Heroic Nurse: A Vietnam War Female Veteran’s Journey -7

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Dakota [: 00:00:03

Ever wondered what it's like to be a nurse during the Vietnam War? Tirelessly caring for soldiers, ensuring they got home safely, only to return to a country in turmoil and protest, feeling like an outcast.

Kim [: 00:00:17

Join us on Dog Tag Diaries as we explore these powerful stories and the credible resilience of the Vietnam War nurse, Sarah Blum. Welcome to Dog Tag Diaries where military women share true stories. We are your hosts, Captain Kim

Dakota [: 00:00:37

And Captain Dakota. The stories you are about to hear are powerful. We appreciate that you have joined us and are eager to learn more about these experiences and connect with the military women who are willing to share their stories in order to foster community and understanding.

Kim [: 00:00:54

Military women are providing valuable insight into their experiences, struggles, and triumphs. By speaking their truth, they contribute to a deeper understanding of the challenges they face and the resilience they demonstrate.

Dakota [: 00:01:08

We appreciate your decision to join us today to gain insights and knowledge from the experiences of these courageous military women. Thank you for being here.

Kim [: 00:01:25

In this episode, we dive into the incredible journey of Sarah Blum. Sarah served as a military nurse during the Vietnam War, stationed at the 12th evac hospital. She's the author of Warrior Nurse Healer, PTSD and Healing, and Women Under Fire Abuse in the Military. Welcome, Sarah. We are so excited to have you with us.

Sarah Blum [: 00:01:47

Glad to be here with you, Kim.

Kim [: 00:01:49

And thank you for your service.

Sarah Blum [: 00:01:52

And you for yours.

Kim [: 00:01:53

Well, thank you very much. So we usually start with your childhood and what you were like as a child. So do you wanna start talking about that?

Sarah Blum [: 00:02:04

Sure. I was pretty serious as a child and you could actually see it in a lot of the pictures I have of myself. I'm very young. My dad was in World War II. My mom was home alone, and I used to be out on the street by myself. And as I grew, there were other kids in the area that would come down to where I was, and we'd all play together. I remember this one building that was around the corner from the liquor store. It also was brick and there was this oval cutout and we would take turns.

Sarah Blum [: 00:02:38

The kids would all take turns because it was high up so you had to get lifted up. So we would take turns sitting in this little oval and pretend we were royalty. And so the person in the seat was the royal one and everybody else was their subject or whatever.

Kim [: 00:02:53

So did you get to be the one in the seat?

Sarah Blum [: 00:02:57

Well, we alternated. Everybody got a turn.

Kim [: 00:02:59

How interesting. You know what? Now that we're talking about it, do you mind telling your age?

Sarah Blum [: 00:03:04

I'm 84.

Kim [: 00:03:05

84. Okay. And I know you cannot see her and I'm talking to our audience, but she looks fantastic. She looks like she's in her fifties.

Sarah Blum [: 00:03:16

Yeah. I try to stay healthy. Yeah. I do exercises every morning, and I walk 1 and a half to 4 miles a day during the week. So when I was about 9 years old, I made a career booklet for school. I think I was in the 4th grade and they wanted us to make a career booklet. And I still remember mine. It was a notebook.

Sarah Blum [: 00:03:37

It was blue. In this career booklet, I was a military nurse. And so I included all of the military because I didn't know any one particular one. So I was an army nurse.

Kim [: 00:03:47

Oh, wait. You already knew back like at 9 years old?

Sarah Blum [: 00:03:51

Apparently.

Kim [: 00:03:52

Oh, my gosh. Okay.

Sarah Blum [: 00:03:54

Made that career booklet and that's what came out. I was an army nurse, a navy nurse, an air force nurse. I don't think there was coast guard then. So I was one of those. When I was 17, I went to nursing school. What I remember is about midway through nursing school, I said to all my classmates, If there's ever another war and I'm single, I'll go. So I was about 19 then.

Kim [: 00:04:16

Oh, how interesting. Okay.

