Giving back a way to deal with the horrors of Vietnam for Petaluma veteran

Kate O’Hare-Palmer is the picture of contentment as she sits in her cozy living room in her home in west Petaluma.

At 77, this national leader of the veteran community – she currently serves as the Vietnam Veterans of America National Women Veterans Committee chair – is active, engaged and whip-smart. She smiles often and laughs easily.

But the smile fades quickly when she recalls the horrors she endured while serving as a U.S. Army nurse in Vietnam – and the scars they left behind.

“When I first went over, I thought I was prepared,” she said. “And I wasn’t. And I realized it’s the overwhelming number of casualties that were coming in.”

A Long Beach native, O’Hare-Palmer was “very naive,” she said. She was 21 when she and some friends stepped into a recruitment center in Los Angeles and signed up for the war.

But for her, “Going into the Army was not a big stretch.”

Both her parents had served during World War II, her brother had already served in Vietnam, and as a well-trained and newly certified nurse, O’Hare-Palmer figured she could help in the U.S. Army Nurse Corps.

In June 1968 – the year U.S. casualties in Vietnam reached their peak – O’Hare-Palmer arrived "in-country.“ She had just turned 22.

“Everybody says the same thing that goes to Vietnam. You get off the plane and the heat and the smell is just overwhelming. It just hits you like a wall.”

Getting off the plane with her friend, the only other woman around, “We had our summer uniform on which was a little dress outfit.”

They saw several soldiers lying on the ground nearby, heads on duffel bags, waiting to take that same plane home. They were quiet, filthy, “and they all have the thousand-yard stare,” she said.

It wouldn’t be long before she had that same stare.

O’Hare-Palmer was assigned to the 2nd Surgical Hospital in Lai Khe, and she made the difficult trip to the remote field hospital.

“They dropped me off in a landing zone in the middle of nowhere, by myself,” she said. “When the guys came and picked me up they said, ‘Oh my God, you’re a woman.’ ”

Finally she reached her destination. But her first day on the job was far from over.

“Two hours later – I’d been up a long time – they were banging (on the door) and saying, ‘Come on Lt. O’Hare, you need to go to the O.R.’

“It was a Vietnamese lady who had gotten fragged, and one of them had hit her aorta,” she said. “It was pretty stark, you know. And we lost that woman, she didn’t make it. So that was my first case.”

'Pissed at God’

For many months afterward, O’Hare-Palmer spent 12-hour days in field hospitals in Lai Khe and Chu Lai, patching up what seemed like an endless amount of grievously wounded people, mostly young soldiers, who had been chewed up by war.

“We had guys that came in that had their legs machete’d off below the knees,” O’Hare-Palmer said. In another case, a young man “came in and half his face was just hamburger. And he asked me for a mirror. And I said, ‘I don’t have one. We don’t have any mirrors here.’ ”

The bloodshed was so staggering that O’Hare-Palmer’s perspective – on the war, and on life – quickly took a downward turn.

“After about three weeks, I realized that this was a war that was going to be long, and I didn’t see how we could get through it. And I was pretty religious, and I had a Bible, and I just started getting really pissed at God.”

Three weeks was just the beginning. In all, O’Hare-Palmer served 14 months in Vietnam, and the things she saw during that time changed her forever.

“When we did the work we felt so bad because we couldn’t save so many, and we focused on the ones we lost. And we got to the point where you couldn’t even cry. Because you didn’t have time. Because you had to go on to the next person.,” she said. “So you just stuffed it, you compartmentalized it. And you got pretty cold, you had to get pretty non-feeling. I called that the ‘Robot Katie.’ And the real me was way down.”

Back home

At some point during the war, O’Hare-Palmer got engaged to a helicopter pilot.

After her tours were up and she returned to the U.S., she waited for him – but found herself wanting to go back.

“Because you saw what was happening on the news, and you knew that you could help,” she said.

“That’s what happens, I think, in most wars. It gets to the point where you’re really not fighting the enemy. You’re just trying to help each other stay alive.”

The helicopter pilot eventually came home too. But before they could get married, O’Hare-Palmer came to realize how badly the war had damaged her.

“I started having these nightmares. Really bad. And I was grinding my teeth. And I was having blood drip down all the walls.”

The terrible visions weren’t only in her dreams. “When I woke up, I would see blood dripping on me. And I was trying to get the blood off of me. I would even go take a shower, it was so real.”

Fearing she was losing her mind, O’Hare-Palmer left her fiancé and returned to California.

In 1972, she moved to the Bay Area, “And I started over.” She went to UC Berkeley, like she’d always wanted, earning a degree in nutrition.

Throughout her adult life she remained a “workaholic,” as she put it, later coming to realize that this is a common trait of people with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Before the 1990s, however, “We didn’t know what PTSD was.”

Peacetime work

Although her wartime service was over, O’Hare-Palmer’s work with fellow war veterans was only beginning.

She worked in Veterans Affairs hospitals, and joined organizations such as Military Women Across the Nation, which connected her with others who shared her experiences.

Later she married an emergency room doctor, and in 1990 they moved with their two young daughters to the North Bay, where, “We opened up the hospital, Santa Rosa Kaiser” – which that year had leveled up from a medical center to a full-service hospital.

The couple bought land in Healdsburg, and O’Hare-Palmer worked as a nursing supervisor for Kaiser.

“And then we got divorced, building the dream house,” she said with a laugh.

A busy mom, she took her children and moved to Petaluma in 1997, where she still resides.

'We did a good job’

Healing from trauma was a slow process for O’Hare-Palmer. It didn’t help that the military devalued women’s wartime service, or that society had yet to grasp the enormous effect PTSD had on the lives of veterans.

But in 1993, a friend convinced her to attend the dedication of the Vietnam Women’s Memorial in Washington, D.C.

“It changed my life,” she said.

As female veterans from around the country gathered for the dedication, many gained new insight into the physical and psychological damage the war caused them.

“We realized the same things were happening to all of us,” O’Hare-Palmer said.

For years, cancer, infertility, PTSD and other ailments had plagued them — but they never understood how universal the problems were.

Their eyes were opened in another way as well: to the critical role they’d played in the war, the lives they’d saved, and the gratitude many still felt for them.

“When they dedicated this memorial, we had a parade. And there were all these people there. … What we didn’t know, all the men were there for us.”

As the women marched down Constitution Avenue, combat veterans came up to them carrying old medical records. The papers had “our names, because we had to sign the sheets. They were looking for us. They were looking for us to say thank you.”

“Because to us it was just a big blur,” O’Hare said. “It took years of therapy to really own that — own that we did a good job.”

Don Frances is editor of the Petaluma Argus-Courier. Reach him at don.frances@arguscourier.com.