Memories of a military nurse
“We lost one soldier while I was there, I still know his name...”
• West Scottsdale’s Beryl Duffy recalls her days as a military nurse in the Vietnam War.
• Beryl Duffy in 1968.
By Daisy Baker
March 11, 2020
There are some names and stories that Beryl Duffy will never forget from her time serving as a military nurse in the Vietnam War.
She says the three years she spent as part of the Royal Australian Army Nursing Corp (RAANC) was a tough but rewarding part of her 32-year nursing career.
As a young nurse working in Deniliquin, New South Wales, Mrs Duffy saw a lot of her friends being called up as national servicemen and when she saw an ad that the RAANC were recruiting, she applied straight away.
“I received a letter back from the recruiting office if I’d like to go down for an interview – I had to do a psych test and English test and all those things,” she said.
“I went back to nursing in civilian life and about two weeks later I got a call to say I had been signed up.
“I went by bus, we were sworn in and pledged our loyalty to Queen and country.”
This was followed by six ‘rugged’ weeks of intensive training in military law.
“There was no nursing it was just completely military stuff – how to spit and shine our shoes and starch our uniforms,” she recalled.
“The uniforms had two pleats in the back and they had to be so stiff they could stand on the floor without falling over.”
At the end of the training, Mrs Duffy was posted at two military hospitals at Ingleburn, New South Wales, which was the biggest military hospital in Australia.
She was working on the surgical ward treating soldiers who were flown back from Malacca in Malaysia as medical or casualty evacuations.
“They came back with terrible wounds, it was so sad. Most of them were our age because national servicemen were only 20,” she said.
“There were pretty horrid sights the first day. I had been nursing for three years already and I thought I’d seen some things but no there was no way you could prepare for that.
“We lost one soldier while I was there. I still know his name.”
All the injured soldiers came back to Two military hospital until they were recovered enough to return to camp hospitals or repatriation centres in Melbourne or Sydney.
Each morning began with an inspection from the chief medical officer.
Patients in the ward would have to sit or stand to attention while the medical ward was reviewed, and the nurses took his orders.
The nurses on the ward tried to keep the mood light where possible, taking patients via ambulance or army trucks when possible to concerts with Col Joye, Little Pattie and Denise Drysdale at the big RSLs in Sydney.
After a year and a half, Mrs Duffy was transferred to 10 dental unit and regimental aid post in Adelaide.
Here, soldiers were prepared to go to Vietnam with dental, mental and physical checks.
“Twice a week we drove up into the Adelaide hills in a limousine, just the captain and myself to check them out and get them ready to go,” she said.
“It was a place called Woodside. The platoons got ready up there to go to Vietnam and when one battalion left, another would move in, so you were always working, preparing them to go.”
The prospect of nursing was an opportunity to take a different life pathway for Mrs Duffy.
She was the third of 15 children born in a poor family. Between the children they would cut the wood, do the washing and hang it out before going to school.
At 17 years old, Mrs Duffy wrote to the matron Deniliquin hospital who agreed to take her on as a cadet nurse.
“They were big wards, there’d be 20 in a ward and you had to clean the beds, make the beds and they all had to have the hospital corners, you’d fill the water jugs, do the flowers, do all the treatments, do everything,” she said.
“The domestics would bring the meals around but you always to made sure the patients could get it or you fed them.
“It’s so different now. It was a different nursing then, a better nursing, I think.”
Mrs Duffy said her first three years in civilian nursing prepared her for the routine of army life.
After the Vietnam War, Mrs Duffy returned to civilian nursing, in between having children, including time spent nursing with the aborigines in Western Australia.
Years on, the horrors of what she saw in Two Military hospital stay with her.
“I didn’t go to an ANZAC service until two years ago, when I was asked to talk at Ringarooma,” she said.
“On ANZAC Day I just feel sad, it was awful. Vietnam was such a lost cause, it was such an awful war.”
“They went away as young boys and they came back as injured men that the government didn’t want to know and the nurses carried a lot of that.
“You’d go home and think about them and worry about them, their mums and dads. You formed real bonds with them.”
Now retired, Mrs Duffy and her husband Pat live in West Scottsdale, with many of their children and grandchildren living throughout the state.
2020 is the International year of the nurse and the midwife and in conjunction with this, the centenary of the NESM Hospital.
In honour of this, the Scottsdale RSL sub branch is putting the spotlight on past and present nurses for this year’s ANZAC Day theme.
They are calling on past and present nurses, who have worked to assist ex-service personnel in any conflict zone or when those service personnel have returned home, to march at the head of the parade.
Any nurses planning to march or with local stories of nursing ex-service personnel to share are asked to contact NESM director of nursing Wendy Mackay.
The Military museum will be putting together a display for the week of ANZAC Day so if you have any military nursing memorabilia they would like to hear from you.