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My name is Donna Barbisch.
I was in the Army, retired as a major-general, spent the beginning of my service on active duty and then transferred to the reserve.
I was in Vietnam, 1969 and 1970.
I was 22 and I was a nurse.
We flew into Tan Son Nuht Air Force Base, spent a few days in hot, sweaty tents and then were deployed up to Chu Lai, where I was at the 91st Evacuation Hospital.
It was quite an experience, especially for a young person to be in that war zone.
In Vietnam was the first time we really dealt with casualties straight off the battlefield within five minutes.
There's nothing like that kind of injury that you face when you're there, and in my experience, I'd only had about a year's experience when I went over.
And I was in the emergency department, which meant that we would get radio calls saying that within five minutes we would get X number of casualties.
Gunshot wounds, frag wounds, level of criticality, and the chopper would land, and we would have to triage them and get them into surgery
and deal with the significant wounds that we had.
It was probably the most dramatic year of my life, big learning curve, learning experience.
I felt like I had really helped save a lot of people.
I think one of the crashing moments was when I found out that an awful lot of them died even after we had revived them.
Shock-lung was something that was new back then; we didn't know what caused people in irreversible shock to die.
So when their lungs collapsed and we ventilated them and got them back and rehydrated them, we thought they'd live, but...
I was in a hospital, on a compound; we did get mortared and fragged.
The one nurse that was killed in combat was killed in the hospital I served in.
The mortars could reach us; we got mortared pretty regularly, but I was young and naïve.
I'm not sure I felt threatened.
I did when I was away from the hospital, if I was at the airstrip and the airstrip got hit, which it did one time when I was there.
So from a combat standpoint, road trips in Vietnam were dangerous.
We had a lot of snipers; we had different kinds of attacks.
The biggest challenge I think was that there weren't that many women in-theater, so we were somewhat of a novelty
and a lot of the guys knew that it was the only place that they'd see American women was at the hospital, so we often had a lot of guys hanging around.
The war was a tough place to be.
The jungle was interestingly different, and our deployments were longer and we didn't have the communication we have today
so we were totally separated from our families and communication.
I think I called home twice in the year I was deployed.
Once I had to stand in line for two hours to get to the telephone, and once I used the radio
where I called and said, 'Hello Mother, over' (laughs) so she just became befuddled and then cried, and that wasn't very helpful
and it wasn't something I wanted to continue to do; it was too hard.
When I went in in 1967, the law had just changed to allow some of the rank structure to change.
At that time, there was only allowed to be one woman colonel in each of the women's corps, and only one female colonel in the nurse corps.
So there weren't many colonels, there were no generals, and it wasn't until quite a few years later that some things changed.
I was the first in the Reserve as a nurse to become a major-general.
I was in a group of five general officers when I was first promoted.
They're still lower in number; you have to have 20-plus years, 30 years in the military before you're eligible to become a general officer.
We as women weren't always taught to be demonstrative in a leadership role.
We have a tendency to be a little more collaborative.
Collaboration works in a lot of circumstances, but when the buck stops here you need to make a decision, and be pretty firm in the direction.
I think leadership is really a lot of basics being done well.
I've had situations where I've had to correct areas that needed to be corrected.
Have been given assignments that I came into that the previous situation wasn't optimal, so I had a lot of opportunities to be a leader.
And it's just always interesting to walk in and identify the problems and then start to fix them and help people feel valuable.
Being a part of the military and civilian, it was a very crisp, clean break, although the leadership skills you learn in the military
applied very well to my civilian side and my civilian education played into my capability in the Reserve.
I think the V.A. has done a great job; I use their health care system.
Many times when I was a Reservist we would work at V.A. hospitals.
I think that caregivers have always been committed to patients but I think that today there's a lot of system-wide attention to that.
I've been really pleased with the V.A.
I have a daughter who was in Iraq and she needed health care.
I encouraged her to go to the V.A., she was in the Air Force, and she was somewhat reluctant at first.
But when she did go to the V.A., she was 100-percent pleased with the process and with the people there
and her care there, and she used the V.A. for her primary care now.
I think that the military women issues are sometimes very similar to the civilian women issues.
It's highlighted by the fact that we do look different and that we have different issues
but I think that as the numbers increase, the differences decrease and we become just 'the way it is.'
We're moving forward; I applaud everybody out there who's doing a good job to build our military strength
and represent the United States because we're a great country.