On a Monday morning for Memorial Day 2022, outside of The Memorial Building on Main Street in Beacon, a tiny woman with short white hair, wearing a pale blue dress, took steps to the podium to deliver a speech for the 2022 Memorial Day ceremony hosted by the American Legion Post 203. She had been sitting next to a Veteran to the on the right side of the stage, engaged in what looked like a captured conversation. When it was time for her to speak, she barely made the top of the podium. But her story and shared memories of her services as a nurse in Vietnam were so big. They were memories, we learned through her speech, that she did not share often. A video of her speech has been placed at the bottom of this article so that you may hear it.
Edie Meeks was the main speaker for the Memorial Day service in Beacon, NY. She said she decided to enlist because her brother Tom was drafted. He was in the Marine Corps. She thought: “If something happened to him, I would want to be there. Someone who really cared, and wanted to take care of him."
Edie went through basic training, were enlistees were “taught everything we needed to know in case things ‘escalated’ in Vietnam.” She flew to Saigon [Editor’s Note: now known as Ho Chi Minh City] where she said the nurses received everyone, because soldiers were flown to her station from other places. “There were mines all around us, and people shooting.”
Edie shared her first big memory that follows her with the audience, and it is based on the memory of another nurse: it was during a situation where the nurse was working in a shift where they had to triage, and decide who would be worked on. Edie’s friend said that one severely injured lieutenant who was lying on a stretcher would ask her every time she walked by if he was next. She walked by him several times, and each time he asked: “Am I next? Am I next?” And every time she walked by, she answered "Yes, you are next."
Finally, he died before he was treated. Edie’s friend the nurse revealed her secret thought to Edie: "I always wondered, if I hadn't told him yes, would he have died earlier, and not suffered?"
Edie answered her with certainty: "I am a mother today, and I'm telling you, I would have wanted you recognize my son, and to speak to him, and to comfort him. So I think you did absolutely the right thing."
Edie observed that when she worked in the Emergency Room in the United States, everything made sense. Kid fell out of a tree, and broke their leg. Over there, she said, nothing made sense. All of the patients were healthy, but blown up.
Eventually, working there became harder. She became so filled with rage. "Young men were coming in saying: 'Lieutenant, they aren't letting us win.'"
Edie appreciated the Corpsmen who helped her, often passing by after working a 12 hour day. They'd casually ask her, "What's going on, Lieutenant," and then lend themselves to wounded soldiers who were coming in. Described by Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund: “Corpsmen were enlisted ‘first responders’ of the Vietnam War, saving countless lives, often at great risk to themselves. Besides providing trauma care on the battlefield, they were responsible for the day-to-day prevention and treatment of a wide range of injuries and diseases among the troops.”
One of the final soldiers she saw there nearly broke her. A young man who came from Kansas, who was 19 years old and came from a farm. “He had a terrible abnormal wound,” Edie recalled, and was holding a letter from his mother that he asked Edie to read to him. “It was all of the little news from the people around town. Talked about his dad coming in with the dog, hunting pheasants. At the very end, she said: ‘We are so proud of you, son.’"
Three days later, he died.
By that October, Edie said she really had to shut down. “I can't feel another thing here." She asked for a change of venue, which ended up being no less violent or heartbreaking. She said she made lifelong friends there. "You needed to. You needed the backup."
She often wondered if she impacted someone's life for the better - who was really suffering - when she saved them. She asked herself: "Did I do him a favor by working on him?" She didn't know how they turned out. They were sent home. They were stabilized, and usually sent to Japan, she said. "We supported each other, because we supported the fellas who came in."
Edie continued with what made her service difficult for her. "That was another thing I felt difficult: to not be able to tell the parents how brave their sons had been. I saw this one patient. He fought and fought and fought to stay alive. And finally, because of an infection, he died. And I couldn't write to his mother to say 'He was so brave. He tried so hard.'"
Edie wanted to write, but was advised not to, in case her letter reached his mother before the official military letter did.
Edie said that one thing she noticed was how the soldiers kidded each other. Poked jabs at each other, like "Come on, get up." Edie knew: "The laughter kept them going."
Most of Edie's memories were dark with sorrow. And she noted that she did not remember the bright moments so well. "As a nurse, you remembered the ones who died. But you didn't remember the ones that you helped to get better."
At the 5th anniversary of the Vietnam's Women's Memorial, she was at the statue, and heard her name called from behind her. She turned around, and saw a lieutenant who she worked with. She asked "Gary, what are you doing here?" Gary said: "I came to see you."
Gary went on to describe what he remembered about Edie: "One of the things I remember about you is, you'd come in in the morning, and you'd start cracking jokes." Edie said that a lot of their patients at that time had chest wounds, so they had tubes that went to the bubbly bottle because the soldiers were taking a breath. "All of them were bubbling like crazy because they were laughing."
But Edie was stunned at herself. "I never remembered any of that. I just remembered the sorrow."
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