as the realization hits her.
What does she see?
She stares out the window. Tears pour down her face.
"A bloody hand," she says finally. "I see a bloody hand."
by CNB