War’s Horrors Linger for Ex-Nurse

Ernest Hemingway would say to anyone who wondered what war was like: “Ask the infantry. Ask the dead.”

Or, ask someone like Irene Miller.

From 1966 to 1967, she was an Army nurse assigned to the 36th Evacuation Hospital near Vung Tau, Vietnam. It was in Vietnam that Miller saw a part of war that few women, or men, ever see.

In the process, she and her first husband, a platoon commander with the 1st Infantry Division, became the first married couple to serve together in Vietnam. They arrived in the war zone on the same day in 1966, but in different airplanes, and flew out together a year later. Both were emotionally and physically scarred by the war, which later contributed to their breakup after 18 years of marriage.

During her 13-month tour, Miller assisted in surgery on her husband, who had suffered a shrapnel wound from “friendly fire” when artillery rounds fired in support of his company fell short. The first GIs she treated were from her husband’s company, which was badly mauled by a larger North Vietnamese Army force. Although her husband was not wounded in that engagement, only 14 men out of about 130 escaped being wounded or killed.

“Vietnam did one positive thing for me. You could say that I was toughened by Vietnam. Nothing can happen to me--short of death--that could be worse than Vietnam. There is no major crisis that can put me down,” said Miller, now a 46-year-old San Diego attorney married to a neonatal doctor.

Like other Vietnam veterans, she is haunted by her own war experiences. She refuses to get caught up in the recent renewed interest in the war. Miller also acknowledges being a little bitter over the lack of recognition that her country has afforded Vietnam nurses. Most Vietnam veterans returned to the United States through the back door; the nurses who cared for wounded soldiers have been all but ignored.

Today, Miller limits her law practice to “representing the oppressed and those deemed by society to be the least deserving.” She is also an accomplished artist, whose charcoal sketches mirror society’s castoffs, and the mother of two teen-age boys.

Her road to Vietnam began in Leechburg, Pa., a small Appalachian coal town where Miller and a younger brother grew up poor, fatherless and supported by a mother who worked as a school janitor. In those days, she dreamed of “one day being rich enough to afford shoes all year-round.”

She won a scholarship to a nursing school in Latrobe, Pa., but ran out of money in her final year. In order to survive financially and graduate, Miller did what thousands of poor young men who fought in Vietnam did; she enlisted in the Army.

“I drew private’s pay in my senior year, $80 a month. I had never seen so much money. After graduation I owed the Army two years and began my enlistment in February, 1965,” she said.

After receiving a commission and going through basic training at Ft. Sam Houston, Tex., Miller was assigned to Ft. Jackson, S.C., where she met her first husband, 2nd Lt. Tony Howe.

“He was an infantry officer, so we knew he was going to Vietnam. But it was a matter of not knowing when. Imagine our surprise, when I was the first to get orders for Vietnam,” she said.

The two got married a few days after Miller was ordered to Vietnam, and Howe’s battalion commander asked the Pentagon to cancel her orders. When that failed, Howe put in for “compassionate reassignment” to Vietnam, Miller said.

“When Tony submitted his request, some general in the Pentagon called his battalion commander and said that ‘some idiot from your battalion just put in for compassionate reassignment to Vietnam.’ The battalion C.O. told him that it was because his wife was going to Vietnam.”

As it turned out, Miller’s orders were delayed long enough for the Army to cut her husband’s Vietnam orders, and the two took separate flights to Southeast Asia in February, 1966, and spent their first anniversary together on R&R; (rest and recreation) in Hong Kong.

“I was used to seeing patients in clean, white sheets, with small surgical scars. But I remember the first wounded we treated. These guys had laid on canvas litters for a while. Their fatigues and the litters were covered with black stains. You didn’t know what you were getting your hands into. You didn’t know if the stains were blood, excrement, dirt or what. I was shocked the first time I saw wounded GIs,” Miller said.

The worst part about treating wounded soldiers was the triage, assigning priority of medical treatment, she added.

“It was awful. Those whom we knew were not going to make it, we triaged them out and made them as comfortable as possible. It was awful, because sometimes they would be awake and saying, ‘Nurse, help me.’ That was the most depressing decision that we had to make.”

As with most soldiers assigned to Vietnam, it did not take long for Miller to become cynical about the war.

“The thing about Vietnam that really disturbed me was seeing all those 18- and 19-year-old boys who weren’t going to be welcomed home and had pieces of their bodies missing . . . . That always bothered me, but I had the ability to not come apart when I saw them. I guess that’s what you call being desensitized.”

Upon her return home, Miller settled in San Diego, her first husband’s hometown, and became the first head nurse at the UCSD Medical Center’s neonatal unit. She suffered the same alienation that some combat veterans endured on their return.

“It was traumatic. One day I was standing in 124-degree heat in Bien Hoa, waiting to fly out with my husband. The next day I was in California, and out of the military. Not even a ‘Thank you, ma’am.’ People at the hospital used to ask me what Vietnam was like. You can’t really tell anyone what it was like. You had to be there to know.”

In 1986, about three years after her divorce and 22 years of nursing, Miller decided to change careers. With encouragement from her second husband, Dr. Ron Coen, she went to law school. She specializes in civil rights, constitutional law and “law enforcement malpractice.” Most of her clients are poor and come from the ranks of the downtrodden.

“By defending people whom society perceives to be the least deserving, I believe that I am not only protecting their rights but everyone’s rights. I believe in that so strongly. We are the only people in the world who afford these rights to these people,” she said.

“You don’t get rich by practicing this kind of law. But they are my clients, and it makes me sick the way they are treated by the system. I relate so much better to these people than to those who are my peers.”

Her husband believes that it is her “Appalachia experience” that helps her relate to the poor, said Miller, who lives in Tierrasanta.

“I’m not a La Costa type. I don’t do tennis or drive Jaguars.”