, “Sometimes a patient would get so confused about where he was that he would attack the nurses. In one incident a wounded soldier jumped out of bed yelling ‘I’m gonna get those suckers!’ and then grabbed me by my throat. Luckily I escaped when a doctor pushed the man away” (Smith 209). After a few attacks by patients, the nurses began to break down and cry because they were trying to help these soldiers and they were getting physically injured. Many nurses hoped that they would be able to live a normal life when they left Vietnam, but this was the case. Many of the nurses had flashbacks that were so painful one nurse said, “I am reliving not just remembering the past” (Van Devanter 297). Another nurse has a similar experience while attending a wedding. She said, “The sight of uncooked tenderloin at a wedding party brought a flashback of mutilated men struggling for life” (Evans 90). With the flashbacks, in a slit second the nurses would be in another place and time. The mental stress that the nurses had to endure affected the nurses in a variety of ways. Some nurses disappeared from society, while others contemplated suicide (Smith 341). Other nurses could not sleep due to the fact they still had terrible nightmares in their rest. The nurses would jump at every little sound. They might be out Little 6in public and drive into a ditch only to discover that the sound passing by was only a police car (Van Devanter 297). There were some nurses that searched for solace among their families only to find out that they did not believe the stories. One mother recalled telling her daughter that she was “making this up for attention” (Smith 327). Some nurses enrolled in clinics years after the war so that they could cope with long-suppressed emotions (Evans 90). These clinics helped most nurses and now the nurses occasionally have bad dreams, but those are few and f...
