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As the Navy nurses gently lifted a badly injured soldier onto the operating table aboard the USS Sanctuary off the coast of Vietnam, a hand grenade rolled out from underneath him and bounced onto the floor.

A corpsman grabbed it, raced up the stairs, and heaved it overboard into the ocean, where it exploded.

'The good Lord did look after us,' said Barb Krzewinski of Fremont, who recalled that as probably the scariest moment in her year of duty on the Sanctuary, 1968-69, nursing friend and foe during the Vietnam War.

Fear had to be pushed aside at such moments. There was too much work to do.

'It's things like that you don't think about until you get home. We were busy all the time,' she said.

War-zone nursing requires every ounce of skill one has, she continued. 'I have never felt so needed as a nurse as the year I spent on the hospital ship.'

Ms. Krzewinski was one of approximately 11,000 American military women who served in Vietnam during the war, nearly all of them as nurses in the Army, Navy, and Air Force and the vast majority of them volunteers. And she said she'll be one of the people who visits the ¾-scale traveling replica of the wall of names at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington when it comes to Toledo this week.

She has visited the memorial in the capital several times. 'I know people on it,' she said.

The 240-foot long replica that’s coming to Toledo, called the Dignity Memorial Vietnam Wall Experience, will be open to the public, free of charge, at the Westgate Village Shopping Center, 3301 West Central Ave. It’s scheduled to open with a service at 10 a.m. Friday and remain open around the clock, guarded by veterans, until a closing ceremony at 4 p.m. next Sunday.

Families of veterans who died in Vietnam will be honored at a candlelight service at 7:30 p.m. Saturday. Other services are planned at 6:30 p.m. Friday, 10 a.m. Saturday, and 10 a.m. July 4.

“Taps” will be played every night at 10, said Joe Berger, president of one of two local chapters of the Vietnam Vets Motorcycle Club.

Mr. Berger is organizing a motorcycle escort for the truck carrying the replica to Toledo on Tuesday. He said they’ll meet the truck at the Ohio Veterans Home in Sandusky and ride back to the city, primarily via State Rt. 2.

“You could see as many as 800 motorcycles,” Mr. Berger said. “This is going to be a very emotional ride.”

Remembering role women played

Approximately 11,000 American military women were stationed in Vietnam during the war.

Close to 90 percent of those women were nurses in the Army, Navy, and Air Force. Others served as physicians, physical therapists, personnel in the Medical Service Corps, air traffic controllers, communications specialists, intelligence officers, clerks, and in other capacities in different branches of the armed services. Nearly all of them volunteered.

An unknown number of civilian women served in Vietnam as news correspondents and workers for the Red Cross, USO, American Friends Service Committee, Catholic Relief Services and other humanitarian organizations.

The names of eight military women who died in Vietnam are listed on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. More than 50 civilian American women died in Vietnam.

The foundation operates a Sister Search program aimed at locating all American military and civilian women who served during the Vietnam era. (It’s estimated that about 265,000 military women served during the Vietnam war all over the world in a variety of occupations.)

The Vietnam Women’s Memorial was dedicated in 1993 as part of the national Vietnam Veterans Memorial. It consists of four figures: a nurse holding a wounded soldier across her lap, a woman standing and looking up, and a woman who is kneeling, staring at an empty helmet.

Source: The Vietnam Women’s Memorial Foundation Web site (www.vietnamwomensmemorial.org).

Volunteers will spend two days assembling the display for the Friday opening.

The Wall — one of three parts of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial — bears more than 58,000 names of the war’s dead and missing. Eight of the names are those of women — seven Army nurses and one Air Force nurse.

Only one was killed by enemy fire, according to records at the Women in Military Service to America Memorial Foundation in Washington. That was Sharon Lane, of North Industry, Ohio, a first lieutenant in the Army Nurse Corps who died on June 8, 1969, when an enemy rocket struck the Quonset hut in which she was working.

