Members of the Moorestown American Legion Post 42 honored veteran and 1st Lt. Mary Ann Perkins (seventh from left) with the Legion’s medal of valor on March 25.
The Moorestown library hosted veteran 1st Lt. Mary Ann Perkins – an Army nurse who served in Vietnam from 1967 to 1969 – for a historical talk last month.
Perkins served with the 91st Evacuation Squadron (91st Evacuation Hospital) in Tuy Hoa, and for the 36th Evacuation Squadron (36th Evacuation Hospital) in Vung Tau.
“What is a veteran?” Perkins asked attendees. “A veteran is someone who stepped forward when others stood back, willing to sacrifice everything for the ideals of freedom and justice. They signed a blank check to their country. Payable with their comfort, their time and potentially, their lives.
“They faced the unimaginable so we could enjoy the ordinary,” she added. “Veterans are the living proof that bravery isn’t the absence of fear – it’s the triumph over it. We should remember to cherish the liberties they fought to protect.”
Perkins was 17 and in her first year of nursing school when recruiters from both the Army and the Navy came to speak at her school. She was one of six children, so paying for school was on her. She went to the Army recruiting station – in downtown Cleveland, Ohio, where Perkins is originally from – and signed up.
Perkins was underage, so she needed her parent’s signature on the paperwork, which they signed because the words “war” and “Vietnam” were not mentioned on the document, she recalled. Perkins graduated from a three-year program in June of 1967 at the age of 20. She was soon off to basic training in Houston, Texas, where she and her peers learned how to dig a latrine, watched an instructor hold and load a gun, and were shown to shoot a grid azimuth (a reference point for connecting two points on a map).
“My first assignment was right here in New Jersey at Patterson Army Hospital in Eatontown,” Perkins noted. “For my first year, I worked on the men’s medical ward. Anyone who didn’t have surgery made it to Ward 3B. I was probably best known on that ward for handing out medicine cups filled with M&Ms.”
While on leave in the summer of 1968, Perkins received orders for Vietnam. In September, she flew out of Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst on Flying Tiger Airlines with 220 military passengers, 219 males and Perkins. She had no idea where she was headed, but soon arrived at a compound surrounded by barbed wire and guards in towers.
Inside the compound was the hospital and lodgings for all military personnel. Long barrack-like buildings with sandbags were all around and the nurses were lodged in hootches. There were 12 single rooms in each hootch with a common bathroom. Early on, Perkins learned to make friends with the civilian contractors. She was gifted with a small refrigerator in her room, a constant supply of grape and orange soda, a small fan, tiles for the concrete floor and a lock for her door.
“ … After three months, I was moved to the pre and post-op ward, an air-conditioned unit in a Quonset hut, but with the luxury of air conditioning came the stark reality of war,” Perkins remembered. “On that unit, we received the patients after they were triaged and waiting for surgery, and then they came back to the unit when they were released from the recovery room and stabilized, until they were moved to the ward or surgical intensive care or airlifted out.”
Perkins spent nine months at the 91st Evacuation Squadron before the hospital closed in Tuy Hoa. She still had three months remaining for her tour, so her orders came for the 36th Evacuation Squadron in Vung Tau, where she completed her assignment again on the pre- and post- op unit. In Vung Tau, doctors and nurses were housed in a three-story villa about one mile from the hospital. There was a small shuttle bus that made trips back and forth, but if you missed it, you could walk there, sharing the road with locals, their chickens and their cows.
Leaving Vietnam was bittersweet for Perkins, an experience she carried in her heart. Most of the nurses in the embattled country were female and under 24. They had usually less than two years of nursing experience and little specialized training. But Perkins’ favorite happily-ever-after to come out of that time period was meeting her husband, Bob, on a plane traveling to Hong Kong for rest and recuperation.
“We didn’t fly a helicopter or patrol the jungle,” Perkins explained. “We didn’t carry a weapon and had very little training in the strategy of war. We worked 12-hour shifts, sometimes (we) had a day off, but most importantly, we helped save lives. Every nurse who served in Vietnam had a different experience …
“For me personally, (if I was) asked to do it all over again, (I would) in a heartbeat.”
Following Perkins’ speech, members of the Moorestown American Legion Post 42 presented her with the American Legion Medal of Valor. Mayor Quinton Law made a proclamation, Boy Scout Jack McDumic of Troop 44 presented the U.S. Army Challenge Coin to Perkins, and Girl Scout Gianna Vidal of Troop 26173 presented her with the Women’s Army Service Coin.
