1LT Annee F. Coots Oral History

title:

1LT Annee F. Coots Oral History

creator:

Coots, Annee (Yazzie) (1941 November 15 - )

subject:

Army Nurse Corps

description:

Annee Coots (formerly Yazzie) was born on November 15, 1941 in Red Valley, Arizona, which is a town within the Navajo Nation. She was the oldest of the kids in her family, with six brothers and seven sisters, and was the first to join the military, ahead of a couple of her brothers. She was sent to boarding school off the reservation with other Native American girls, and in that process the Bureau of Indian Affairs misrecorded her name, writing “Annee” instead of “Amy.” She graduated from Riverside Indian School in 1960 and went to the Viriginia School of Nursing in Albuquerque, New Mexico. While there, she met a recruiter for the Student Army Nurses Program and was drawn in by the buddy system, which they were told would guarantee that, if she and her friends joined together, they’d do all their military service together. This didn’t end up happening, and they were separated and she went to basic training at Fort Sam Houston. Coots doesn’t think basic prepared her at all for what she was going to experience in Vietnam. Her first station after basic was Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, where she was put in the maternity and nursery ward. From Fort Leonard Wood, Coots was sent to Vietnam in 1965. She didn’t volunteer to go but could tell that it was just a matter of time before she and everyone else was given that assignment. To get to Vietnam, she was sent to Fort Lewis in Tacoma, Washington and joined the 51st Field Hospital Unit, waiting there until they were eventually shipped out from Oakland, California on the USS Upshur. They landed in Vung Tau and then went to their Field Hospital outside Saigon. While overseas, she found that soldiers were cruel to her, and some mistook her for Vietnamese. Once, she went to pick up her mail from the hospital and forgot her ID, and the MPs pulled their guns on her. This was the most frightening thing Coots experienced, because it showed her that the men meant to protect her were just as willing to hurt her as he Viet Cong because of her appearance. The audio cuts out part-way through the interview, and the rest covered the types of wounds they treated at her hospital, the first time a patient she was treating died, and her own experiences with PTSD and nightmares in the decades after her service in Vietnam. When she left the service, Coots had reached the rank of 1st Lieutenant. A transcript of the first part of the interview is available.

publisher:

Military Women's Memorial Foundation

contributor:

Scott, Kate | Carron, Alice

date:

2003-09-27

type:

Audio

format:

CD

identifier:

187; 2003.187

source:

CLIR - Recordings at Risk

language:

English

relation:

587036

coverage:

Vietnam War (1964-1975) | 1965-66

rights:

Unrestricted