Anna Marie Rutallie, Indianapolis, Indiana
Nurse - She had just turned 22 in July 1970 when she went to Vietnam as an Army nurse at 91st Evac hospital in Chu Lai
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"Even now, I’ll wonder about certain patients. Can’t remember their names, but I wonder, ‘What every happened to them? Did he make it back alive? Is he doing well now?’ One guy we had, he had both his arms and legs blown off. And I keep wondering, did he thank us? Is he thankful we saved him? Is he sorry we saved him?"
"Sometimes I can’t remember how I dealt with it. I know I must have. A lot of us over there coped in that we drank. It was cheap, it was readily available, and you had to do something to get through, so you drank. You drank to get to sleep at night because your mind was going 50 miles a minute and thinking of all the things that went over. Sometimes we just shut down to get through the day, get through the night and get through our year, and then when our year was up, go home."
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