LCDR. Joseph Cancellieri
U.S. Navy – Corpsman
Hotel Company
2nd Battalion/4th Marines
Phu Bai, Camp Evans, Hue, Dong Ha, Quang Tri, Vietnam
1966 – 1969 and 1976 – 1993
U.S. Navy – Corpsman
Hotel Company
2nd Battalion/4th Marines
Phu Bai, Camp Evans, Hue, Dong Ha, Quang Tri, Vietnam
1966 – 1969 and 1976 – 1993
“There were a lot of wonderful Vietnamese but after sunset you didn’t know who your friend was”.
Joseph John Cancellieri was born in 1945 in the West End of Boston. Joe was born and bred in Boston and has a soothing Boston accent. He grew up with an older and a younger brother and an older sister. Both of Joe’s parents were also born in the North End of Boston. His father was a sous chef at the Parker House in Boston and worked his way up to chef at an Italian restaurant in the North End. Joe’s mother took care of the family in their four-room apartment on the second floor of a four floor walkup. There were three boys and one girl which meant the three boys shared a bedroom until Joe’s older brother went off to the National Guard. Joe’s grandmother and grandfather lived upstairs on the fourth floor and Joe’s grandfather was very influential in his life. His other grandmother lived in the North End also. “It was walkable” (about 1.5 miles) for him to visit.
At one time the North End of Boston was 90% Italian but when Joe was growing up in the West End, he recalled it as a diverse neighborhood. “We must have had 10 to 20 different languages: Irish, Italian, Polish, Jewish and others”. “We played stickball and punchball in the neighborhood schoolyard”.
The neighborhood kids spent their spare time at the West End House. “It was like a Boys Club”. Joe would walk down and play basketball every night. He also went to a summer camp run by the West End House. “It was a learning experience”. There were kids from all walks of life. Rich, poor and different ethnicities. “That’s how we learned to grow up together”. Joe still has seven friends from the old neighborhood. “It was a great place to grow up”.
The Cancellieri’s didn’t have much but neither did the neighbors. Joe was expected to have a job. “We didn’t have a car. But, we had food, we had clothing, we had parents that were encouraging about what we did in school. And of course, I went to parochial school”. “I didn’t know I was poor until I was about 21”.
Joe worked and saved his money for summer camp. “I didn’t have a paper route; I had a paper corner in Boston at the old State House”. Joe and his brothers went to the West End House summer camp in Maine. Joe always wanted to stay for two extra weeks and that cost an additional $45. He had to pay for that. “So, I would save the $45 to go that extra two weeks and I loved it”.
Joe graduated from St. Mary’s High School in June of 1963 and spent a year at Newman Prep School. Joe clearly recalled where he was when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. He was walking across the Boston Common on his way home when he heard the news. “It was devastating. We were glued to the TV for the next two weeks”.
Joe was an average student, and he didn’t really know what he wanted to do with his life. One of his friends was going to attend Bentley College and he decided to enroll there. He soon knew college wasn’t for him at that time. “My father borrowed the money, and I knew I couldn’t waste his money”. He left in December after one semester and took a job as an office boy in a local engineering firm. That’s when Uncle Sam caught up with him and sent him his draft notice.
Joe didn’t want to join the Army because “I knew they were in Vietnam”. “I couldn’t get into the Coast Guard. The Air Force was full”. The father of one of his friends in the neighborhood was a Marine during WWII. He told Joe to join the Marines. “Are you kidding me! Let me look at the Navy. I rationalized, three squares, I’ll be on a ship”. What could there be to worry about? Joe enlisted with the Navy and “do you know, I never spent a day on a ship for the first four years”.
Joe headed to boot camp in Great Lakes, Illinois in the middle of February. “I went in the coldest month of the year to Great Lakes”. When Joe arrived, they didn’t have a uniform for him at the time, and he was left to wear his civilian clothes which weren’t very warm. During boot camp the men were asked what job (classification) they wanted in the Navy. Joe chose dental tech, air traffic controller and a desk job. They told Joe he needed one more choice. Joe said, “I don’t want another choice”. The Navy add Corpsman.
After eight weeks of boot camp Joe learned he was going to be a Navy Corpsman. He trained for this role at Corps School which was also located in Great Lakes. Joe didn’t realize the Marines didn’t have their own medics and they used Navy Corpsman. Joe was assigned to the Marines.
