Maureen Patch says her heroines are the 22 Australian nurses gunned down in the Bangka Island massacre of 1942. That gives us an idea of why she volunteered for service in Vietnam.
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When a young midwife named Maureen Healy decided to head overseas and nurse Diggers in the Vietnam war, she didn’t have far to go.
From Sydney’s St Vincent’s hospital, where she worked and trained as a midwife, the Victoria Barracks was just a short skip across Oxford St in Paddington.
Of course after Ms Healy completed her studies, and enlisted, there was still a long way to go. The battlefields, rice paddies and clinics of South Vietnam were a world away for the young nurses, and the national servicemen upon whose bodies the bloody tale of conflict was written.
Sydney was a heady place in 1969, especially for a country girl born in Mullumbimby and raised in Coffs Harbour. Social revolution met a young person’s sense of adventure; anti-war protests and a rapidly changing world were accompanied by the presence of US servicemen on R&R leave.
The young sister Healy had already thrown in her former job – being a “bank Johnny” at the Commonwealth was not for her so she left Coffs and “went nursing” in Sydney. She was brave, tough and capable, and as the world shifted, she was ready for anything.
Speaking to Weekender this week, Maureen Patch estimated there were been equal measures of wanting adventure, trying a different challenge, and a sense of duty to help those in trouble, that drove her decision to volunteer for Vietnam.
“It was something I wanted to do – I thought it would be great to go over,” she said. “It was a unique style of nursing, you wouldn’t get it anywhere else. I did want to join the army originally, but I didn’t know what I wanted to do.
“But after I’d done my training I knew then – it was to go and nurse.”
As if going off to a foreign war zone was the most normal thing in the world – despite the clear risks to life and limb.
“Honestly, you don’t think about it (the possibility of death),” she said. “Never once did I think about the possibility that I might not come home. But my father, who was terminally ill at the time, used to be horrified at the the thought if me going somewhere in helicopters. He thought I might crash. So I just used to leave that out of the letters.”
Flights above the rice paddies to the Australian Task Force base at Nui Dat, or up north to Saigon, in the open Iriquois choppers, didn’t make the cut in letters home.
“They didn’t have doors, but that was half the fun of flying,” she said. “I used to love sitting on the outside seat.”
The 1st Australian Field Hospital was built behind the sand dunes at Vung Tau, which was about 70km south of Saigon and near where the Australian troops were stationed in Phuoc Tuoy province. It was also on the beach, but not the kind of beaches you’d find in Sydney Coffs Harbour.
The water and sand were greyer, the waterways carried rubbish and refuse, and the sounds of war were in the air all around.
“The heat of the place, the stench of the place, probably hit us worst,” she said. “The sanitary conditions were non-existent. All the rot went into the street.”
Maureen Patch was one of 43 Australian Army nursing sisters who served, with many other civilian nurses also volunteering to work in South Vietnam tending the wounded at civilian hospitals.
And as with the returned soldiers, recognition for nurses has lagged behind. This year has seen an increased focus on the nurses who gave such vital, often lifesaving, support to the troops.
We know from many accounts that it was the nurses who often saw worse carnage than many of the soldiers, as they had the incoming casualties heading their way – with limbs blown off by mines, head injuries, trauma.
“Oh yes, we got the lot,” Mrs Patch said.
“The way I looked at it, it was Accident and Emergency on a Saturday night at Prince Alfred or St Vincent’s in Sydney, only course we didn’t have drug cases.
“The Australian soldier on the whole preferred his beer to drugs, which was great.”
As with many of the generations of Australians who have served overseas, Mrs Patch, now 75, was made of pretty stern stuff, and still is.
She thought the location, so close to the battle, meant a wounded soldier could get a “dustoff” (casualty evacuation) and be treated quicker than at home. In her year there, they lost only one patient.
“Our fellows were never more than 30 minutes away from a hospital. The soldiers knew if they got on a dustoff … they’d have a far better chance of surviving than they’d have back home in a car accident.”
After three years in the army including 12 months in Vietnam, Mrs Patch quit nursing in 1973 to become an “army wife”. But she would return to nursing in 1988, working in civilian hospitals until her retirement in 2000, when she received the Chief of Army's Commendation for her service to nursing and the Army, one of only two civilians to receive such an award.
She has not stopped caring for Diggers. In recent years she has been heavily involved in her local RSL club in Queanbeyan, particularly a program called the Mud Hat Day Club, catering to elderly veterans by getting them out of the house for lunch or an excursion regularly.
She was adamant this article could not be a “sob story”. She downplayed the threat and the trauma, saying the nurses were “wrapped in cotton wool” and kept safe.
But her voice cracked when speaking of her father, whose last months she missed while serving. And when she spoke of the Bangka Island nurses, who were massacred by Japanese troops after their ship was sunk following the fall of Singapore in 1942 – about whom she spoke on Anzac Day in Wollongong in 2011.
“I think we were a different ilk to a lot of people these days, because it was a matter of (simply) you join the army, you know you’re going to be sent somewhere, you got sent there, and you made the best of it. There was no use complaining, because you just did what you were told.
“But I didn’t find that detrimental to life or to anything else, really. We went to nurse there, and we did it.”