A Piece Of My Heart (book)

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enormous amount of pain while in Vietnam. As veteran Rose Sandecki said, "[The Vietnam] War really did a number on all of us, the women as well as the men" (20). Nurses in Vietnam were exposed to a nonstop flow of casualties from the field. The landing of a Chinook with mass casualties on board had become a standard to Christine Schneider, a nurse in Da Nang. Practically every nurse’s story described the hospital scenes in Vietnam as "busy." Jill Mishkel explained that she experienced a minimum of at least one death per day. As Ms. Schneider described, "There was just too much death" (46). Ms. Schneider also mentioned, "Everybody was bad" (45); nurses only saw the bad because they were surrounded by it, day in and day out. Charlotte Miller described everything as "on a very negative basis" (324), and that she had to deal with these problems from twelve to fifteen hours per day, twelve to fifteen days in a row, a very rigorous schedule. Further emotional damage was ...

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and bring everybody back" (144). In the early days of her service, Ms. Mishkel said that she cried often, and that she thought the other nurses were "totally insensitive" (124). However, after day after day of experiences like Ms. McVicker’s, where there just simply weren’t the resources necessary to tend to everybody, where cases with low chances of survival had to be dropped to make room for others; Ms. Mishkel soon became as apathetic as everybody else. Many nurses, such as Ms. Sandecki, put up an emotional wall around them; forcing themselves to care less. As Pat Johnson said, "I don’t think I’ve ever taken life as lightly as I did then" (64). The ...

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