When I Die I'm Going to Heaven 'Cause I've Spent My Time in Hell

A Memoir of My Year As an Army Nurse in Vietnam

By: Barbara Hesselman Kautz MSN RN / Narrated By: Janet Metzger

Length: 6 hrs and 8 mins

A (young) woman to be proud of

Barbara Hesselman was 18 years old when she joined the army, hoping to finance her nursing education. She had six months nursing experience when she was sent to Vietnam and stationed at an Evac Hospital. That might not seem like too long a time, but she did some pretty major work as she was at Walter Reed, where they had 30x the trauma/amputees that even top hospitals in the country saw. For a very young woman, she was pretty tough and unflappable.

She likened the boys she flew to Vietnam with, and her fellow nurses, as lambs quite possibly being led to the slaughter. And with a full bladder, she joined them as they all ran off the plane and dashed into waiting buses which took them to the 24th Evacuation Hospital in South Vietnam for quite possibly one of the longest years of her life.

When I Die I’m Going to Heaven ‘Cause I’ve Spent My Time in Hell is her story of that year, of the close and lifelong friends she made with the other nurses, of some of the relationships she developed with doctors and chopper pilots—people she’d probably never see again despite the urgency they all experienced, and of many of the cases, young men and civilians, she absolutely knew she’d remember but would never ever run into again. There was only one patient, someone they all assumed had died, she would see again at a reunion, he having been saved through extraordinary (And at the time, deemed futile) measures. All these people made a difference in her life and in the outlook she had after she left Vietnam.

Voiced in crisp, even, and professional tones by Janet Metzger (Who vividly brought Barbara to life, with all her unemotionalism… that would sometimes break; with all her distance… that would always be tried), this is a really good journey into what a young woman has to do to survive, what she has to do to excel and to keep battered, traumatized, brutalized young men alive. As she gets off the plane, she looks around at the boys running with her, and she wonders how many will be getting back on the plane to go home a year later, and how many would be going home in body bags.

She has no illusions, and sometimes she comes off as rather cynical and distant. But as she explains, she simply could NOT afford to become attached to patients and their outcomes; she simply could NOT afford to think about the plight of civilians trapped in such a brutal era, with dismemberment and death being the harsh reality in the lives of Vietnamese children.

The book ends with a list of all the nurses who suffered and died due to exposure to Agent Orange, and it’s very, very sobering indeed. The hospital was built upon a radically defoliated area and was situated next to Agent Orange dumps. Those nurses met some pretty grim ends right along with a lot of the men who survived the war only to come back to illness and nerve damage and cancers of all sorts.

I was so happy that this book wound up being so good because, whereas I’ve thought quite a bit about the men in combat and about the POWs, I really hadn’t given much thought to what the nurses went through (Yes, even with TV shows on about doctors and such all).

I happily add this book to our Veterans Day selection, and I proudly declare myself as a member of Ms. Hesselman Kautz’s gender.