After 12 weeks of Corps School, Joe graduated and reported to the Chelsea Naval Hospital in the Boston area. For seven months he worked on an infectious disease ward. “I was very fortunate. I met some wonderful nurses that became my mentors”. After seven months he reported to Camp Pendelton in California for Fleet Marine School. There he learned to be a Marine and all about the organization of the Marine Corps.
When it came time to deploy to Vietnam in May of ’67 his first stop was Hawaii for refueling and then to Okinawa, Japan. They stayed in Okinawa for two days where Joe finished “20 rum and Cokes”. From there he flew into Da Nang, Vietnam. The trip wasn’t over quite yet, and Joe and the others jumped in a six-by-six truck and headed up to Phu Bai. In Phu Bai Joe received his “782 gear” which included a flak jacket, a .45 caliber side arm, a canteen, and a belt. The next stop was Camp Evans.
Joe was assigned to Hotel Company. Their mission was to conduct patrols in the areas of Dong Ha in the Quang Tri Province and Con Thien and up to the DMZ. Joe recalled artillery attacks when they were near the DMZ. The Marines would jump into deep holes that had been dug prior by other Marine units. “I didn’t mind being the second one down because I had four on top of me”.
The Marines are a proud, tight-knit group, and you might expect they wouldn’t warmly welcome a Navy Corpsman. Joe said, “Are you kidding? You were like next to God. I never had to use an ‘E’ tool (shovel)”. The Marines did the digging for him “but it was a tradeoff”. The tradeoff was Joe took care of their feet. “My gunny (gunnery sargeant) told me no one gets out of the field because of Trench Foot”. The boots they wore were made to allow water to penetrate. After walking through the rice paddies all day their socks and boots were soaked. “Every one of my guys had to have two pairs of socks besides the one they had on their body”. At night Joe would go through the hooches or lean-tos rubbing the Marine’s feet to prevent foot issues. “They needed to get their shoes off and they wouldn’t take them off sometimes. So that was one way to do it”. Joe got to know every Marine’s name, where they lived back in the states, if they had a girlfriend and other personal information.
Hotel Company would perform reconnaissance, and Joe was assigned to ambush patrols every other night. “I was scared all the time”. Joe snored and he was quickly told that if he kept on snoring, he wouldn’t be alive for very long. “I learned to stay awake on ambush patrols”. That was also scary because he had no idea where the enemy was. Firefights were the busiest time for the Corpsman. Firefights at night were very difficult because the Corpsman couldn’t see where the injured Marines were. They had to try and find them and drag them back to safety. Sometimes they would send up an illumination flare to light up the battlespace.
The dining accommodations for an Italian kid from the West End of Boston were less than ideal. The Marines were issuing C-Rations dating back to WWII. “Some people would only eat canned fruit so they would swap you for ham and mothers. I loved that”. Ham and mothers were ham with succotash. Joe had his parents send him onion salt, garlic salt and garlic powder “so I could change the flavor of the food”. There are some things Joe won’t eat today because of his tour in Vietnam. Cottage cheese, spam and Vienna sausages. “We had spam for breakfast, lunch and dinner but in different formats”.
When Hotel Company was in the rear, they would often offer first aid to the local villagers. They were able to apply topical antibiotics for sores and provide immunizations.
On one patrol they came across an empty camp with warm food and cigarettes still burning. They gave chase and “I was tail end Charlie with a .45 and I had to try and keep up”. Joe reached the point where he said, “God, I don’t mind if you take an arm, just get me out here. It was self-preservation”.
When a Marine was injured, they would call, ‘Corpsman up’. That was the notification for the Corpsman to come and provide aid. The enemy eventually caught on and would yell Corpsman up and then look to shoot the medic. When Joe worked on a Marine and he wasn’t able to save him, it had a big impact on Joe, but he had to compartmentalize it because there was always another injured Marine who needed his aid. “You can’t do anything for the dead. You have to do something for the wounded”. It was very important that Joe do everything he could to save every Marine, even if he knew it was hopeless. “ I would work on them for a while. I knew they didn’t have a pulse or anything, but I had to show the Marines around me that I was going to take care of them no matter what”.
