The War Within : Judge Still Battling Painful Memories of Vietnam-Era Nursing

One of Eileen Moore’s most vivid memories of the Vietnam War was of a young soldier who was regaining consciousness following the amputation of his severely injured leg.

His eyes bright, his voice meekly anxious, the soldier asked Moore, a combat nurse, if he was still alive.

“I told him, yes, he was still alive but that he lost one of his legs,” said Moore, still recalling that moment with clarity 28 years later. “He said, ‘Thank God . . . I don’t have to go back.”’

The young soldier’s joy about the wound that would send him home was only one irony of many, Moore said. She saw many wounded soldiers become sick with disappointment once they were treated and released--to return to combat.

Such was the tormenting ambivalence that caused Moore and other active duty nurses in the war to question the purpose of their duties to heal, she said. It also kept them from discussing--and therefore purging--their painful experiences, Moore said.

Moore, 49, served as a combat nurse in Vietnam for six months in 1966, too short a time to witness the ultimate destruction of the country but long enough to watch the unfolding of the devastation and its lasting effects on the psyche of Americans who lived through that era.

On Thursday, the day of the dedication of the Women’s Vietnam Memorial in Washington, Moore, now an Orange County Superior Court judge in Santa Ana, spoke during an interview at her home about some of her memories from that unforgettable period. It was the first time she has done so with a non-family member, she said. She asked that the city where she lives not be published because she fears possible retaliation from those convicted in her courtroom.

Moore said that perhaps now she and other female veterans may finally be able to break the silence most have kept for nearly 30 years about how the war scarred them emotionally.

“I think the nurses deserve (the memorial) and the public deserves to understand a little bit more about what the nurses and other American women who were there went through,” Moore said. “We had to care for these young fellows and tell them they were missing an arm, a leg or an eye, and we were more traumatized than the public realized.”

During the war, the Defense Department did not keep records of military personnel by sex, and only about 11,000 of the 265,000 American women who served, mostly as nurses, have been identified. It is uncertain how many of those female veterans live in Orange County, according to local chapters of Veterans of Foreign Wars.

For many female veterans, the Women’s Vietnam Memorial--a bronze statue depicting three fatigue-clad women nursing a wounded soldier--symbolizes the public’s acknowledgment of their role in a war heretofore associated with the loss of the lives of American men and the disillusionment of Americans at home.

For Moore, the memorial “is a great release for all the nurses who have been bottling it up for the past 25 to 30 years.”

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During her six-month stint at the 85th Evacuation Center of Qui Nhon, a military field hospital in central Vietnam, Moore watched many soldiers die and helped nurse many others back to health. It is the memories of the wounded soldiers whom she patched up and sent back out onto the battlefield that would continue to haunt her, she said.

“You tried your best to help these young men, but the ones who were not seriously injured . . . there was almost a disappointment among the soldiers--aimed at you--when you helped to make them better,” Moore said, her eyes filmed with tears. “They had to go back. You let them down. You never quite knew what you were doing wrong.”

Moore completed her tour of duty in West Germany, where she was stationed for 2 1/2 years. After she returned to the United States and was discharged, she attended UC Irvine and later the Anaheim campus of Pepperdine University, under the U.S. Army Nurses Corps Education Fund.

Moore decided to enter law, she said, on the advice of counselors and friends who praised her analytical mind. Moore said her decision to leave nursing for law was not influenced by her experience in Vietnam.

Moore worked at a Newport Beach law firm for 10 years and was appointed to the bench in 1989 by then-Gov. George Deukmejian.

Many former combat nurses tend not to talk about the inner conflicts they suffered in the war, even among themselves, Moore said. To this day, Moore and one of her dearest friends, whom she worked with in Vietnam, do not discuss their experiences, she said.

Not too long ago, Moore called the friend, who lives in Pennsylvania, and left a message, saying she would go to Washington for the memorial dedication only if the friend would accompany her.

“She called me back to say, no, she couldn’t go,” Moore said. “She didn’t give any explanation.”

Maybe one day soon, Moore said, the two women could visit the memorial and reconcile with each other their time in Vietnam.

“Right now, I’m still not ready,” she said. “But the memorial is helping. . . . I don’t talk about my time in Vietnam. But I’m talking about it today.”