— Maggie Gordon

ALTAMONT — Some lessons stay with you for a lifetime. Helen Vartigan is 63 now. She remembers her tour of duty as a 25-year-old nurse in Vietnam as vividly as if it were yesterday.

She shared her memories this week, the day after Memorial Day, at a quiet corner table in the Home Front Café.

Pictures of a herself in service show a young woman with the same no-nonsense short hair as today — though darker. She has, too, the same steadfast gaze.

At one point, she talked about the challenge of working in a makeshift war front hospital without enough staff.
"We had to learn a lesson — how to triage. Nobody wants to let somebody die, so at first we tried to save everybody, but it was just impossible," Vartigan said. "We provided comfort and pain relief for the dying, and handled those we knew would survive... People felt bad because of those that they had to set aside."

She is proud of her service and has shared some of her memorabilia for an exhibit sponsored by the Foundation of New York State Nurses.

History on exhibit
Traditionally, Memorial Day is centered around men on the front lines. This year though, the foundation is showing an exhibit entitled "They Also Served: Nurses in the Military," which is drawing attention to the women who risked their lives to save others.

The exhibit, open to the public, is located at the Vietnam Memorial Gallery in the Justice Building’s east lobby on State Street in Albany. It features uniforms, photographs, original research, and scrapbooks from nurses dating back to World War I.
"The exhibit gives people a real sense of what a nurse’s experience in the military is," said Rachel Donaldson, the archivist for the Center for Nursing Research at the Foundation of New York State Nurses, located in Guilderland. "I think we often think of the military as the soldiers, but there are also the nurses that help heal the soldiers. The visitors will get an idea of the side of military that they don’t really see."
Cathryne Welch, the director of the Center for Nursing Research, said, "The exhibit provides visitors with a very clear and direct sense of the nature of military nursing and how important nursing services are to those who are serving."

Inspired by Kennedy

A large number of the objects in the Vietnam portion of the exhibit were donated by Vartigan. As an Army nurse, she was stationed in Cu Chi from 1966 to 1967. The exhibit includes Vartigan’s hat, dog tags, shirt, and photographs from her tour of duty.
Vartigan graduated from high school in 1959, and decided to go into nursing. "Most of my friends went into nursing or teaching or secretarial work," she said. "At one time, I had thought about becoming a lawyer, but it wasn’t common for a woman to do that."

After her graduation from nursing school in 1963, she worked at a small hospital in Troy, N.Y.. From there, she decided to join the Army.
"I guess I was a product of the Kennedy era," Vartigan said, as she sat at a table decorated with Benny Goodman sheet music and a recipe for Tasty War Cakes, beneath the Orsini flag in Cindy Pollard’s World War II themed Home Front Café.
"I believed in Kennedy when he told us to ‘ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country,’" she said.

Vartigan was stationed at the 12th Evacuation Hospital, located on the base camp of the 25th Infantry Division. When she first arrived, approximately 29 to 35 nurses were stationed there, assigned to provide medical support for the 20,000 men in the division.

The hospital she was stationed at opened on Christmas Day in 1966. Vartigan described the hospital as a football field with an operating room, emergency room, recovery room, and intensive care units on one side.
"On my side," she said, "we had the orthopedic division, the Vietnamese ward, two general surgical wards, and a medical ward."

For the first six months of her tour, there were no sidewalks to transport patients from one ward to the other, nor was there any overhead coverage to protect the nurses and patients from the weather.
"We had to wait until the rain stopped before transferring wards," Vartigan said.
"The temperature was about 110 degrees daily," Vartigan said. "We actually became acclimatized to the heat, so when it went down to 70 or 80 degrees, we were cold."

Sometimes the weather made it easy for Vartigan and the other nurses to miss home. Christmas came without snow or pine trees. When another nurse received a package from home containing some pie and pine needles from Kansas, it was the smell that made the holiday for Vartigan.
Vartigan worked a 12-hour shift six days a week. While she was not working, she attended parties, watched "cowboy and Indian" movies, and played volleyball. While there were many fun activities for her to take part in, there was always work to be done.

Challenges
"The most challenging part was trying to provide the best care possible with limited equipment. We had to do a lot of improvising," Vartigan said. At times, the nurses would use empty IV bottles for chest drainage, and construct colostomy bags from the plastic covering on IV tubes.
"It wasn’t ideal, but it served it’s purpose," she said.

The minimal staffing was also a big challenge for Vartigan. She was the head nurse in the orthopedic ward; usually one enlisted person with medical training and one nurse was assigned to each ward, she said. The wards housed 30 patients each, and sometimes there was not enough room for all the patients.
Sometimes Vartigan felt as though her own life was in danger. "Because we were on the grounds of the 25th, we were mortared probably 10 times during the year I was there," she said. "We did feel as though we were in danger.
"I look at history as something really important. In a sense, it’s the map to the future, in that if you don’t know where you’ve been, how do you know where to go"" Vartigan said. "I would hope you would really think we had learned our lesson.
"I’m very supportive of our troops. I just wish that there were ways that this could have been handled without loss of life or severe wounds to our youth," she said of the current war.
Vartigan still keeps in contact with many of the other nurses from their hospital; every four or five years, they hold a large reunion. "The 12th Evacuation is very close," Vartigan said.

Vartigan is even planning on spending some time this summer to visit Beth Parks, an Army nurse who worked in the operating room at the 12th Evacuation Hospital. Parks, who now lives in Maine, spoke at the opening reception of the exhibit this May.
"Visiting the exhibit was kind of fun," Parks said. "I haven’t looked at all those things in years."
"I’m so glad I did it," she said of her time on tour. "I would do it again at the drop of a hat."