The stress from combat and patrolling was always present and would build up over time. The best relief from the stress was getting out of the jungle to take a shower and get a hot meal. Joe did get one in-country R&R leave, in which he spent two days at China Beach. Later, he got a five days in Hong Kong where he spent a lot of money on suits that were out of style when he returned to the states.
On September 21st, 1967, Hotel Company was guarding a bridge being built by the Seabees. “I remember the date because when you fill out tags for the medevacs, I used to keep copies”. The bridge was almost completed when the enemy attacked. Joe estimated there were over 2,000 GIs in the area. “We got overrun that night by a regiment of NVA (North Vietnamese Army)”. The enemy kept coming in waves and the battle went on for 10 hours. The U.S. called in fighter jets to drop napalm. Eventually the U.S prevailed and hundreds of NVA were killed but 50 Americas were dead including three Corpsmen. Joe thought the enemy was calling ‘Corpsman up’ that night to kill the medics. “I know it was one of the busiest nights of my life”.
Sometimes it was simply a case of being in the wrong spot at the wrong time. On September 25th, 1967, Hotel Company came under intense enemy rocket, mortar and artillery fire. Early on in the attack the Marines took numerous casualties. Joe continuously maneuvered to treat the injured Marines while exposed to heavy enemy fire. He ran through enemy fire to a landing zone where an enemy mortar hit a truck full of ammunition. A Marine who should not have been near the truck was hit with shrapnel and covered in tar from the explosion. While Joe was providing aid mortars started to rain down again. Thinking that the mortars couldn’t hit in the same spot twice Joe threw his body on top of the wounded Marine. When the mortars exploded Joe took minor shrapnel wounds. He was able to pull the Marine to cover and for those actions Joe was awarded the Bronze Star Medal.
Joe recalled treating many seriously injured Marines. “Especially up in the mountains. There were snipers”. Joe recalled treating Marines who were reinforcements just arrived in-country, jumped off a helicopter, were injured and were loaded back on the same helicopter. Some were headed home with the “Forest Gump” million-dollar wound.
When Joe’s tour had under 30 days remaining, he tried to keep a low profile and was reluctant to volunteer. Why tempt fate? He had seen many guys with a few days to go in-country get killed or wounded. He had also seen helicopters with medics get shot down on the way to the hospital. He did volunteer once to ride in a helicopter with an injured Marine. “They took him all the way down to the White Elephant”. That was the name the troops gave to the big hospital in Da Nang.
With his time in-country up, he boarded a plane in Da Nang headed for the states. When he deplaned in at El Toro Marine Corps Air Wing base in California, Joe kissed the ground. When he finally reached Boston and reunited with his family, it sank in that he missed important family events. While he was deployed, he was unable to return for his brother’s wedding nor his grandmother’s funeral.
With one year remaining on his enlistment Joe returned to the Chelsea Naval Hospital where he spent most of this time handling administrative duties. He never wore his uniform if he didn’t have to. The anti-war politics of the day were too much to battle.
When Joe was discharged, he found a job with the West Roxbury VA hospital. He became an Operating Room (OR) Tech working on open heart patients. This was in the early 70’s at the very beginning of open-heart surgeries. While working at the VA Joe met Gail Gardner, who was working in the cardiac ICU. “We dated. It didn’t work out. We dated. It didn’t work out. The third time they dated it worked out and they were married in 1973.
Joe was 24 when he went back to school at UMass in Amherst. “I didn’t really become an adult until I got to Vietnam and that was a big growing up period. I wasn’t a good high school student, but I was a good college student because I had a sense of purpose”. Joe didn’t find that purpose right away. Initially he was spending a lot of time watching the Bruins and drinking beer at a local bar. Then he realized, “I have an opportunity of a lifetime to get a degree and I’m gonna blow it by being here”. Joe realized he didn’t need to be at the bar, and he didn’t need the beer, and he just dedicated himself to his studies. He graduated cum laude with a degree in Nursing.
His classmates were 17 and 18 years old with no real-world nursing experience. Joe was 24 and had lots of real-world experience and under the tremendous pressure of combat. Joe helped his classmates get through their clinical classes and when they graduated, they gave Joe a plaque inscribed, ‘we couldn’t have made it without you’. He still has that plaque 50+ years later.