Sarah Blum [: 00:04:19

At that point in my life, 6 years later, I was actually in Los Angeles working as a nurse at the Kaiser Foundation Hospital, Sunset Boulevard. I was listening to the radio, getting ready to go to work, listening to the radio. And I kept hearing about this place called Vietnam that I'd never heard of before. I kept listening to see what that was all about. And this was in 66, 1966. And so it turned out that Vietnam was this place where they started fighting. There were soldiers fighting. And I realized there was this moment of I realized that, oh, my gosh, There's fighting going on.

Sarah Blum [: 00:04:56

And I said I would go. So I guess I better go check it out. And so I went to the recruiters in Los Angeles. And I first went to the Air Force. I wanted to be an Air Force flight nurse. I mean, I knew that. You had to be 5 foot 2 and I'm almost only 5 feet tall, so I couldn't be an air force flight nurse. And they said, well, then I could do this or that.

Sarah Blum [: 00:05:17

And they gave me a whole bunch of other options. I said, no. I wanna be a flight nurse. So then I went to the navy and I was gonna be on a hospital ship because in my career booklet, there was a nurse at a hospital ship. And Yeah. And they said, well, that's fine, but you need to be 2 years in the Navy first before we'll send you to the hospital ship. And so I said, well, 2 years, it'll probably be over by then. What did I know? Right? Well, yeah.

Sarah Blum [: 00:05:43

So then they went to the army, and they said, we're glad you're here, and we need operating room nurses over there. And we'll teach you how to do it. And on top of that, if you wanna go to get your degree afterwards, you can do that on the GI Bill. So, I signed up for the Army, and I went to Letterman General Hospital. Well, at first, I went to basic training and that was at Fort Sam Houston, Texas in San Antonio, Texas. And that was a trip, basic training. And then after basic training, I went to Letterman General Hospital in San Francisco. I was in the operating room course, so it's 5 months long.

Sarah Blum [: 00:06:17

The thing about Letterman, there's this long corridor I had to walk down to get to the operating room. And this corridor this is 1966. Keep this in mind, 1966. And it was, like, May of 1966. And I'm walking down this long corridor to get to the operating room and it's lined with Vietnam veterans in the royal blue army pajamas. Most of them were amputees of some kind.

Kim [: 00:06:44

Oh gosh. So that was different for you.

Sarah Blum [: 00:06:48

Yep. So the first time I walked down that corridor, it was overwhelming because there's so many of them and they lined the whole corridor. It was like walking the gauntlet and all their stairs. But I was focused on getting to the OR. So I went to the OR, found out where I needed to be. And then I decided I can't do this every day. I cannot walk down this corridor every day and not talk to these guys. So I left an hour and a half earlier every day to be able to walk down this corridor and meet and greet these guys and learn their names and learn what happened to them and what they were doing.

Sarah Blum [: 00:07:24

And I so I befriended all of them and I would go to physical therapy to cheer them on when they're working on their physical therapy.

Kim [: 00:07:32

Oh, gosh. You were like an angel to them.

Sarah Blum [: 00:07:35

Yeah. And not only that, but I got to hear all these stories of Vietnam before I ever went there.

Kim [: 00:07:41

And so did that scare you then?

Sarah Blum [: 00:07:43

I don't think it scared me because I was thinking about them. Yeah. I don't think I applied any of it to myself. I was thinking about them and, sad for them and what happened to them. The work course was really good. It trained me to do pretty much everything that would ever be show up on the operating room table. And that was also where I learned about multisexure assault because I experienced it myself. So I scrubbed in on every case, every kind of case you can imagine.

Sarah Blum [: 00:08:13

I did neurosurgery. I did heart surgery. I did open heart surgery, did chest surgery, abdominal surgery, GYN, everything. So this was an open heart surgery case that was happening that I was scrubbed in on. So the major was doing a lot of the general stuff on the heart and getting it all hooked up. But the colonel was the one who, when they got to the actual heart and the changes that need to happen inside the heart, that's when the colonel would come in and do his thing. He would come in, do his thing, and then leave. So, it was in that where he put his hands on me, on my breast basically.

