Nursing degree led to Army service during Vietnam War BY SUE WEBBER CONTRIBUTING WRITER If you ask Trisha Bach Robbins when she decided to be a nurse, she talks about a photograph of herself at the age of 5 or 6, in which she wore a Clara Barton cape and hat and carried a little medical bag. “I was going to be a nurse; there was no question about it,” said Robbins, 67, who lives in Minnetonka with her husband, Jim. When she was 9, a cousin came to stay with the Bach family while she was in nurse’s training. That cinched it for Trisha. “If I wanted to be a nurse at 5, I was locked in at 9,” she said. When Robbins was 12, she was a junior volunteer at Methodist Hospital; at 16, she’d become a nurse’s assistant. Following graduation from St. Louis Park High School, earning a degree in nursing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison was Trisha Robbins a logical next step. The Vietnam War was well underway by then, and Robbins thought joining the Army would be a good way to use her training and see the world at the same time. “I decided to go into the Army because they would send me overseas,” she said. “I was young, and I wanted to do something different.” After training at Fort Sam Houston in Texas, Robbins was assigned to a hospital in Heidelberg, Germany. She was housed in BOQ (bachelor’s officer quarters) off base, which were similar to small apartments in a housing area.
The medical corps and nursing corps were not typical military, she said. Nursing and medical staff members all went into the Army as officers. She was a first lieutenant. Today’s nurses wear scrubs at work, but in those days, they were required to wear white dresses, white nylons and shoes, and a nurse’s cap. “I was fresh out of school but I was the only military nurse in the unit I was assigned to, so I became the head nurse,” Robbins said. “We were providing care for people who were stationed in Heidelberg, at all kinds of different posts around there. I was in charge, and I didn’t know enough to be scared. We were in the middle of a war, and they had to use the people they had. My saving grace was that the civilian nurses on my unit were old enough, experienced enough and kind enough to show me the ropes by example without embarrassing me.” As a result, Robbins said, “I learned more faster in my first year in the military than I had in four years in college.” She also had a chance to see places while she was there that she wouldn’t have seen otherwise, including France, Austria, England and Scandinavia. After a three-year European tour in Germany, Robbins was sent to a hospital in Augusta, Ga., and assigned to teach Licensed Practical Nurses (LPNs). “I was teaching young men and women the basics, like how to take Trisha Bach Robbins’ early decision to be a nurse was illustrated in this photograph, taken NURSE - TO PAGE 4 when she was 6 years old. (Submitted photos)