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 As the first blog entry got exhausted. My second book |
| For ten hours, ammunition exploded a mile away. She took off her protective gear to save her patients. For 40 years after, she woke up under her bed. January 1971. Quy Nhon, South Vietnam. The 67th Evacuation Hospital. First Lieutenant Virginia "Ginny" Dornheggen was 23 years old, working the night shift in the surgical intensive care unit when the world exploded. At 2 AM, the Viet Cong hit an ammunition dump one mile from the hospital. Five thousand tons of explosives detonated in a chain reaction that sounded like the end of the world. The shockwave hit like a physical blow. Nurses flew off their feet. Patients were thrown from their beds. Metal doors ripped from their hinges and became projectiles. Windows shattered into thousands of glass shards that rained down like deadly confetti. The building shook so violently that Ginny thought it would collapse on top of them. Her training kicked in immediately: take cover. She dove under a metal desk, yanked on her flak jacket, secured her helmet. The explosions continued—one after another, each one closer, louder, more terrifying than the last. Under that desk, Ginny had a single thought: "I'm going to die tonight." Then she remembered her patients. The wounded soldiers in the ward couldn't run. They couldn't hide. Some were unconscious. Others were barely stable, hooked to IVs, covered in bandages, days out from surgery. They were completely, utterly defenseless. Ginny crawled out from under the desk. Two other nurses were on duty that night. Together, without speaking, they made the same decision: they would protect their patients, no matter what. Ginny tried working in the flak jacket at first. It was designed to save her life—thick, heavy, bulletproof. But it was also bulky and restrictive. She couldn't move fast enough. She couldn't bend properly to check IVs or adjust monitors. She couldn't lift patients. The explosions were getting worse. Shrapnel was punching through walls. Glass continued to fall like rain. Ginny looked at her patients. Then she looked at the flak jacket. She took it off. For the next ten hours, First Lieutenant Virginia Dornheggen worked without body armor while five thousand tons of ammunition exploded a mile away. She and the other nurses moved systematically through the ward. They pulled wounded soldiers from their beds—men with gunshot wounds, shrapnel injuries, missing limbs, burns covering their bodies—and slid them onto cots. Then they pushed the cots under the metal bed frames and piled mattresses on top as shields against the falling debris. One patient at a time. One makeshift shelter at a time. The building shook with each new explosion. Ceiling tiles fell. Windows kept shattering. The nurses kept working. The last patient they reached was a Viet Cong prisoner of war in a full body cast. There were no mattresses left. No more cots. The nurses slid him under his bed and hoped the cast would protect him. He was the enemy. He might have been the one who set the charges that were trying to kill them all right now. They protected him anyway. Because that's what nurses do. For ten hours, the ammunition dump burned and exploded. For ten hours, Ginny and her fellow nurses stayed in that shaking building, checking vitals, adjusting IVs, reassuring terrified patients, working without armor because their patients needed them to move fast. When dawn finally came and the explosions stopped, Ginny was still alive. All of her patients were still alive. She had made it through the worst night of her life. Except she hadn't. Not really. Ginny finished her tour in Vietnam—thirteen months total. After that January night, she requested reassignment for her final four months, moving from surgical ICU to orthopedics, then to emergency. The work was still brutal, the casualties endless, but she kept going. When she came home and was discharged, everyone told her she was fine now. Safe. Back to normal life. Ginny got married. Moved to Kalamazoo, Michigan. Had two children. Worked as a nurse for 30 more years—18 in critical care, 12 in home health. She smiled. She functioned. She seemed perfectly fine. But for 40 years, Ginny Dornheggen woke up under her bed. Not beside it. Under it. She'd wake up on the floor, pressed against the cold ground, with no memory of how she got there. Back in Quy Nhon. Back in that hospital. Back in that night when the world exploded and death felt certain. A car would backfire and she'd throw herself flat on the sidewalk while her husband kept walking, confused, looking back to see his wife on the ground, shaking. Fireworks on the Fourth of July were unbearable. Thunderstorms sent her into panic. Loud noises—any loud noise—and she was 23 again, watching the ceiling fall. She had nightmares every single night. Flashbacks during the day. Constant hypervigilance, always scanning for danger, never able to fully relax. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. PTSD. Though Ginny didn't have that language yet, and wouldn't for decades. She didn't talk about it. Not to her husband. Not to her children. Not to her friends or colleagues. Vietnam veterans—especially women—were told to move on, to be grateful they made it home, to stop dwelling on the past. So Ginny stayed silent for 40 years. Until 1993. That year, Ginny visited Washington, D.C. for the dedication of the Vietnam Women's Memorial—a bronze statue of a nurse cradling a wounded soldier. Nearly 265,000 women had served during the Vietnam War, most of them nurses. For decades, they'd been invisible. Standing in front of that memorial, Ginny started crying. She remembered something a soldier once told her after Miss America visited their ward: "These celebrities don't hold a candle to what you mean to us and to what you are." At the memorial, surrounded by other women veterans, Ginny realized for the first time: "Oh my gosh. We actually did something." Then she walked to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall—the black granite with 58,000 names of American soldiers killed in the war. She stood looking at all those names and thought: We lost. We failed. So many died. A friend standing beside her said something that changed everything: "If you nurses weren't there, this wall would be six miles longer." Six miles longer. Ginny had spent 22 years haunted by the patients she couldn't save. She'd carried the weight of every soldier who died on her watch, every casualty she couldn't prevent. She'd never once thought about the thousands she did save. That moment broke something open in Ginny. She started talking—first to high school students, then to veteran groups, then to anyone who would listen. She shared her story with the Veterans History Project. She allowed herself to remember, and to be remembered. She got treatment for PTSD. She learned that waking up under the bed wasn't weakness or failure—it was a wound, like any other combat injury, and it could be treated. Today, Virginia "Ginny" Lee Dornheggen is 77 years old. She lives in Georgia with her husband. She's a mother and grandmother. She's an advocate for veterans struggling with PTSD, especially women veterans who served in silence and suffered alone. Her story has been preserved by the Department of Veterans Affairs and C-SPAN's oral history project so future generations will know what she did. But more than recognition, Ginny represents something essential: the thousands of women who served in Vietnam, who took off their armor to heal the wounded, who carried trauma home in silence, and who deserved honor long before they received it. Ginny Dornheggen didn't carry a rifle. She carried morphine, bandages, and the weight of every life in her care. She didn't storm beaches or charge enemy positions. She stood in a shaking hospital for ten hours while ammunition exploded a mile away, working without body armor because wearing it meant her patients might die. And when she had to choose between her own safety and the lives she was responsible for, she chose them. Every single time. For ten hours, she chose them. For 40 years after, she woke up under her bed, reliving that night. But because she made that choice, the Vietnam Wall is six miles shorter than it could have been. Welcome home, First Lieutenant Dornheggen. Thank you for your service. |
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