When Joe graduated from UMass the job market for nurses was not good. “There was a glut of nurses in western Massachusetts. At this time his wife was pregnant and without paternity leave, he would soon be out of work. Joe needed a job and a career. He took a job at the Sisters of Providence hospitals, one in Holyoke and one in Springfield, Massachusetts. He bounced back and forth between them for a year while he waited to re-enlist the Navy.
Joe returned to the Navy as an Ensign for six months and then was promoted to Lieutenant JG and eventually Lieutenant while stationed in San Diego where he was med-surg nurse and then became a charge nurse. After three years Joe’s next duty station was at Great Lakes giving immunizations at boot camp and later served as an OR nurse. Joe was promoted to Lieutenant Commander, and his next stop was Puerto Rico where he was stationed at Roosevelt Roads, the Navy’s largest Naval Base at the time. Joe was a senior nurse and ran the Emergency Room and later went on to manage the various clinics.
In January 1987, Joe’s last permanent duty station was the submarine base in Groton, CT. He was the Chief Nurse for the submarine crews. “It was a great place, great people to work with”. In May of ‘87 Joe received a set of orders, but he didn’t know where he was going. He turned on CNN and then he knew.
The U.S.S. Stark was in the Persian Gulf and was accidentally struck by an Iraqi missile during the Iraq-Iran War. Joe took a team of ICU Corpsmen, respiratory therapists and physical therapists to attend to the injured U.S. seamen from the Stark. They landed in Bahrain where they met up with various surgeons from San Diego. They waited several days and then boarded the U.S.S. Guadalcanal. This ship was an LPH (Landing Platform Helicopter). “It’s like a carrier for helicopters”.
The first thing Joe did was find the medical storage room and evaluate the inventory. “I found a lot of great stuff…but it was all expired. It had to be brought up and be sterilized”. Joe was able to get the medical supply inventory in good order, and they were ready for whatever medical emergencies might come their way. While on the Guadalcanal they received two Iranian prisoners taken by a SEAL team. The SEALS had conducted a fast boat operation against an Iranian small boat and killed several Iranians. Two survived but were badly burned and the SEALS brought them back to the Guadalcanal.
The ship made port in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. Joe recalled it was the first time a U.S. ship had docked there since WWII. The Iranians were kept isolated from the rest of the ship’s crew, and their presence was not made know to the Saudis.
When they arrived on the ship they were evaluated by the doctors. Joe estimated they were burned over 65% of their body. The Iranians were “in tough shape and we realized we were going to have them for a while”. Joe and his team had to change their dressings several times a day and keep them medicated because they were in serious pain from their burns.
For the next two months Joe provided care for the Iranian prisoners. “Every day I would go into the Hubbard Tank with them. I’d shoot them up with morphine and clean them out so they wouldn’t die of infections. And it worked”. A Hubbard Tank is a stainless-steel tank filled with water for hydrotherapy.
Joe returned to Groton in January 1988 and worked in the ER and later in the Education area. In 1993 Joe retired from the Navy. He quickly took a job at Backus Hospital in Connecticut. He worked there from 1993 to 2010 in the ER and the Interventional Radiology Department where he was responsible for providing conscious sedation. “My job was to keep them comfortable”. Joe retired in 2010 “but I wasn’t ready to leave. I got a little depressed”. As luck would have it, a friend called and invited him to join an infusion clinic. Joe enjoyed his time there and the people he worked with. By 2013 Joe was ready and he gladly made the jump to retirement.
Joe and Gail were married for 30 years and she passed away in 2011. The couple have a son, a daughter and four grandchildren. His daughter has continued the family tradition of nursing.
In retirement Joe keeps very busy. He travels a great deal, visits family and friends, is involved with Veteran’s groups, collects stamps and coins and perfects his culinary skills. Gail commanded the kitchen during their marriage. “I never cooked even though my father and grandfather were cooks. My wife was a gourmet cook. There was never enough room for two of us in the kitchen”.
Joe has had the good fortune to strike up a relationship with Elaine, a Boston native. “She’s a wonderful woman, no children. She ‘adopted’ my children and grandchildren as if they’re her own”. They have been together for 11 years.
