60 years ago, then US President John F. Kennedy sent the first soldiers to Vietnam. During the war, the Swiss nurse Ursula Greuel-Leimbacher worked in the country for the Red Cross. The now 80-year-old remembers sleeping nights at the operating table and a rescue helicopter flight
In 1966, the Swiss Red Cross asked me if I would go with a team to Vietnam as a surgical nurse for a certain period of time in order to provide medical care for the civilian population. I arrived in Vietnam after Christmas 1967, when I was 25. For twelve years, war had raged in the country between the US-supported south and the communist north. The hospital of the Swiss Red Cross was located in the town of Kon Tum in the central high mountains. I was supposed to work as a nurse there.
At that time, the doctors earned the equivalent of 200 euros a month. We had a house with an ambulance, additional rooms and an operating room, where we operated on all the injured and also treated the burns left by the napalm bombs of the Americans. Many children had bad burn injuries too. There have also been countless accidents because of the landmines. The children knew nothing but the war. They even played with the grenades they found.
The forests were partially defoliated because the USA used the poisonous defoliant Agent Orange. And there were a lot of bomb craters.
We always spoke French, never English, the language of the US armed forces. And we never asked who we were treating or which side the people were fighting on. I was deeply impressed by the terrible fate of a divided family with two sons whom we knew well. One was in the South Vietnamese Army, the other son fought for the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam, i.e. the Viet Cong. Often we got a hint from them when actions were planned. So we were mostly well informed about what was going on.
In the surrounding villages lived the mountain people, called Montagnards, who were discriminated against by many Vietnamese. They had no written culture, everything was passed down by word of mouth. I took a lot of photographs back then. These people had few rights, their children were not allowed to go to school, and their products were not allowed to be sold in the local market. Groceries were very expensive. A kilo of oranges cost a dollar back then. There was corruption too. Because many South Vietnamese earned very little, while there were plenty of snacks, cigarettes and condoms in the shops for the Americans.
Prostitution flourished because of the wealthy foreign soldiers. The newspapers read by the Americans were all about propaganda and lies, and they praised their “great work”. Many of them drank. During combat operations, they were given stimulants in the evening and then Valium during the day so they could sleep; the fights were mostly at night. The soldiers were badly treated and harassed during training in the United States, which they then called “training”.
A notorious special unit even served convicted murderers who had brought them out of jail. Some Montagnards, who knew their way around the woods but were also often drugged, hired themselves out with the US armed forces.
The village communities of the Montagnards, who had a lot of children, showed incredible solidarity. When there were injuries, the men from the mountain villages always told us to take care of the women and children first. On the other hand, I have seen some Vietnamese who complained when it was not their turn first.
There were attacks almost every night. Exactly at 11 p.m., the bombing by the US Army and shelling with grenade launchers began, mainly for psychological warfare. The target of the B-52 bombers was the Ho Chi Minh supply path, which connected the north of Vietnam with the south, and elephants were also used as pack animals for the Viet Cong. The Americans bribed the locals to tell them where the Viet Cong were hiding.
Once, a ten-year-old boy commissioned by the Viet Cong dropped a bomb on Kon Tum Police Headquarters. Fortunately there were no dead.
The hospital was only equipped with the essentials. Since we had no way of testing the blood, I knew nothing about our patients when I had to put them under anesthesia. But almost everyone had tuberculosis.
Chronicle: The USA in the Vietnam War
July 1954:At the Indochina Conference, Vietnam is divided into north and south.
December 1960:The National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam is established in the north.
May 1961:US President Kennedy is sending around 400 army special forces to Vietnam.
January 1962:USA sprayed the poison known as “Agent Orange” for the first time.
August 1964: The United States bombed North Vietnam.
March 1965:With Operation Rolling Thunder, the United States under President Johnson intensifies air strikes.
March 1965:3,500 US soldiers set foot on Vietnam, the first time on Asian soil since the Korean War.
1967: More than 500,000 US soldiers are in Vietnam.
January 1968:In the Tet Offensive, communist guerrilla groups take parts of Saigon and other areas of South Vietnam.
March 1968:US soldiers kill and rape 504 civilians inside My Lai. Public pressure against the US is increasing.
October 1968:Johnson officially stops bombing North Vietnam.
July 1969:The new US President Richard Nixon announces the withdrawal of the troops.
September 1969: Ho Chi Minh dies of a heart attack in Hanoi.
March 1970:The US begins the secret bombing of communist bases in neutral Cambodia.
March 1972:North Vietnamese forces occupy large parts of southern Vietnam.