Sarah Blum [: 00:08:51

So, he came around behind me and I didn't know because I was focused on what I was doing and I didn't know he was even there. And then he just put both of his hands right on top of my breasts while I was scrubbing and doing this open heart surgery case. I mean, it's mind blowing that he would even do that. And so what happened was, and I'm sure you know this from whatever experiences you've had or research you've done, that the first thing that happens to us when we have an experience like that, everything stops. It's like, you know, and everything stops. And, like, I'm not thinking or breathing. I'm just, like, stuck there. And finally, when I got my voice, I said, Sir, if you don't take your hands off me right now, I'm gonna break scrub.

Sarah Blum [: 00:09:31

And that would've been horrible, really horrible thing. So he did. He did. He took his hands off me and he went out And I was, of course, you know, stuck replaying that a lot and trying to focus on what I was doing and finish up the case.

Kim [: 00:09:46

Well, yeah, you were just violated.

Sarah Blum [: 00:09:48

I was. Yep. Horribly. And in front of people. In front of everybody was in there. Yeah. So the next day I went to the head nurse of the operating room. I was actually called in there and she said that I was reported for being insubordinate.

Kim [: 00:10:06

Oh, so he actually went to her. So he told a different story.

Sarah Blum [: 00:10:11

Yep. And they have known each other for a long time. And so I was told I would never be able to scrub in on an open heart surgery case again in his operating room. I would never be allowed in his operating room again ever again. Like, he owns the operating room.

Kim [: 00:10:26

Yeah.

Sarah Blum [: 00:10:27

Anyway, that was a shocking experience for me. I think it's the reason that I was later in life while I was asked to write about women in the military who were being treated unjustly. And so, that's how I got that first book I did, Women Under Fire Abuse in the Military, that was actually a spiritual mission to write that. I interviewed 58 women vets over the course of 6 years, and I did the interviews over the phone. I did all this on my own time and money.

Kim [: 00:10:59

Wow. You were that passionate about your mission.

Sarah Blum [: 00:11:03

Yep.

Kim [: 00:11:04

Thank you.

Sarah Blum [: 00:11:05

Yeah. I wore, a headset with a microphone, and I would just sit at the table over there and interview them. And I would record it on an old fashioned tape recorder and also take notes. And then I would go back and re listen to it to make sure I didn't miss anything, you know, got it all correct. And so, yeah, I did that over about 6 years. It started out being about women's military service. It didn't switch to the MST until I had turned everything I'd written over to an editor through the Pacific Northwest Writers Association. And that was about 2009.

Sarah Blum [: 00:11:47

He advised me that if this was gonna go anywhere and have any impact, then I needed to focus in on the few stories I had about sexual assault in the military. At that point, I think I had about 3 stories of that, maybe more, but I think 3. So I had to change in my mind around from what I started out doing. And there were a lot of the women I'd already talked to who didn't fit into that category so their stories wouldn't be in there. But I had to just totally switch it. And then I focused on the issue of justice, which for me is a soul mission. So that's how I got to women under fire abuse in the military. And it's about the culture of abuse toward women in the military and how to change that.

Sarah Blum [: 00:12:32

And it's not going to change unless our military acknowledges that they have that problem, that there that there is a culture of abuse toward women in the military. If they don't acknowledge it, nothing will ever be done about it.

Kim [: 00:12:44

And thank you for starting that. Thank you for starting the mission.

Sarah Blum [: 00:12:47

Yeah. You're welcome. They just play with it. I don't think it's important to them at all. But to us women, it's important.

Kim [: 00:12:54

It is important to us because we are human and we deserve respect.

Sarah Blum [: 00:12:57

Yeah. And they prey on young women who are new in the military and don't know anything and are very vulnerable.

Kim [: 00:13:04

I'm not sure if you listen to any of our other podcast episodes, but this seems to be a trending theme for us and the women that we interview. And I'm sure you're not surprised.

Sarah Blum [: 00:13:17

I'm not because I do these, women veteran retreats in Wisconsin, place called the High Ground. And the very first one I did, there were 21 women in the circle and 19 of them had been sexually assaulted in the military. And this last one I did was a smaller group, but every single one of them had been assaulted in the military.

Kim [: 00:13:37

Well, Sarah, you talked about you have another book coming out. Do you wanna tell us a little bit about that? Like, when is the launch date?

