(SOUNDBITE OF GEORGE HOLLINGDRAKE'S "THE MIST ROLLS IN")
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
On this Memorial Day weekend, let's check in once again with StoryCorps' Military Voices Initiative. They record and share stories of service members and their families. Carol Kirk has a long history of military service and sacrifice in her family. Father was a pilot in World War II. He was shot down and lost in the Pacific. Her uncle was killed in Korea. Carol herself deployed to Vietnam as a U.S. Army nurse in 1969, and at StoryCorps, she remembered some of the men she cared for and lost in that conflict. And a warning - this interview contains graphic descriptions of war wounds.
CAROL KIRK: I kind of framed my tour between two patients whose memory has stuck with me forever. They were both named Bill (ph), and the first Bill came very early in my tour. He was probably in his mid-20s, had been out on patrol with his unit, and he had stepped on a land mine. When he came to the operating room, both of his legs were hanging by threads. He had multiple fragments from the land mine in his belly. His eyes were gone, and he had frags in his brain. And I was going through his fatigues, and I pulled out a wallet with a picture of his two little girls. And as nurses, you're trained to save lives, and that's what we thought we were there to do, and that's what we wanted to do. But that's the day that I discovered that sometimes it's better not to save them because I couldn't send their daddy back to those children. I found myself praying that he would not make it. And he did die three days later.
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KIRK: The other Bill came at the very end of my tour. He was a young man who turned 18 on the day that he was shot. He had taken a round through his left shoulder, and we had taken him to the operating room. We had done all of the necessary stuff, and everything looked pretty good. We were getting ready to send him back to the states, but I noticed he was having trouble breathing, and I went over to him. I said, Bill, are you OK? And he says, I can't breathe. I can't breathe. And we took a needle and inserted it into his chest, and all of this brown goop came out. He had a horrendous infection. So he died two days later. Another one that we couldn't send home.
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KIRK: They told us when we came over there, be very careful about getting into relationships with any of the young men, but young people in wartime gravitate toward each other. And I met Frank in August of 1969, and then by November, we were talking about getting married. He was a helicopter pilot, had the typical fighter pilot attitude - talked tough. But when we would actually be alone together, sometimes he would just cry in my arms because he said he was so tired of the killing. It was his second tour in Vietnam and he just wanted it to stop.
The 5 of January 1970 - probably the roughest day of my life - one of the medics from the emergency room came down and said they had a pilot with a bad neck wound. So I went up to the emergency room, and I realized that it was Frank. And there really was nothing that we could do. I went numb, and I stayed numb. The hospital commander offered me three days off to take a leave anywhere in country, and I said, no, I'd just go back to work. And I kind of immersed myself in my job.
You know, things that happened over there, things that I did over there, it's with me every day. But I have no regrets over my service. It was, in many ways, the most rewarding and the most difficult work I've ever done. And those soldiers that I took care of in Vietnam, those were my heroes - every one of them.
(SOUNDBITE OF GEORGE HOLLINGDRAKE'S "THE MIST ROLLS IN")
SIMON: Retired Army Major Carol Kirk. She served for more than 30 years. Her interview is archived at the U.S. Library of Congress.
(SOUNDBITE OF GEORGE HOLLINGDRAKE'S "THE MIST ROLLS IN") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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