December 1972:Nixon orders one of the war’s most massive air strikes, destroying the cities of Hanoi and Haiphong.
January 1973:After five years of peace negotiations, North and South Vietnam sign the Paris Agreement on the Armistice. It obliges the USA to withdraw all troops.
1973: USA continues to bomb Cambodian border areas, both North and South Vietnam break the ceasefire.
April 1975: The South Vietnamese capital Saigon falls. The US is transporting US troops and refugees from Saigon.
July 1975:North and South are united as the “Socialist Republic of Vietnam” under communist regimes. FR
The doctors in Vietnam were really super good as they faced so many different injuries in the war. But many swallowed psychotropic drugs to get through the stress. Sometimes the team at the French hospital helped us. I brought a woman there with a fallopian tube pregnancy who was already completely white-green in the face because of the loss of blood. The Vietnamese doctor said to me: “There are no emergencies with us.” But when he operated on the woman late in the evening, it happened first class at a pace that I could hardly follow when the assistant was there.
There were also seldom attacks by tigers. In order to protect themselves from the wild animals, all houses of the hill tribes were built as pile dwellings. Once the three of us operated for hours on the head of an injured man who had been attacked by a tiger at a waterfall.
Even as a child, I was often there when my uncle, who was a veterinarian in Switzerland, operated on. At the time, he was one of the first to perform caesarean sections on pregnant cows, although this method was not yet widely used.
The Catholic nuns were very valuable in providing medical care in Kon Tum and the surrounding area. Together with them we took care of a nearby village where leprosy had broken out. We treated the ulcers. Incidentally, leprosy is not as contagious as many think. I wasn’t at all afraid of getting sick myself. I was always very healthy and didn’t even suffer from diarrhea during my stay in Vietnam.
At the end of January 1968, the North Vietnamese Army and the Viet Cong launched the Tet Offensive, a surprise attack on a broad front on the New Year celebrations. The clearly outnumbered Americans were surprised, many were on leave at the time. Our house, where we slept, was also completely bombed, although it was marked with a red cross that could be seen from the air.
My colleague Francoise and I had been warned beforehand by the US aid organization USAID and we hid under the bed in a farmer’s building on the outskirts of Kon Tum. I was incredibly scared, but my colleague was brave and lay down in front of me so that I wouldn’t be hit by a bullet. The day after we passed many dead on the way to the hospital, and there were an awful lot of injuries in the clinic.
Due to an agreement between the USA and Switzerland, we were finally taken to a US military camp. It was terrible, we passed so many dead on the transport. Children searched the bodies for money. We were housed in a bunker that was totally overcrowded and so narrow that you could hardly sit. When I was shot at, I was slightly injured in the back by a shrapnel.
After a week my colleague, I and other foreigners were forcibly evacuated to Pleiku because the US Army no longer wanted to take responsibility for our security. This ended my work as a nurse in Vietnam and I couldn’t return to the hospital.
Francoise got me Vietnamese clothes in case the helicopter had to make an emergency landing. The pilot flew low over a river for a long time. When I asked him why, he replied, “Then the enemy won’t have that long time to aim at us.” Our helicopter was the only one that was not shot down and that managed to get through to Pleiku. After about a week we were transported to Saigon by a larger plane.
The capital had been badly destroyed, many Viet Cong and civilians had been killed. The orphanages were full, and I met a large number of orphaned children on the streets, including small babies who had lost their parents. They screamed and looked at me with big eyes. It took a few weeks before I was able to return to my home country, Switzerland. It wasn’t until I got home that I felt the fear. As long as I was active and able to do something, I hadn’t noticed her. But in the years that followed, I was hardly afraid. Only the roar of New Year’s Eve brought back bad memories, and I couldn’t stand it for years.
Shortly after my return, I moved to Germany with my future husband. Left groups invited me to lectures in Switzerland and especially in Germany to report on my experiences from the Vietnam War. The issue was topical because of the student movement protesting against the war in Vietnam. In Cologne, I even spoke to more than 2000 people, so I was nervous. Unfortunately, I loaned my photographs showing the war atrocities and did not get them back. But I still have recordings from that time. Some of these are rarities that met with great interest on my later visit to Vietnam.
In 2009 I went to Vietnam again, almost 40 years later. I wanted to see if the hospital was still standing. The small hospital of Kon Tum had been expanded into a large clinic that looked after the whole region; there was nothing to be seen of our buildings. Only the runway of the military airfield partially existed and was a reminder of that time.
It was disappointing to me that almost no one remembered the war times and the old hospital, except for the doorman and another man who was very interested in my photos. But the boys didn’t remember the war at all. For them it was something from the distant past.