Sarah Blum [: 00:13:45

Yeah. Launch date is March 6, 2025, and this is the book. So I started working on this in 2016, and it took me from 2016 to 2021. And this is called Warrior, Nurse, Healer, PTSD and Healing. So, it's my story of being in Vietnam, coming home to a hostile country, getting PTSD, learning about it, learning about it for myself to help get help. And then I decided that I didn't think there were very many therapists that really knew what PTSD was and what it is that veterans need to heal from it. And so I studied it from a professional standpoint and then I decided to dedicate my career, 34 year career to healing PTSD. So, that's what I did for 34 years as a psychotherapist, a nurse psychotherapist, healing trauma.

Sarah Blum [: 00:14:41

A lot of it was deep trauma that people had from childhood and some of it was just general trauma that people had in their lives and then some were veterans. So all of that's in the book, my own experiences, my own experience of PTSD, all the things that I learned over those 34 years of working with it, and how people can help themselves who may who do have PTSD. So that's all in the book.

Kim [: 00:15:05

Can we talk a little bit about that? Like, from your boots on the ground in Vietnam at your evac hospital, what were the conditions?

Sarah Blum [: 00:15:15

To get to Vietnam, I had to go through Alaska and Japan. I'm in my little summer uniform because I'm going to the tropics in Vietnam. Right? And I go through Alaska and Japan. It was 21 degrees in one of them and 11 degrees in the other. And I was freezing to death. They wouldn't let us go anywhere. And we were outside in a hangar. Everybody was freezing to death.

Sarah Blum [: 00:15:42

And the plane was loaded with nurses, a whole plane load of nurses going to Vietnam. This was in, January of 'sixty 7. So, we get to Vietnam. We land at Benoit Air Base. We get off the plane and it's probably a 115 degrees. And they offload all of our duffle bags and they all look the same, except for the ones who were smart enough to put colored ribbon on theirs. I wasn't one of those. And so first thing they did was they put on an air show for us.

Sarah Blum [: 00:16:18

That was cool. I mean, that's a nice way to enter the country of Vietnam in the middle of a war. They put on an air show. Okay. And then they told us to go get our duffle bags. That was a disaster for me anyway because there's 200 OD Green duffel bags out there.

Kim [: 00:16:34

Oh, wow. There were that many nurses on the plane?

Sarah Blum [: 00:16:37

Yep. January 1967. It's really early. And so I was sweating. I sweat through my entire uniform. I was a total sweat ball. My uniform was soaking wet, and I finally found my bag. And then I go to these OD Green buses, and they put my duffel bag in there.

Sarah Blum [: 00:16:57

And I notice that the windows on the bus have all this crisscross metal covering the windows. And as naive as I was, I said to the bus driver, what's with all the crisscross wire on the windows? Ma'am, this is a war zone. That's to keep the grenades out. So I said, okay. And then I sat down.

Kim [: 00:17:19

What was the feeling that went through you?

Sarah Blum [: 00:17:22

I think I was in a state of shock maybe from just the whole thing of getting all those hours of getting there and, landing. I don't know that I had a lot of feeling. I had a lot of curiosity about things that I saw, but I don't know that I had a lot of feelings right then. I did when I got to the replacement battalion. So they took us to the 90th replacement battalion at Long Bin. We're in a little, like, a barracks and there's rats everywhere. And that did it to me, the rats. Yeah.

Sarah Blum [: 00:17:56

I was like, Oh, man. I don't know if I can do this for a year. Oh, my gosh. Anyway, we went through all the learning about the mail and learning about money and all the protocols and all that. So I had been given my orders before I went over. I was going to the 71st evac at Pleiku. And so there was one day so I was there for 3 days at the 93rd Place and Battalion. And one of the days, the chief nurse of Vietnam came and she was there to affirm our assignments or change them.

Sarah Blum [: 00:18:30

I found out that the 71st evac wasn't even built yet, So they sent me to the 67th evac at Qui Nhon, and I found out it was on the China Sea, South China Sea, and it was where they treated mostly civilians. And I was not happy about that. So I was gonna ask for a change. But before that happened, there was a young nurse and I say young because I was 26. I thought I was old. And so this young nurse, who was probably 19, she was distraught as distraught as anyone could be. She was crying and sobbing and choking and couldn't breathe. And there was nobody around her.