Two other nurses died in a helicopter crash in February, 1966; two others — including 1st Lt. Hedwig Diane Orlowski of Detroit — died in the crash of a C-47 in November, 1967; two died from natural causes. The eighth, Air Force Capt. Mary Therese Klinker of Lafayette, Ind., died in a plane crash during Operation Baby Lift from Vietnam on April 4, 1975.

There were no women in combat in Vietnam, said Judy Bellafaire, chief historian at the foundation. “Women were just not assigned to those jobs at that point in time,” she added. Military women who were not in medical positions held jobs in such areas as administration, communications, and intelligence, she said.

Recognition of women who served in Vietnam was slow in coming. The Wall was dedicated in 1982, followed by the Three Servicemen Statue in 1984. After a 10-year effort led by a former Army nurse, the Vietnam Women’s Memorial in Washington was dedicated in 1993.

(There’s also a women’s memorial at Arlington National Cemetery honoring military women from all eras. That was in progress for 11 years before being dedicated in 1997.)

Ms. Krzewinski was a career officer, joining the Navy Nurse Corps in 1966 and retiring as a lieutenant commander in 1986. She’s the commander of VFW Post 2947 in Fremont — the first woman to hold the position there — and works as an RN for the Gibsonburg Exempted Village School District.

“I joined the Navy to see the world, and needless to say, I did,” she explained. After going to nursing school at St. Vincent Mercy Medical Center and receiving a bachelor’s degree from Mary Manse College, Ms. Krzewinski worked briefly for Memorial Hospital in Fremont before reporting to her first duty station at the naval hospital in Oakland, Calif.

After stints in the emergency room and obstetrics, she moved to the orthopedic ward, where nearly all the patients were returnees from Vietnam, many of whom had lost limbs.

“The guys were the most fantastic patients in the world, but it wasn’t an easy place to work,” she said. “You could give them lots of empathy, but no sympathy because they never would have gotten out of those beds. You had to learn to be tough to get them better.”

The day after her roommate received orders to report to a hospital ship in Vietnam, Ms. Krzewinski shared the news with the chief nurse at the Oakland facility.

“She asked, ‘Would you like to go too?’ And I said, ‘of course.’”

But why?

“Because I wanted to,” she said simply. “It’s so hard to describe. The patients had been through so much and I wanted to see where it was happening, and I figured, what better way to use my skills?”

The Sanctuary traveled up and down the coast, from DaNang to the DMZ (the demilitarized zone, or dividing line between South and North Vietnam) picking up the wounded and the dead. “They did surgery literally around the clock sometimes,” she said.

Patients included U.S. troops, Vietnamese adults and children, even some Viet Cong.

“We took care of everybody. War is war and patients are patients,” Ms. Krzewinski said. “You are in the business of healing people and you cannot discriminate.”

The enemy received the basic care they needed, she said. Her other patients received much more.

She talked of cradling a seriously injured soldier who was too traumatized to drift off to sleep. “He needed his mother,” she said.
Another patient was upset because he wouldn’t be able to fulfill his promise to send his grandmother a Vietnamese doll for her collection. The next time Ms. Krzewinski went ashore, she bought a doll and mailed it to her.

She also listened to soldiers spill their fears that their wife or girlfriend would no longer want a man who was missing an arm or a leg — and knew that their fears were well-founded. She had seen women present divorce papers to maimed men in Oakland.

The Vietnamese children often lightened the mood aboard the ship. As they recovered from burns and other injuries, Ms. Krzewinski taught them how to play pat-a-cake and let them make rounds with her.

Although many Vietnam veterans came back with emotional wounds, Ms. Krzewinski said her duty in Oakland had prepared her for much of the ugliness she saw. She even offered to extend her service on the USS Sanctuary, “but the Navy felt a year was enough,” she said.

The emotion that has remained with her is gratitude — “That I am an American and have all the freedoms we have,” Ms. Krzewinski added.
“It really was a privilege to be able to take care of our heroes. And every one of our patients was a hero.”

Contact Ann Weber at: aweber@theblade.com or 419-724-6126.

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