Joe, thank you for the sacrifices you and your family made on our behalf and all that you endured in the dangerous jungles of Vietnam. I am sure every day, every Marine and every patient you have helped over your many years, gives thanks for what you have done for them! You have made a career of helping people during their most vulnerable times.
“I want to be remembered as a kind, caring, generous person”.
Joseph John Cancellieri was born in 1945 in the West End of Boston. Joe was born and bred in Boston and has a soothing Boston accent. He grew up with an older and a younger brother and an older sister. Both of Joe’s parents were also born in the North End of Boston. His father was a sous chef at the Parker House in Boston and worked his way up to chef at an Italian restaurant in the North End. Joe’s mother took care of the family in their four-room apartment on the second floor of a four floor walkup. There were three boys and one girl which meant the three boys shared a bedroom until Joe’s older brother went off to the National Guard. Joe’s grandmother and grandfather lived upstairs on the fourth floor and Joe’s grandfather was very influential in his life. His other grandmother lived in the North End also. “It was walkable” (about 1.5 miles) for him to visit.
At one time the North End of Boston was 90% Italian but when Joe was growing up in the West End, he recalled it as a diverse neighborhood. “We must have had 10 to 20 different languages: Irish, Italian, Polish, Jewish and others”. “We played stickball and punchball in the neighborhood schoolyard”.
The neighborhood kids spent their spare time at the West End House. “It was like a Boys Club”. Joe would walk down and play basketball every night. He also went to a summer camp run by the West End House. “It was a learning experience”. There were kids from all walks of life. Rich, poor and different ethnicities. “That’s how we learned to grow up together”. Joe still has seven friends from the old neighborhood. “It was a great place to grow up”.
The Cancellieri’s didn’t have much but neither did the neighbors. Joe was expected to have a job. “We didn’t have a car. But, we had food, we had clothing, we had parents that were encouraging about what we did in school. And of course, I went to parochial school”. “I didn’t know I was poor until I was about 21”.
Joe worked and saved his money for summer camp. “I didn’t have a paper route; I had a paper corner in Boston at the old State House”. Joe and his brothers went to the West End House summer camp in Maine. Joe always wanted to stay for two extra weeks and that cost an additional $45. He had to pay for that. “So, I would save the $45 to go that extra two weeks and I loved it”.
Joe graduated from St. Mary’s High School in June of 1963 and spent a year at Newman Prep School. Joe clearly recalled where he was when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. He was walking across the Boston Common on his way home when he heard the news. “It was devastating. We were glued to the TV for the next two weeks”.
Joe was an average student, and he didn’t really know what he wanted to do with his life. One of his friends was going to attend Bentley College and he decided to enroll there. He soon knew college wasn’t for him at that time. “My father borrowed the money, and I knew I couldn’t waste his money”. He left in December after one semester and took a job as an office boy in a local engineering firm. That’s when Uncle Sam caught up with him and sent him his draft notice.
Joe didn’t want to join the Army because “I knew they were in Vietnam”. “I couldn’t get into the Coast Guard. The Air Force was full”. The father of one of his friends in the neighborhood was a Marine during WWII. He told Joe to join the Marines. “Are you kidding me! Let me look at the Navy. I rationalized, three squares, I’ll be on a ship”. What could there be to worry about? Joe enlisted with the Navy and “do you know, I never spent a day on a ship for the first four years”.
Joe headed to boot camp in Great Lakes, Illinois in the middle of February. “I went in the coldest month of the year to Great Lakes”. When Joe arrived, they didn’t have a uniform for him at the time, and he was left to wear his civilian clothes which weren’t very warm. During boot camp the men were asked what job (classification) they wanted in the Navy. Joe chose dental tech, air traffic controller and a desk job. They told Joe he needed one more choice. Joe said, “I don’t want another choice”. The Navy add Corpsman.
After eight weeks of boot camp Joe learned he was going to be a Navy Corpsman. He trained for this role at Corps School which was also located in Great Lakes. Joe didn’t realize the Marines didn’t have their own medics and they used Navy Corpsman. Joe was assigned to the Marines.