Sarah Blum [: 00:19:08

I didn't think she had anybody with her or anybody she knew. So I went over to her to try to find out what was going on and see if I could comfort her or help her somehow. And it turns out she was scheduled to report to the 12th Avec hospital at Cu Chi, Vietnam, and she must have known about it because she was terrified. And I finally said to her, what's your MOS? And she had the same MO MOS as I did, operating room. And I said, let's go to the chief nurse. We'll get it changed because I wanted to go a place like that and she wanted safety. So it was a perfect fit, right? So we went to the chief nurse. She looked at her.

Sarah Blum [: 00:19:44

She looked at me. She saw this woman and was distraught. We had the same MOS. There was really no reason for her to say no. And so she said, Yes, we could switch assignments. And so I was gonna go to 12th and she was gonna go to Quignan. It was a good deal all the way around until I got to the officers club that night. This is at the replacement battalion, and I met sergeant Phillips who was my drill instructor in basic training.

Kim [: 00:20:09

Fort Sam Houston? Yeah.

Sarah Blum [: 00:20:12

Wow. These guys were dust off helicopter pilots, and they were in the officers club that night at the 9th replacement battalion. And they knew me because I was in their drill team and by the way as a little aside you should see doctors try to drill. It's hilarious. They're terrible.

Kim [: 00:20:32

Did it feel good to see a familiar face?

Sarah Blum [: 00:20:35

It did. And I sat down with them. I was having a beer with them, and and they said to me, where are you going? And I said, oh, I'm going to the 12th of Ave. And they're the color drained out of their faces, and they said, oh, you get that change. You don't wanna go there. That's the worst place you could go. I said, well, I actually got a change so I could go there, so that's where I'm going. And they said, well, make sure you keep your head down all the time.

Sarah Blum [: 00:20:59

So I knew it was not good. They spent quite a bit of time with me telling me how to take care of myself over there.

Kim [: 00:21:06

Yeah. How did you get to the 12th of that?

Sarah Blum [: 00:21:09

So, they loaded all my stuff on a truck. They put me on a helicopter. Back in that day, I was playing baritone ukulele. I took it with me because I knew I would need some music over there to keep my sanity. And so I had my baritone ukulele in in the case. It's just me and that in the helicopter. So the first thing that happened to me is I look at this helicopter, and it doesn't have doors in it. I said, where are the doors? He said, we don't do doors over here.

Sarah Blum [: 00:21:41

Okay. I said, well, how do I make sure I don't fall out of this thing? And so I sat in the middle thinking that would be safer going on the edge.

Kim [: 00:21:53

That only makes sense. Right?

Sarah Blum [: 00:21:55

They get me to the 12th of act, and then they won't land on the helipad. And I kept saying I kept pointing down. They wouldn't land, and I And I kept yelling and screaming, Put it down. Put it down. And they wouldn't. They made me jump out of the helicopter onto the helipad with my ukulele. And I'm in this desolate place, and there's, like, nothing here or not. I'm looking around like, Oh, my God.

Sarah Blum [: 00:22:18

What is this? And I yelled at them, well, where do I go? And so they pointed to a building, the headquarter building. I went to the headquarter's building and I met our executive officer and he was the most track officer you would ever could ever imagine in a war zone. I mean, it looked like his fatigues were ironed. He had creases. It was so strag. He was Oh. Anyway, I was like freaked out. So I went in and I put my ukulele down and I saluted him and I said, Lieutenant Plum reporting for duty.

Sarah Blum [: 00:22:54

And he said, he looked up my ukulele case and he said, What's that? And it was really tense. So I said, well, it's a machine gun. I thought I might need it over here. He might have laughed but not this guy. No. He's not that guy. So, so I spent 20 minutes getting being yelled at until I was being disrespectful to a a superior officer, all that stuff, yelling and screaming at me. And then finally I got to go to the chief nurse's office.

Sarah Blum [: 00:23:26

And she said, you have one day to prepare your space, and then you're on duty, and you'll never have time again. And she was right. Yeah. It was a a metal bed frame and a mattress. That was all that was in there.

