In a week when America is thanking those who have served, a Vietnam veteran wanted to thank his nurse.
Steven Jimerfield was recovering from surgery about three weeks ago. It was shoulder surgery; it didn’t have anything to do with his time in Vietnam … but a part of his brain didn’t know that.
And for a few minutes, the unconscious Coast Guard veteran thought he was on a river patrol boat, surrounded by jungle.
“I had a flashback to Vietnam. I think I started crying,” Jimerfield said last Wednesday at Legacy Salmon Creek Medical Center. “I don’t know why. I didn’t see heavy combat.”
Terri Kramer, a surgical services nurse, was there to help Jimerfield through it.
“Coming out of anesthesia, he was distressed. He wasn’t verbalizing much,” said Kramer, who said she knew something was going on because she has seen this sort of thing before as a nurse in the recovery room.
“People don’t always know what’s going on,” Kramer said. “A police officer who was coming out of anesthesia had been (working) undercover. He thought we were going to kill him.
“It’s just letting them know you’re there, recognizing that they are in distress,” the nurse said.
As Jimerfield described the flashback, “I knew I was in the jungle in a PBR” — the Navy designation for patrol boat, river.
He quickly realized that Kramer “was holding my hand, telling me that everything is OK, stroking my arm.”
A few days ago, Jimerfield and his wife, Sharon, returned to Legacy Salmon Creek to thank Kramer. He gave Kramer a pair of commemorative coins marking the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam War.
Jimerfield was in Vietnam from 1967 to 1970, he said, serving on two Coast Guard cutters that did interdiction and fire-support missions. His onboard duties included working a 5-inch gun, as the ship fired at enemy positions inland.
“We weren’t more than 1,000 yards off the beach,” Jimerfield, 72, said. “I pulled the trigger on 5,000 rounds of 5-inch.”
He also was a small-boat coxswain, taking boarding crews out to search Vietnamese boats along the coast for weapons and other military supplies.
“I was not allowed to carry a weapon,” he noted. “They didn’t want me armed because they wanted me to be ready to pick up our crewmen” if something went wrong, not getting into a firefight.
His Coast Guard cutters also resupplied the river patrol boats.
After the war, Jimerfield spent 30 years in law enforcement, with the biggest share of his career in Alaska. And that’s a setting where he can recall a flashback similar to his post-surgery experience.
“In Alaska, I was in a small boat, and for about 10 minutes, I was in Vietnam. It was real: on a PBR, on a river.”