After 12 weeks of Corps School, Joe graduated and reported to the Chelsea Naval Hospital in the Boston area. For seven months he worked on an infectious disease ward. “I was very fortunate. I met some wonderful nurses that became my mentors”. After seven months he reported to Camp Pendelton in California for Fleet Marine School. There he learned to be a Marine and all about the organization of the Marine Corps.
When it came time to deploy to Vietnam in May of ’67 his first stop was Hawaii for refueling and then to Okinawa, Japan. They stayed in Okinawa for two days where Joe finished “20 rum and Cokes”. From there he flew into Da Nang, Vietnam. The trip wasn’t over quite yet, and Joe and the others jumped in a six-by-six truck and headed up to Phu Bai. In Phu Bai Joe received his “782 gear” which included a flak jacket, a .45 caliber side arm, a canteen, and a belt. The next stop was Camp Evans.
Joe was assigned to Hotel Company. Their mission was to conduct patrols in the areas of Dong Ha in the Quang Tri Province and Con Thien and up to the DMZ. Joe recalled artillery attacks when they were near the DMZ. The Marines would jump into deep holes that had been dug prior by other Marine units. “I didn’t mind being the second one down because I had four on top of me”.
The Marines are a proud, tight-knit group, and you might expect they wouldn’t warmly welcome a Navy Corpsman. Joe said, “Are you kidding? You were like next to God. I never had to use an ‘E’ tool (shovel)”. The Marines did the digging for him “but it was a tradeoff”. The tradeoff was Joe took care of their feet. “My gunny (gunnery sargeant) told me no one gets out of the field because of Trench Foot”. The boots they wore were made to allow water to penetrate. After walking through the rice paddies all day their socks and boots were soaked. “Every one of my guys had to have two pairs of socks besides the one they had on their body”. At night Joe would go through the hooches or lean-tos rubbing the Marine’s feet to prevent foot issues. “They needed to get their shoes off and they wouldn’t take them off sometimes. So that was one way to do it”. Joe got to know every Marine’s name, where they lived back in the states, if they had a girlfriend and other personal information.
Hotel Company would perform reconnaissance, and Joe was assigned to ambush patrols every other night. “I was scared all the time”. Joe snored and he was quickly told that if he kept on snoring, he wouldn’t be alive for very long. “I learned to stay awake on ambush patrols”. That was also scary because he had no idea where the enemy was. Firefights were the busiest time for the Corpsman. Firefights at night were very difficult because the Corpsman couldn’t see where the injured Marines were. They had to try and find them and drag them back to safety. Sometimes they would send up an illumination flare to light up the battlespace.
The dining accommodations for an Italian kid from the West End of Boston were less than ideal. The Marines were issuing C-Rations dating back to WWII. “Some people would only eat canned fruit so they would swap you for ham and mothers. I loved that”. Ham and mothers were ham with succotash. Joe had his parents send him onion salt, garlic salt and garlic powder “so I could change the flavor of the food”. There are some things Joe won’t eat today because of his tour in Vietnam. Cottage cheese, spam and Vienna sausages. “We had spam for breakfast, lunch and dinner but in different formats”.
When Hotel Company was in the rear, they would often offer first aid to the local villagers. They were able to apply topical antibiotics for sores and provide immunizations.
On one patrol they came across an empty camp with warm food and cigarettes still burning. They gave chase and “I was tail end Charlie with a .45 and I had to try and keep up”. Joe reached the point where he said, “God, I don’t mind if you take an arm, just get me out here. It was self-preservation”.
When a Marine was injured, they would call, ‘Corpsman up’. That was the notification for the Corpsman to come and provide aid. The enemy eventually caught on and would yell Corpsman up and then look to shoot the medic. When Joe worked on a Marine and he wasn’t able to save him, it had a big impact on Joe, but he had to compartmentalize it because there was always another injured Marine who needed his aid. “You can’t do anything for the dead. You have to do something for the wounded”. It was very important that Joe do everything he could to save every Marine, even if he knew it was hopeless. “ I would work on them for a while. I knew they didn’t have a pulse or anything, but I had to show the Marines around me that I was going to take care of them no matter what”.
The stress from combat and patrolling was always present and would build up over time. The best relief from the stress was getting out of the jungle to take a shower and get a hot meal. Joe did get one in-country R&R leave, in which he spent two days at China Beach. Later, he got a five days in Hong Kong where he spent a lot of money on suits that were out of style when he returned to the states.
