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Maxine Conder c. Vietnam War
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Maxine Conder c. 2011
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Last March, KUED aired the first episode of Utah Vietnam War Stories, a powerful documentary tribute to the men and women of Utah who served during the Vietnam conflict. The second gripping segment, Turning Point, airs Monday, September 10 at 7:00 p.m on KUED.

Built upon dozens of interviews with soldiers, sailors, airmen and medical personnel, Turning Point is a compelling oral history of the pivotal months in Vietnam during and immediately after the Tet Offensive of 1968. The film features interivews with Layton’s Maxine Conder and Terry McDade, Farmington’s Jay Hess, Bountiful’s Nicholas Miller and Wanship’s new arrival Russ Moseley.

Maxine Conder worked as a state-side nurse in the Navy over the course of the Vietnam War. When the first woman ever to achieve the rank of Admiral in the Navy retired, Conder replaced her, becoming the second woman to hold the position that put her in charge of 2,600 Navy nurses stationed around the world. She felt a deep appreciation for the teamwork and camaraderie both among the soldiers she cared for and the medical team itself.

"After you've had a busy day and things go bad, and you've come off duty, you get together and you kinda unwind,” says Conder. The strong support system the nurses offered each other, including getting together to tell “sea stories,” or stories of the out-of-the-ordinary events of the day, helped the nurses cope.

To patients and corpsmen, Conder served not only as an authority, but often as a mother figure. One of her first patients, before going into surgery would ask, “Ma'am, would you be here and holding my hands when I wake back up?” She recalls many touching moments with the young soldiers she ared for.

“Never in my life have I taken care of patients who would say to me, ‘Ma'am, my buddy is three or four beds down. He needs you more than I do. Please go take care of him first’… You had to be careful not to get too attached to some of these people. They could still break your heart.”

After learning that he wasn’t going to graduate from high school, Terry McDade joined the Marine Corps at age 18. He marched in the Days of ’47 Parade in Salt Lake City and, afraid the war was going to be over before he got there, he rushed through basic training. Once in Vietnam, he became a helicopter door gunner, often on “medevac,” or medical evacuation, missions. With an acute awareness that any day might be his last, he made the most of his R&R time. “The taxi driver that took me back to the base, I handed him all the rest of the money, I said, ‘Here ya are, have a nice time.’”

Amid the carnage of emergency medevac flights, McDade recalls seeing the hands of wounded soldiers, smudged with blood or dirt from where their buddies had held them, trying to offer some comfort. “I didn't fly for God and country and mom's apple pie and the American war effort in Vietnam,” explains McDade. “I flew for the grunts.”

The camaraderie with the soldiers got him and his crew through the chaos and deafening noise of the airborne missions, the constant threat of not knowing who was friend and who was foe, and even village relocations involving hysterical pigs with loose bowel control. Describing the sense of brotherhood among soldiers in Vietnam, McDade says, “they might even think the other person is the biggest jerk in the squadron, but they were willing to risk their life to save his.”

Jay C. Hess, Lieutenant Colonel in the Air Force, likes to say that he flew 33-and-a-half missions over North Vietnam. “Unfortunately, I didn't keep the number of landings equal to the number of take-offs.” On his 34th mission, he was shot down over enemy territory, where he was taken as a POW to Ha Noi. At first, torture and solitary confinement took him from “’How am I gonna make it through the day?’ to, ‘How am I gonna make it through this next minute.’”

Soon after his arrival, Hess was assigned roommates, with whom he became very close. After two years, they were moved to large rooms of about 50 men each, which they called “Camp Unity.” They taught each other everything they knew just to pass the time. “We had guys that were teaching Russian, and guys that were teaching Spanish, and guys that were teaching history, and guys that were teaching math. We had all these academy graduates that were well-educated people.”

A volunteer in the Military Medical Corps and a volunteer paratrooper, Nicholas Miller spent a lot of his time in Vietnam crawling back and forth on battlefields, attending wounded soldiers. During one battle, Miller himself was indirectly hit, but stayed on the field for two more hours, taking care of soldiers that were in worse shape.

Miller’s mother, who wrote to him every week, did a great deal to help him maintain this sense of stability. A veteran herself, who had served in the 12th Women's Army Group during World War II, “she was the one that was a stabilizer.” He enjoyed the support of a family with a history of military service, and from the strong bond of brothers in combat.

Russ Moseley was born into a military family and grew up a "military brat." He enlisted in the Air Force to fly, like his father did in World War II. As his plane of newcomers touched down in Vietnam, the enemy was bombing the runway. While the other new guys were running for cover, Moseley and a friend sat on a sand dune, thinking, “The Army is going through a lot of trouble to scare us… this is a real stupid way of introducing this.” It wasn’t until the battle was over and the dead were counted that they realized it wasn’t a training exercise – it was life in-country. His youthful bravado dried up quickly after arrival in Vietnam.

Moseley earned the nickname “Casper” thanks to his ghost-like ability to slip away from combat and narrowly avoid high-fatality situations. Being part of a helicopter crew, he felt extremely lucky, especially when he flew resupply missions to the infantrymen who spent weeks in the harsh conditions of the jungle.

“The joke in Vietnam is, ‘Hey, Joe, you saved my life yesterday. Hey, I've got a dry pair of socks; we're even,’ you know? A dry pair of socks was that valuable.”

Moseley and his crew did their best to take care of the grunts that slept in the jungle, bringing them food, mailing their letters when they got back to base. “It made you feel so eternally grateful that you were just going to pick up and fly off and leave this behind you and go to a much safer place,” but it was hard to leave them behind in the swamp.

The second episode of a projected three-part documentary series, Utah Vietnam War Stories: Turning Point provides a sense of the wide scope of human experience that took place during the Vietnam War. Additional episodes of Utah Vietnam War Stories will debut in early 2013.

Utah Vietnam War Stories is made possible by The Katherine W. Dumke and Ezekiel R. Dumke, Jr. Foundation, The George S. and Delores Doré Eccles Foundation and the contributing members of KUED.

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