Kim [: 00:23:42

I guess I thought that's all you were gonna need. Right? Because it sounds like you didn't have any downtime.

Sarah Blum [: 00:23:48

That's true. That's true. And then, bamboo kind of walls and then beads for the entryway. I mean, it's a it's a big open space for all the women, right? And everybody has their own little space and this the separation where was the bamboo netting and beads on the door frame so that when you come in and out, a little bit a little bit of fires.

Kim [: 00:24:11

And how hot was it there?

Sarah Blum [: 00:24:13

110, 112 degrees most of the time. I worked pretty much around the clock. I worked probably 16 to 20 hours a day, every day.

Kim [: 00:24:22

Tell us what that looked like.

Sarah Blum [: 00:24:24

You're just going you're just doing it and really super hot. And the Quonset huts where the operating room was we had 2 operating room Quonset huts. Those get really hot because it's just tin. My corpsmen were constantly coming around and wiping the sweat off me so it didn't drop in the wounds. And so I had to wear a scrub dress, just a regular OR scrub dress. But, yeah, it was it was just super hot all the time. We're hot.

Kim [: 00:24:52

And soldiers were coming in just 24 hours.

Sarah Blum [: 00:24:55

Around the clock. Yeah. Because we have a helipad right there, and they come right out of the helipad into the triage. And then and then triage will call over and they'll say, we have 18 casualties for you. We'll start bringing them. And they're bringing them in order and the order is those with the biggest wounds with the best chance of survival first. We couldn't waste resources on anybody that wasn't going to make it. At 12th, we had a really good esprit de corps and we tried we really tried to save them all.

Kim [: 00:25:27

I bet you did. That's why you went in.

Sarah Blum [: 00:25:29

That's why I went in. That's right. Yeah. And it was constant. And, I never saw so much blood in all of my life before or after because they come in wounded severely, blood all over them usually, including wherever they're wounded. They didn't come with just one simple wound. They came with, like, 4 or 5 wounds all over their body. And then after the one case, we clean everything up.

Sarah Blum [: 00:25:56

All the blood. There's blood all over the floor. There's blood all over me and my shoes. I can't clean me or my shoes, but I can clean the floor and the table and everything. And then we just get the next one and then you just keep going. You just take each one, one at a time. We could run 4 tables at the same time and then we had an extra building with an extra table in there and, mass casualties, sometimes we had to be over there as well. And that that's when it got really hard because everybody's in the 1 O are dealing with all these 4 soldiers and we have to get somebody over there and there's no way to communicate once you get over there.

Sarah Blum [: 00:26:33

It was just round the clock until all the casualties are done. And that picture I have of me in my scrub suit, my scrub dress outside of Mount Continent, that was actually taken after I'd worked around the clock because I said to somebody, take a picture because I wanna see what I look like. I wanna see if I look as bad as I feel.

Kim [: 00:26:51

Well, yeah, because there is so much trauma going on there, so much traumatic energy, and you don't even have time to process it.

Sarah Blum [: 00:27:00

None. Can't process anything.

Kim [: 00:27:02

And moving on to PTSD, you're there for a year. This is going on nonstop. Talk us through ending up leaving because even though it's, like, it's very traumatic there, that's been your your home for a year.

Sarah Blum [: 00:27:17

Yes.

Kim [: 00:27:17

And so talk about having to leave and go back home and how that felt.

Sarah Blum [: 00:27:23

Coming home, Travis Air Force Base, they wouldn't let us off the plane because there apparently there were protesters in the airport, so they wouldn't let us off the planes. We had got stuck on the plane for 2 hours after being in Vietnam for a year. And so, it was a war of emotions inside me. Like, I'm glad to be home, I think. I'm sad because I'm leaving all these people that I had all these intense relationships with over the course of a year and I don't know what's gonna happen to them. And here I am at home and I can't touch the ground. I can't get out. They won't let me out to touch the ground.