On September 21st, 1967, Hotel Company was guarding a bridge being built by the Seabees. “I remember the date because when you fill out tags for the medevacs, I used to keep copies”. The bridge was almost completed when the enemy attacked. Joe estimated there were over 2,000 GIs in the area. “We got overrun that night by a regiment of NVA (North Vietnamese Army)”. The enemy kept coming in waves and the battle went on for 10 hours. The U.S. called in fighter jets to drop napalm. Eventually the U.S prevailed and hundreds of NVA were killed but 50 Americas were dead including three Corpsmen. Joe thought the enemy was calling ‘Corpsman up’ that night to kill the medics. “I know it was one of the busiest nights of my life”.
Sometimes it was simply a case of being in the wrong spot at the wrong time. On September 25th, 1967, Hotel Company came under intense enemy rocket, mortar and artillery fire. Early on in the attack the Marines took numerous casualties. Joe continuously maneuvered to treat the injured Marines while exposed to heavy enemy fire. He ran through enemy fire to a landing zone where an enemy mortar hit a truck full of ammunition. A Marine who should not have been near the truck was hit with shrapnel and covered in tar from the explosion. While Joe was providing aid mortars started to rain down again. Thinking that the mortars couldn’t hit in the same spot twice Joe threw his body on top of the wounded Marine. When the mortars exploded Joe took minor shrapnel wounds. He was able to pull the Marine to cover and for those actions Joe was awarded the Bronze Star Medal.
Joe recalled treating many seriously injured Marines. “Especially up in the mountains. There were snipers”. Joe recalled treating Marines who were reinforcements just arrived in-country, jumped off a helicopter, were injured and were loaded back on the same helicopter. Some were headed home with the “Forest Gump” million-dollar wound.
When Joe’s tour had under 30 days remaining, he tried to keep a low profile and was reluctant to volunteer. Why tempt fate? He had seen many guys with a few days to go in-country get killed or wounded. He had also seen helicopters with medics get shot down on the way to the hospital. He did volunteer once to ride in a helicopter with an injured Marine. “They took him all the way down to the White Elephant”. That was the name the troops gave to the big hospital in Da Nang.
With his time in-country up, he boarded a plane in Da Nang headed for the states. When he deplaned in at El Toro Marine Corps Air Wing base in California, Joe kissed the ground. When he finally reached Boston and reunited with his family, it sank in that he missed important family events. While he was deployed, he was unable to return for his brother’s wedding nor his grandmother’s funeral.
With one year remaining on his enlistment Joe returned to the Chelsea Naval Hospital where he spent most of this time handling administrative duties. He never wore his uniform if he didn’t have to. The anti-war politics of the day were too much to battle.
When Joe was discharged, he found a job with the West Roxbury VA hospital. He became an Operating Room (OR) Tech working on open heart patients. This was in the early 70’s at the very beginning of open-heart surgeries. While working at the VA Joe met Gail Gardner, who was working in the cardiac ICU. “We dated. It didn’t work out. We dated. It didn’t work out. The third time they dated it worked out and they were married in 1973.
Joe was 24 when he went back to school at UMass in Amherst. “I didn’t really become an adult until I got to Vietnam and that was a big growing up period. I wasn’t a good high school student, but I was a good college student because I had a sense of purpose”. Joe didn’t find that purpose right away. Initially he was spending a lot of time watching the Bruins and drinking beer at a local bar. Then he realized, “I have an opportunity of a lifetime to get a degree and I’m gonna blow it by being here”. Joe realized he didn’t need to be at the bar, and he didn’t need the beer, and he just dedicated himself to his studies. He graduated cum laude with a degree in Nursing.
His classmates were 17 and 18 years old with no real-world nursing experience. Joe was 24 and had lots of real-world experience and under the tremendous pressure of combat. Joe helped his classmates get through their clinical classes and when they graduated, they gave Joe a plaque inscribed, ‘we couldn’t have made it without you’. He still has that plaque 50+ years later.
When Joe graduated from UMass the job market for nurses was not good. “There was a glut of nurses in western Massachusetts. At this time his wife was pregnant and without paternity leave, he would soon be out of work. Joe needed a job and a career. He took a job at the Sisters of Providence hospitals, one in Holyoke and one in Springfield, Massachusetts. He bounced back and forth between them for a year while he waited to re-enlist the Navy.
