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Joan Furey at her home in Sayville with the medals...

Joan Furey at her home in Sayville with the medals from her service as an Army nurse during the Vietnam War. Credit: Rick Kopstein

Joan Furey was born in Brooklyn, raised in Terryville and has spent the past 19 years in Sayville. But the fulcrum of this quiet Long Island life was long ago and far away, on a hot dusty air base near the city of Pleiku, in South Vietnam's Central Highlands. Twenty-two at the time, Furey had recently completed her training as a nurse at Pilgrim State in Brentwood, joined the Army and on Jan. 27, 1969, was deployed to Pleiku AB's 71st Evacuation Hospital — "a very, very busy hospital," she recalled in an interview.

The staff met a steady stream of Dustoff Hueys that brought in wounded soldiers from firefights in the so-called II Corps Tactical Zone, a vast area bordering Cambodia. In early 1969, it happened to be a very, very busy field of action. Those medevac helicopters made a huge difference because soldiers who would have normally died on the battlefield were saved by Furey and her colleagues.

Nevertheless, many soldiers' wounds were often so grievous that they did not survive. Furey also treated wounded children that soldiers brought into the 71st. Talk with her for a few minutes, and you're left with an impression that she remembers them all — the living, but especially the dead.

Furey, 78, is featured in the fourth hour of Apple TV+'s "Vietnam: The War That Changed America," a six-parter that drops Friday commemorating the 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon (April 30, 1975). For most of us, 50 years is ancient history, but for so many Vietnam vets like Furey, it's yesterday — or right now. This film explores why.

At the 71st, she says, "you were put in a position where you initially think 'I can't do this — it's beyond my capabilities' — then you're forced to find the resources within yourself to do what needs to be done. You tap into a level of strength you never knew you had."

Furey also began to question the logic of a war without logic. She'd get some soldiers with minor injuries on planes to Japan or to the States, mindful that if they were sent back into battle again, the next time they wouldn't be so lucky. After boycotting a Thanksgiving dinner on base, she made the evening newscasts. Those were seen by her father, John, a World War II Army Ranger, and mother, Juanita, back home in Terryville. Furey wrote them a long letter explaining her protest, which Juanita then published in the Port Jefferson Record. Her daughter was mortified when she found out. "You are so raw when you get home, then here are your deepest, darkest thoughts in the local newspaper."

Returning to Long Island in 1970, those thoughts were about to get darker. "Everything around you seems so shallow and meaningless that all you want is to get back to Vietnam where every action meant something," she says. Therapy helped her close a gaping psychic wound: "One of the things you have to come to grips with, when you look at those soldiers and what they went through, is that by acknowledging your own pain and experience, that does not diminish someone else's."

Furey went on to get her BSN from SUNY-Stony Brook and masters at NYU, then spent the next three decades with the Department of Veterans Affairs. She ran the education department for the National Center for PTSD, where in 1992 she co-founded the first in-patient treatment program for women veterans suffering from that condition.

She admits to some "consequences for participating" in this film, because "it does generate some of these old feelings. But you really do it because you want people to understand."

Watch this particularly fine film — all six hours — and at least you can begin to try.


 

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