NSA Station Hospital, Da Nang: A Personal History - Part 1
By Jim Chaffee
In May, 1999, as I sat drinking in the colonial style bar of the Furama Hotel on the beach next to the site of the old China Beach USO, a loud and boorish former Army nurse anesthetist, claiming to have served with an Army hospital in the Central Highlands, yammered in my face. I’d told him about NSA Station Hospital which had been located a few miles south of this place, near the foot of the Marble Mountains; that in our triage we had no nurses; in fact, there were almost no nurse anesthetists at the hospital. He essentially called me a liar, told me the Navy was run by nurse anesthetists, then berated the whole unit, saying we could have provided better service had we staffed with nurses. Cutting him short, I insulted him, the Army, and nurses in general, and he left the bar.
I had the privilege and good fortune of serving as a hospital corpsman at the Naval Support Activity Station Hospital, NSAH for short, near Da Nang from October, 1967 until June, 1969. Situated on the sandy strip on the east side of the Han River from Da Nang, between the Han River and the South China Sea, the hospital sat near the Marble Mountains just to the south. These five outcroppings dominated our landscape.
Part of a cluster of bases just north of the Marble Mountains, where the Da Nang perimeter ended, the hospital was across the Main Supply Road from MAG-16, a Marine Corps helicopter base on the beach. The hospital was on the west side of the road, the river behind it. On the south perimeter was a Seabee camp, and south of that, at the foot of the northernmost inland Marble Mountain, Nui Tho Son, was a dump. Across the road from the dump, on the beach at the foot of the big Marble Mountain, Nui Thuy Son, now generally referred to as The Marble Mountain in tourist guides, was the 5th Special Forces HQ. North of that was a POW compound, and then came MAG-16. Farther north the road to the China Beach USO exited the main road. On the hospital's north perimeter was a pagoda attached to a hamlet on the east perimeter, between the hospital and the river.
The original hospital was destroyed just before its completion in an attack in October, 1965, when MAG-16 was overrun. When I arrived, the rebuilt facility was a major field hospital with air conditioned wards and operating rooms and a large staff of specialists in areas ranging from tropical medicine and thoracic surgery to neurosurgery.
I was temporarily assigned to Receiving II, part sick bay and part outpatient clinic. Receiving I was next door, just off the chopper pad. This was the triage, where I would spend the bulk of my tour. But first I was permanently assigned to the same sort of medical ward as my previous assignment at Naval Hospital Yokosuka, Japan.
The Vietnam war would explode with the 1968 Tet Offensive, coinciding with my 21st birthday, just around the corner from my arrival. The year would be the most devastating of the war in terms of American casualties.
Hospital corpsmen at the Yokosuka Hospital received orders to Vietnam in groups. The previous groups had been sent FMF, Fleet Medical Forces, to serve with the Marine Corps. A substantial number would not return alive. Our future seemed ominous as we received fresh combat casualties at the Yokosuka facility. The seriously wounded were evacuated as soon as possible and Yokosuka was one of the stops. We saw some of those we had served with return, or read their names in the Stars and Stripes.
Surprise was the general response to the orders for NSA Station Hospital. Some of us were unhappy, having looked forward to serving with the "grunts," but most were puzzled, with no idea of the facility's location or of its mission. I didn't understand that mission until recently.
What I did learn came after years of reflection on haunting personal experiences. The sense of mission at the hospital was intense, and our performance as corpsmen went beyond what anyone could expect from our twelve weeks of formal training. Those without the stamina to handle the daily stress sometimes made irrational decisions to get out.
When I got to NSAH the wards were staffed with a handful of nurses who went about their typical supervisory roles in starched white uniforms. I am not certain when they arrived, but I believe it was about the time I did, as there were corpsmen working the wards who had preceded the nurses. My recollection is that they were all at least lieutenant in rank. Most were lieutenant commanders, and they were led by a CDR Cannon who later made captain. Their role was largely symbolic, and there was an uneasy truce between the nurses and the doctors, with the corpsmen often caught between. The areas of the hospital where corpsmen had most freedom in treating patients, Receiving I and II, were not staffed by nurses, and in fact they almost never made an appearance in either place. There was one nurse in the OR, however, who may have been an anesthetist. She was always in scrub greens when I saw her, usually in the pre-op area just above the triage across from X-ray. But I am getting ahead of myself.
Staffing for the large, open bay wards was short. A single night corpsman often had to handle a ward with 60 or more patients. I remember making the temperature rounds at 0200 with a ward full of malaria patients, giving them the standard drill when their fevers were excessive: Sit under a cold shower and drink a recycled IV bottle full of cold water after swallowing five aspirin. Sometimes short on bedside manner, the wards provided a real bed, hot chow, showers and flushing toilets, and excellent medical care. To the grunt Marines, the majority of our patients, they were paradise. Transferring from the wards was nearly impossible; it took an insubordinate encounter with a nurse to get me out.
Weekly sick call for Vietnamese civilians at the orphanage near China Beach, a few miles north of us, provided rare civilian exposure. The whole area was off limits, particularly the city of Da Nang. The doctor who organized these Medical Civic Action Program visits, a firm believer in winning hearts and minds, was senior physician on my ward. A lieutenant commander, he was also a devout Catholic, and I assume he had made contact with the Vietnamese Catholic nuns who ran the orphanage through the Church. Their convent was next door to the orphanage. Medcap Photos
The doctor had full trust in the ability of his corpsmen to treat what they could and refer what they could not, so we had total freedom on these visits, broadening our range of experience in disease and exposing us to the appalling local conditions. All this temporarily ended when the Tet Offensive made the MEDCAP visits too dangerous.
The medical ward was intensely busy, overflowing with malaria patients, most with P. Falciparum, which can lead to cerebral malaria and death. There had been deaths from cerebral malaria. The lab was over-extended and samples sometimes sat unexamined for days. A lab tech showed me how to stain a slide with a drop of blood and examine it for parasites. The doctor had a microscope in his office and let me use it, encouraging me to take blood when a patient began the cycle of chills and fever. The nurse did not think I should be doing this duty, since it was the responsibility of the lab. This led to a shouting match one day when I was examining a slide instead of mopping the floor.
In essence, I was fired. I was pretty certain that a captain's mast would be next, but I believe the doctor interceded, and I was transferred to Receiving I. That was a blessing.