Lou Eisenbrandt recalls year as Army nurse during peak of Vietnam War

By Don Bradley

On March 22, Lou Eisenbrandt will tell an audience at Leawood City Hall about her year as a nurse in Vietnam.

She won’t hold back. She’s an open book. In fact, she’s written two about her experiences in America’s most conflicted war.

And when the fundraiser for the Leawood Veterans Memorial Project is over and people leave, somebody out in the parking lot might ask, “So, did she like going over there or not?”

The question would probably make Eisenbrandt smile.

One of the hardest things she did in Vietnam? Holding the hand of a dying soldier.

One of the best? Holding the hand of a dying soldier.

“A guy might look up at me and say something like, ‘You look like my girl back home,’” she said.

She shook her head.

“I wouldn’t trade my year in Vietnam for anything.”

That’s saying something. Especially considering 24 years ago, she was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease as a result of exposure to Agent Orange, a defoliant used by the American military in Vietnam.

The free lecture event, “Vietnam Nurse, Mending and Remembering,” is set for 1 p.m., March 22 in the Oak Room at Leawood City Hall, 4800 Town Center Drive.

Donations toward the privately-funded Veterans Project are appreciated. The fundraising is more than halfway to its $350,000 goal.

Eisenbrandt was raised in Illinois near Scott Air Force Base. A lot of her friends growing up were military “brats.”

She was the oldest of five in a blue-collar family.

“I wanted to see the world,” she said.

So, she joined the army and they made her a nurse. At some point in her first duty assignment, she received a letter. “Congratulations,” it said. “You’re going to Vietnam.”

That’s where she would start her world tour.

On Nov. 1, 1969, she arrived at the 91st Evac Hospital in Chu Lai in the Quang Nam Province of Vietnam. The war was at its peak with more than a half-million American troops in the country.

That first day, she cried, surrounded by hepatitis, malaria, jungle rot, intestinal wounds, maggots. Plus, her luggage hadn’t arrived.

Things got better. And then worse. The Tet Offensive the previous year had turned much of the United States against the war.

“I got jaded pretty fast,” she said.

She was soon transferred to the emergency ward treating wounded that arrived by helicopters. She saw gunshot wounds, fragmentation wounds, head traumas, amputees, 12-hour shifts, six days a week.

She remembers helping roll over a double-amputee and his back stayed on the litter.

“I did a lifetime’s worth of nursing in that one year,” she said.

She also learned to water ski at China Beach. And she and the other nurses at Chu Lai also partied. A lot.

Maintaining a balance, she called it.

It’s how they kept going, day after day, to keep up with the choppers that wouldn’t stop coming.

“I don’t think we were as irreverent as they were on M*A*S*H,” she said. “But we were close.”

She rotated back stateside in late 1970 and in the 50-plus years since, she has married and raised a family, but never completely left Chu Lai.

One day, she was asked to talk to a 5th grade class about Vietnam. She did. Then she wrote a book. She talked to more kids in more classes and eventually wrote another book.

“I do this so Vietnam doesn’t get swept under the rug,” she said.

It was a war, she knows, that America never really supported. Protests filled college campuses back home. Returning vets were called “baby killers.”

“There was so much wrong with what happened,” Eisenbrandt said.

It was a war not even the government thought America could win, according to the so-called Pentagon Papers. American troops struggled with jungle warfare, and they were fighting an elusive enemy that seemingly could hide months in a tunnel.

And perhaps most of all, Eisenbrandt said, “The privileged didn’t have to go.”

Now retired and living in Leawood with her husband, she’s proud of her Vietnam duty and hopes the best for all the soldiers and Marines who came her way.

She’s gone back several times.

And, of course, she’s been to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington where the names of 58,000 Americans killed in the war are inscribed in a wall.

“I’m always amazed by the quiet there,” she said.

And in that stillness, she will think, “What a waste.” Not just the names on the wall, but the ones who brought the war home, to be forever part of them. And people like herself with Parkinson’s or other malady tied to that war.

But she has found her peace. Sometimes, she will focus on a single name on the wall and wonder, “Is that a hand I held?”

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