Sarah Blum [: 00:28:00

All those things were happening inside of me. I was angry and I was crying and I wasn't the only one. This time it wasn't a plane load of nurses either. This was a plane load of soldiers but we were all in it together. And so, yeah, we were just all feeling all of that because you can't leave a group of people that you've been with for a year that you've been really intense and close with for all that time and living through hell and you can't leave them and not be worried about what's gonna happen to them. They finally let us off the plane and now it's like 1 or 2 in the morning or something like that, Travis Air Force Base. I think at that point I was in a state of shock because I was like just in a daze and I said to somebody, I had to get to San Francisco International I was at Travis. So somebody guided me to where I would get the bus.

Sarah Blum [: 00:28:54

It was a red and silver Trailways bus to get me to San Francisco International Airport. I remember on the bus. So I told the driver where I was going to start with. And then I sat down and it was raining and there was raindrops all over the window of the bus. And I literally felt myself crawl into that raindrop on the window. Like, it seemed like the friendliest thing to me, and I didn't talk to anybody except the bus driver. I just spent time with the raindrops on the bus.

Kim [: 00:29:27

And that was a way to soothe you.

Sarah Blum [: 00:29:30

Yeah. Then I got to the airport, found my way to the flight, and I was going to LA. So, when I left to go to Vietnam, I left a lot of friends in Los Angeles that I'd been with before I joined the army. And one of them was very special to me. She was like a like a mom to me. And she was ill. She was in the hospital down there. And so I wanted to go see her.

Sarah Blum [: 00:29:54

And so I flew into Los Angeles and a nurse friend of mine picked me up and took me to her house to get some sleep before we went to the hospital. The next day in the car going to the hospital, a siren went off. We didn't have sirens in Vietnam. Stuff like this doesn't make sense to me. But I mean, I understand it now, but a siren went off. All of a sudden, I got up from my seat and I just dove to the footwell of her car. It was an automatic reaction.

Kim [: 00:30:24

And at that time, you didn't know what was going on?

Sarah Blum [: 00:30:27

No. I had no idea.

Kim [: 00:30:28

In your body or mind?

Sarah Blum [: 00:30:30

No. I had no idea. It was a reaction. And, so I'm I look up at her. She's like, what are you doing? I said, I have no idea. I got back on my seat. I did go see my friend in the hospital, cried with her. And then we went to a a big store, probably like a Safeway or something.

Sarah Blum [: 00:30:48

I started to step toward the door, and the door flew open, and I freaked out. I literally freaked out. It was like, I don't know where I am. I don't know what's happening in my life. And it just went on like that. It was like I had spent 1 year, one very intense year in Vietnam and everything was about the war and wounds and healing, and it consumed everything about my life for that full year. And when I came back, I didn't belong here. I didn't sit here.

Sarah Blum [: 00:31:17

I didn't know what to do with myself, and nothing seemed right.

Dakota [: 00:31:21

So one thing that we ask is, what advice do you have for women who are currently in the military or who are thinking about going into the military? What advice would you give them?

Sarah Blum [: 00:31:34

So for a woman thinking about going into the military, I tell them to read my first book, Women Under Fire Abuse in the Military, and then decide if they wanna go. And for women who are already in the military, I tell them to read that book and learn all the ways they need to take care of themselves and not to get sucked in to being asked to report someplace that isn't safe. Don't agree to meet any male superior without somebody else present and make sure it's a public area rather than a private room anywhere.

Dakota [: 00:32:09

Yeah. Well, great. Thank you for that advice, and thank you so much for sharing your story. It's very powerful and moving, and we just really appreciate you and all that you've done.

Kim [: 00:32:23

Thank you for tuning into Dog Tag Diaries. We appreciate your willingness to listen and engage with these stories as we understand the challenge that comes with sharing and hearing them. Your support in witnessing the experience of our military women is invaluable. These stories are meant to inspire and provide meaning, and we hope they can help you find your own voice as well.

Dakota [: 00:32:47

If you or anyone you know are in need of immediate help, call the crisis line by dialing 988, then press 1. There are resources available to help and provide guidance during difficult times. Please visit our website, www.reveilleandretreatproject.org, to learn more about the Reveille and Retreat Project, including upcoming retreats for military women and resources. The link is in the show notes. We'll be here again next Wednesday.