Vietnam defines nurse’s HOF career
By Ian Tocher
It’s a long way from Gettysburg to Vietnam to now living at Great Waters on Lake Oconee, but Virginia “Ginny” Lee Dornheggen’s lifelong journey led to her induction last November to the Georgia Military Veterans’ Hall of Fame (GMVHOF).
Dornheggen was inducted for her work as a U.S. Army nurse in Vietnam as well as her involvement with the Reynolds Veterans Association (RVA) and her ongoing efforts since 2014 with the Student Veterans Resource Center (SVRC) at the University of Georgia. Retired U.S. Army officer and SVRC Director Jon Segars nominated Dornheggen for her GMVHOF recognition.
“The Reynolds Veterans Association had been working with the Augusta Rehab Center for returning Iraqi and Afghanistan soldiers, but by about the end of 2014, they really didn’t need our services anymore,” Dornheggen explained.
The RVA then refocused to support just four U.S. veteran-students attending UGA at the time by providing them computers at a small, dedicated student lounge within the on-campus Tate Center.
“As time went on, they got more and more students and they have almost 400 veterans as students now,” said Dornheggen, who continues as liaison between the RVA and SVRC. “And not only did they progress in the number of students, but the need was there for more accessibility to computers and books and other things. So, the RVA started an endowment fund, which is now over $100,000. And then we have a discretionary fund that we also give from, too.”
Even as a little girl growing up in Gettysburg, Penn., Dornheggen was sensitive to the plight of American soldiers fighting and dying for a cause greater than themselves.
She recalled participating in a Memorial Day parade that ended at the Gettysburg National Military Park cemetery, where she and some of her grade-school classmates placed hand-picked flowers upon the short, grey stones that mark the graves of unknown soldiers.
“I remember thinking how sad it was that so many of the stones had no names,” Dornheggen said. “There was just a small American flag where we were supposed to place our flowers. That same kind of sadness came back to me after my Vietnam experience. I’ve always thought that other than the Civil War, no military episode in American history produced domestic trauma to match what happened with the war in Vietnam.”
Dornheggen experienced some of that trauma firsthand, initially for a few months in 1970 as a freshly minted U.S. Army nurse at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington before being transferred that October to the 67th Evac Hospital in Quy Nhon, where she earned a Bronze Star for her service.
While attending the Harrisburg (Penn.) Hospital School of Nursing as a 19-year-old junior in 1968, Dornheggen said she overheard some senior students talking about joining the Army Nurse Corps.
“My ears perked up because I thought, ‘Oh, that sounds like something I might want to do.’ I had been a Girl Scout, I had a lot of patriotism, and I wanted to travel,” she said. “And then this girl said I could go on the GI bill, and the thing that really struck me was I would get $300 a month for my senior year. And back then, that was a lot of money.”
Upon pitching her new career plan to her parents, Dornheggen admits her World War II veteran father wasn’t immediately sure his middle of three daughters truly understood what she’d be getting into, but upon seeing she was adamant, he and her mother agreed to the new plan.
“Since I wasn’t 21 yet, they had to sign the papers for me to enlist,” she said.
Immediately upon graduating from nursing school, Dornheggen said she took a three-month intensive-care coronary course just because she loved intensive care work. She then took her board exams to become a registered nurse, and on Jan. 6, 1970, she was sworn in as a second lieutenant and sent to basic training at Fort Sam Houston in Texas.
“I learned all the Army protocol, how to wear the uniform, salute, march, all that stuff,” she recalled. “And then I was assigned to Walter Reed, and I loved it there, absolutely loved it. I was mostly in the ICU recovery room, but some of the surgical unit, too.
“I worked with so many Walter Reed nurses who wanted to go to Vietnam, so I thought, ‘Well, they want to go; I'm happy here; so, I won’t get sent.’ Well, I got my orders in October.”
Dornheggen became one of about 40 nurses at the 67th Evac, a two-story hospital built in 1958 with an airstrip running immediately beside it to deliver or evacuate injured soldiers via C-130s with sometimes alarming frequency.
“It was so intense most of the time, but there were times when we really didn’t have any casualties coming in. But we always had someone who was just sick with GI (gastro-intestinal) problems or whatever. So, there were boring days, too,” she said.
