Back home in staid mid-1960s Melbourne after three years in swinging London, Dorothy ‘Dot’ Angell wanted a new adventure.

So, in early 1967 the 26-year-old nurse signed up for a stint in south-east Asia: she and a group of other staff from The Alfred Hospital in Melbourne put their hands up to work in South Vietnam as part of a civilian medical team.

“I was very, very restless … and so I volunteered, not knowing anything about what we were going to be facing. And I still say that the experience I had over there really changed my whole career.”

The team of doctors and nurses landed at a place far from orderly, conservative Australia: Saigon’s Tan Son Nhat International Airport, in the middle of a chaotic war.

“When our plane landed it was immediately surrounded by South Vietnamese, heavily armed. We arrived by Pan Am, the American airline, and the South Vietnamese were trying to persuade them to give them a big plane. They wanted the plane.”

Treating civilians as war raged on

The team were dispatched to a civilian hospital in Bien Hoa, about an hour outside Saigon.

“I think we thought that we were going to another Alfred hospital, with all the facilities, all the equipment, et cetera. And what we found were the hospital conditions in a rural area, so we had wards that had dirt floors … there were ducks and geese which had to be gotten rid of … We were short of everything … You didn’t throw a half-used intravenous bag away, it was stored in a sterile manner. And what was left was used on somebody else. And we got very skilled at sharpening needles.”

The civilian medical team was contracted by the Australian government – but Dot says they weren’t provided with enough cash to buy their own food. They turned to the American troops at the nearby Bien Hoa Airbase.

“We had a shed full of shovels and cement, but we had a shortage of food. And so we bartered with the Americans who wanted shovels and cement and we got powdered eggs and skinless sausages.”

The war raged in the streets and countryside around the hospital, with regular raids on the air base, and the Australians treated all comers: wounded Vietnamese soldiers, suspected Viet Cong, but mainly civilians, including lots of children.

“One who sticks out when he was a 12-year-old and he’d stepped on a mine, and he was peppered right through it. Unfortunately, he subsequently died. Other children had lost limbs, they were burnt with napalm. Others, it was the malnutrition. They came in and they were starving.”

Dot worked in a six-bed post-operative recovery ward in a hospital inundated with people injured by the war.

“The first weekend I was there, I had 30 patients. And so there were stretchers on the floor … you might have three children laying sideways on the bed.”

This experienced hospital nurse found the work confronting.

“[In a] Casualty department most of the injuries are accidental. Whereas the wartime injuries are deliberately man-made, and that was the most difficult.”

Readjusting after the war

After four frantic months, Dot’s team flew home to Australia … and as with the war’s other veterans, the transition home was difficult.

“And when I looked out from the plane everybody was out yachting. And I thought to myself, oh, yes. Well, you’re taking barbecues, et cetera. You have no idea what’s going on.”

She was startled by loud noises and flew into inexplicable rages. It took her four years to realise she was suffering from post-traumatic stress.

And while Dot and the other civilian medical staff suffered similar health problems to the returned service personnel, they couldn’t access the same level of subsidised health care.

“The Department of Veterans Affairs applied the rule that you had to be deployed as part of the defence forces, and therefore you had to have what they called qualifying service. And they didn’t apply the same set of rules to the civilians,” says Bob Elworthy, from the Victorian branch of the Vietnam Veterans’ Association.

The state branch swung in behind the civilian nurses, urging them to march alongside them, and lobbying for their access to the Veterans’ Gold Card.

“They probably saw some of the hardest times that perhaps a lot of the Australian servicemen didn’t see. I mean the conditions under which they worked, the pressure under which they were placed, they were just amazing.”

Dot says the veterans’ support was critical to the surviving members of the 450-strong civilian teams finally receiving gold cards in 2020.

“I think the turning point for the civilian surgical teams was the love and the recognition from the military personnel that we’ve bonded to,” she says.

On Friday, Dot Angell and surviving members of the Civilian Medical and Surgical Teams will be in Canberra, for a commemoration of 50 years since the end of Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War. The Whitlam government withdrew the last Australians from Vietnam in mid-1973.

The event is likely to be the last major commemoration for many veterans, most of whom are aged in their 70s and 80s.

“I think it’s terribly important, actually,” says Dot. “I think from the point of view of the age of the Vietnam veterans, that this acknowledgement of the end of what was, at that stage, the longest war of the 20th Century, that it should be remembered.”

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