Joe returned to the Navy as an Ensign for six months and then was promoted to Lieutenant JG and eventually Lieutenant while stationed in San Diego where he was med-surg nurse and then became a charge nurse. After three years Joe’s next duty station was at Great Lakes giving immunizations at boot camp and later served as an OR nurse. Joe was promoted to Lieutenant Commander, and his next stop was Puerto Rico where he was stationed at Roosevelt Roads, the Navy’s largest Naval Base at the time. Joe was a senior nurse and ran the Emergency Room and later went on to manage the various clinics.
In January 1987, Joe’s last permanent duty station was the submarine base in Groton, CT. He was the Chief Nurse for the submarine crews. “It was a great place, great people to work with”. In May of ‘87 Joe received a set of orders, but he didn’t know where he was going. He turned on CNN and then he knew.
The U.S.S. Stark was in the Persian Gulf and was accidentally struck by an Iraqi missile during the Iraq-Iran War. Joe took a team of ICU Corpsmen, respiratory therapists and physical therapists to attend to the injured U.S. seamen from the Stark. They landed in Bahrain where they met up with various surgeons from San Diego. They waited several days and then boarded the U.S.S. Guadalcanal. This ship was an LPH (Landing Platform Helicopter). “It’s like a carrier for helicopters”.
The first thing Joe did was find the medical storage room and evaluate the inventory. “I found a lot of great stuff…but it was all expired. It had to be brought up and be sterilized”. Joe was able to get the medical supply inventory in good order, and they were ready for whatever medical emergencies might come their way. While on the Guadalcanal they received two Iranian prisoners taken by a SEAL team. The SEALS had conducted a fast boat operation against an Iranian small boat and killed several Iranians. Two survived but were badly burned and the SEALS brought them back to the Guadalcanal.
The ship made port in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. Joe recalled it was the first time a U.S. ship had docked there since WWII. The Iranians were kept isolated from the rest of the ship’s crew, and their presence was not made know to the Saudis.
When they arrived on the ship they were evaluated by the doctors. Joe estimated they were burned over 65% of their body. The Iranians were “in tough shape and we realized we were going to have them for a while”. Joe and his team had to change their dressings several times a day and keep them medicated because they were in serious pain from their burns.
For the next two months Joe provided care for the Iranian prisoners. “Every day I would go into the Hubbard Tank with them. I’d shoot them up with morphine and clean them out so they wouldn’t die of infections. And it worked”. A Hubbard Tank is a stainless-steel tank filled with water for hydrotherapy.
Joe returned to Groton in January 1988 and worked in the ER and later in the Education area. In 1993 Joe retired from the Navy. He quickly took a job at Backus Hospital in Connecticut. He worked there from 1993 to 2010 in the ER and the Interventional Radiology Department where he was responsible for providing conscious sedation. “My job was to keep them comfortable”. Joe retired in 2010 “but I wasn’t ready to leave. I got a little depressed”. As luck would have it, a friend called and invited him to join an infusion clinic. Joe enjoyed his time there and the people he worked with. By 2013 Joe was ready and he gladly made the jump to retirement.
Joe and Gail were married for 30 years and she passed away in 2011. The couple have a son, a daughter and four grandchildren. His daughter has continued the family tradition of nursing.
In retirement Joe keeps very busy. He travels a great deal, visits family and friends, is involved with Veteran’s groups, collects stamps and coins and perfects his culinary skills. Gail commanded the kitchen during their marriage. “I never cooked even though my father and grandfather were cooks. My wife was a gourmet cook. There was never enough room for two of us in the kitchen”.
Joe has had the good fortune to strike up a relationship with Elaine, a Boston native. “She’s a wonderful woman, no children. She ‘adopted’ my children and grandchildren as if they’re her own”. They have been together for 11 years.
Joe, thank you for the sacrifices you and your family made on our behalf and all that you endured in the dangerous jungles of Vietnam. I am sure every day, every Marine and every patient you have helped over your many years, gives thanks for what you have done for them! You have made a career of helping people during their most vulnerable times.
“I want to be remembered as a kind, caring, generous person”.