“And I can remember getting down when I didn’t get any mail. The mail was like, maybe you’d get one letter in two weeks, and then all of a sudden you’d get 20 letters, that type of thing. But the friendships and comradery of our unit was just incredible. We were family because we didn’t have anybody else to trust.”
The unpredictable, often chaotic atmosphere also meant the doctors on site placed a great deal of reliance on their nurses.
“Our critical thinking skills, our accuracy to know what to do and when to do it became incredible,” she said. “I mean, the doctors taught us so much because then they would expect us to know what to do.”
Just eight months into her Vietnam deployment, Dornheggen said several nurses who showed her the ropes had been transferred or returned to the States, leaving her behind at 22 years old among the “seasoned” caregivers responsible for teaching a new batch of nurses.
“So here I was with my really close friends and they left, leaving me with all these new people, and I just got really tired and depressed,” Dornheggen said. “I was depressed, but I was also very irritable because I had to teach people who just weren't picking things up as fast as I wanted them to.”
What never changed, though, was the appreciation of injured soldiers for the nurses who took care of them. Dornheggen recalled a morale-boosting visit to her hospital by 1971 Miss America Phyllis George and her entourage.
“I had already worked 10 hours that day when she came through our unit,” she said. “They were all dressed so beautifully in civilian clothes, their makeup, their hairdos were perfect, and I was in my usual fatigues and combat boots. I remember just looking at them and thinking how awesomely beautiful she and her court were.
“One of the soldiers that I was caring for had both arms amputated and could not sit up by himself as I was helping to hold him up. Phyllis George came over and spoke to him for several minutes,” Dornheggen said. “As I laid him back down, I said, ‘Wouldn't it be great if all us nurses could look that good?’ He gave me the biggest smile I had ever seen from him and answered, ‘They don't hold a candle to what you mean to us and to what you are.’ I leaned down and kissed him on his forehead and told him I would never forget him. He was supporting me, but I was supposed to be caring for him.”
The stress continued to take its toll, however, so Dornheggen approached her chief nurse and told her she needed to get out of the intensive care unit. She was quickly moved to orthopedics for a month and then to the emergency room until she departed Vietnam on Nov. 21, 1971, a little over a year past her arrival.
After taking a couple of months to regroup, Dornheggen landed a job stateside with a hospital in Kalamazoo, Mich., where she met a young hospital administration resident in October 1972, got engaged six months later, then married in September 1973. She and David remain married with two adult children 51 years later.
Dornheggen said it took nearly 20 years for her to come to grips with her Vietnam experience and what it meant for the country as a whole. Her healing, she said, didn’t start until she made a 1988 pilgrimage to see the then-five-year-old Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington with its 58,000-plus names inscribed to commemorate U.S. casualties.
It took another great step forward, she said, with the debut of the Vietnam Women’s Memorial in 1993. Though anchored by a statue depicting two nurses comforting a fallen soldier, the memorial, lobbied for over several years by former U.S. Army nurse Diane Carlson Evans, is dedicated to all military women who served in Vietnam.
Dornheggen attended its official opening on Nov. 11, 1993, “with my dearest Army nurse friend, Laura, no husbands, no kids,” and they wound up connecting with about 20 other nurses they’d served with at Quy Nhon.
“We were walking down the mall from the Smithsonian, and there were thousands and thousands of Vietnam vets clapping loudly and shouting, ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you,’ and holding up signs of nurses' names who took care of them,” Dornheggen said, clearly emotional recalling the memory.
“None of us ever thought we would ever hear that -- Thank you for a job that we were supposed to be doing," she added. "I mean, I could cry now just thinking about it because it was so meaningful to us,” she said. “So, the memorial, it almost looks like we are still watching over the wall at all the soldiers that died. That’s how impressive it is. After that, I was finally able to start talking about it. Twenty years later.”
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This story appeared in Lakelife magazine, Volume 19, Issue 1, and is the property of Smith Communications, Inc. No portions of the story or photos may be copied or used without written consent from the publisher. For more information about the Vietnam Women's Memorial, visit https://vietnamwomensmemorial.org/
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