A Candle In The Darkness: The Ongoing Legacy of Sharon Ann Lane
I am thankful for this day. I am thankful for good health. Today, I will go through the day inwardly relaxed and outwardly alert. I will pay more attention to the things outside of me and less attention to the things inside of me. I believe I will be given the strength to meet whatever problems come to me. I will do my tasks one at a time and not try to cross all my bridges at once. --Favorite saying of Sharon Ann Lane Sharon Ann Lane had been in Vietnam about seven weeks when a Soviet-made 122mm rocket detonated in the Quonset hut complex that was the 312th Evacuation Hospital in Chu Lai. Rocket and mortar attacks were not infrequent, but this rocket came by itself, a lone missile in the early morning darkness. It was around five o'clock, June 8, 1969. The next shift of nurses already was up and getting dressed for the day. Sharon Lane worked in Vietnamese Ward 4, a volunteer who chose to tend to patients most others avoided. The patients included ARVN and civilians and children the nurses loved; but the Vietnamese ward also included NVA and VC prisoners. Medical personnel rotated quickly through the ward. Most didn't care to stay long. Lane chose differently. She saw only patients who needed her. Her former head nurse, Jane Carson, who now splits her time between Santa Fe, New Mexico, and her native South Carolina, said: "She just liked people. She was color blind. She loved the children. We all did. But a lot of nurses resented having to work on the ward that had POWs, people who injured our guys. But Sharon liked the Vietnamese people, and she wanted to remain there.'' The rocket hit almost dead center in the Quonset hut complex. It injured many patients. It killed Sharon Lane, the only woman in the American armed forces killed by enemy fire in the Vietnam War. She was a month shy of her 26th birthday. "It was devastating for the hospital,'' Carson said. "Everyone was in a stupor for a while. But we didn't talk about it. We didn't grieve. We went back to work. Part of my difficulty was that I was always afraid I wouldn't have the skills for the next patient, the knowledge, the courage to do it. After a while, you forgot about any concern for your safety, and it was more being able to measure up when the time came. You went on automatic pilot. You just didn't want to lose one of those guys or one of those women or one of those children. It was a defeat each time. Death was our enemy every day.'' Like so many other Vietnam veterans, Carson took the war deep inside herself. It stayed there for a long time. "It took me literally years, 17 or 18, to even start thinking about it again,'' Carson said. "I met Sharon's mom at the dedication of the Vietnam Women's Memorial in 1993. That was the starting point for me to come to grips with some of this stuff.'' In November of that year, Kathleen Fennell, another nurse and Vietnam veteran, flew across the Pacific on the long voyage back to Vietnam. She, too, had not spoken of it for years. Then Fennell got involved in Operation Smile, a volunteer surgical mission that traveled to the developing countries of the world to repair cleft lip and palate deformities. In 1993, she found herself headed to a place filled with memories. She asked her husband, with whom she served in Vietnam during the war, to accompany her. A medical technician during the war and now a physician, her husband at first declined. He said he didn't want to go. Later, he relented. They have been back many times since. "If the guys became invisible after the war, the women became more invisible,'' Fennell said. "We simply put everything aside as best we could and went on with our lives. You just didn't deal with it.'' Someone gave her a book to read on the long flight--Hostile Fire: The Life
Tell others about
this page:
Comments? Questions? Email Here