Susan Thomas Vietnam Era Army Nurse Provides a Lifetime of Service

Susan Thomas, a veteran of the U.S. Army Nurse Corps, served during the Vietnam War era. After Officer Training at Brooke Army Medical Center at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas, she was stationed at Ft. Riley, Kansas, where, as an active-duty nurse on a 50-bed surgical ward, she provided a wide range of care including immunizing troops as they prepared for deployment. She was present as the 1st Infantry Division, also known as The Big Red One, left for Vietnam. “I didn’t go to Vietnam but was stationed stateside in support of the troops sent to war, and I cared for the wounded on their return to the U.S.” There are heart-wrenching memories from that period but it meant everything to render assistance to those who were injured in combat.

Susan’s grandmother was an RN and, as far back as she can remember, Susan admired her with every fiber of her being. “I knew from the time I was a small child that I wanted to be a nurse just like her. I used to walk around the house in her white shoes,” she laughed. Born to a military family in Wichita, Kansas, Susan attended grade school in Casablanca, Morocco, due to her father’s work there. She graduated from the International School in Brussels, Belgium. It all sounds very exotic, she admits, but as a kid it seemed like “just the norm” to her.

Reaching Her Dream
After graduating in Brussels, Susan returned to Wichita to attend the St. Francis School of Nursing, a three-year diploma program situated within a hospital. “Nursing school was everything I wanted it to be,” she said of the experience. The first two years were academic and involved hands-on hospital work, giving baths and patient care. For three years she lived in a dorm with the same roommate, and in the final year she was class president. “Many of those people are still my best friends to this day,” she
said fondly.

It was during her third year that Susan decided to join the Army. “We were a very patriotic family and having lived in Europe solidified and intensified our pride as Americans.” The catalyst for that decision was Vietnam. A compassionate soul by nature, Susan wanted to do her part and credits her parents with instilling values that led to the decision. “The way my folks always kept the family involved with volunteering, they were consistently setting that example, so it’s just in my DNA.” In fact, when the time came, she would have gone to Vietnam herself, but the army had a rule against sending married nurses, and by then she was married, so deployment was not an option.

Reciprocal Caring
Susan had great respect for the young soldiers recovering in her hospital, not just for their sacrifices, but for how she saw them pitching in to take care of one another. Sometimes their girlfriends would leave them, or worse, their own mothers abandoned them, “but they never abandoned each other,” she said. “They would help one another, serve food, clean up and make themselves useful. After all, they were still in the military, even as hospital patients. They didn’t think about it, it was just a given that they were expected to stay busy doing what they could.” Susan witnessed, time and again, how this self-reliance gave the patients purpose, helped them to feel valued and to get well sooner. “These corpsmen were very intelligent,” she said, “they were leading teams for us, administering meds, taking blood pressure readings, like licensed vocational nurses, practically.”

Susan went through officer training in 1965 and had risen to the level of 1st lieutenant when she became pregnant with her first child. In 1966, married women could serve as army nurses but not pregnant women, so she was given honorable discharge from the Army. Happily, this coincided with the completion of her husband’s Air Force enlistment and freed them to relocate and start a new chapter. Four months later they left Wichita and drove cross country to Berkeley, California, where hostilities against the Vietnam war and anyone involved were amplified, to say the least.

Transition to Civilian Life
“I loved being in the military,” Susan shared, “but in Berkeley you quickly learned to keep quiet about your military past. You buried that deep. Even in the ER, you did not mention that you had a military past because patients were likely to shout, ‘Don’t let her touch you, she was in the military!’” But for Susan, the far more painful thing was witnessing the brutal contempt with which soldiers returning from war were treated by the public. “It was awful. You had to bury your anger very deeply at seeing them treated so horribly upon their return,” she explained of the years they spent in Berkeley before moving to Stockton to raise their family.

Not long ago, Susan read Kristin Hannah’s The Women, which recounts the experiences of nurses during the Vietnam war. “I cried so many times with flashbacks,” she confided. Still, it’s a story worth knowing and important for younger people to understand what was happening at that time. Susan struggled with guilt for many years over not being able to go to Vietnam. But a veteran at the American Legion Karl Ross Post No.16 brought her a new perspective she had never considered. He told her, “The difference is, you women volunteered. You weren’t drafted, you volunteered. We men went because we were enlisted. We had no choice; we had to go. So, there’s a lot of respect we male veterans have for you women.”

Despite some of the more difficult memories, Susan said, “I loved every moment of nursing” as she reflected on her lengthy and fulfilling career that included 36 years with St. Joseph’s Hospital in Stockton. In addition to her role as critical care manager of a medical/surgical unit, Susan served as director of emergency services. Her other duties ran the gamut from open heart surgery department to 14 years in the ER and manager of case management and social services. “ICU, CCU, open heart, it’s in your blood,” she said. “Hospital is a real community. I was ideally suited to ICU, fast action, fast turnovers and ER medicine. That was my training and my specialty so when I worked those units, I felt like I’d really achieved something at the end of each day. While working full time, I completed my bachelor of science degree in nursing at Sacramento State. I was able to take advantage of the GI Bill for schooling and was very grateful for the opportunity.”

Now retired, Susan says she is “still a goer and a doer” and prefers to stay busy. She initiated and still participates in her church’s quilting team that makes quilts for Hospice of San Joaquin veterans. She served on the HSJ board of directors for six years and has been active in St. Joseph’s NODA, or No-One Dies Alone, program since 2010. Susan is also a deacon at Lincoln Presbyterian Church, an accomplished cook and enjoys traveling with her extended family.