Marjorie Nelson, a twenty-eight-year-old Society of Friends (Quaker) physician from Kokomo, Indiana, had been staying in Hue for the holiday at the home of Sandy Johnson, an American English teacher at the Dong Khanh school for the International Voluntary Services. “It was really scary: all the bombing, the shelling, the strafing,” Nelson remembered. “We didn’t know if we’d survive.” Sheltering under an improvised bomb shelter—a dining room table piled high with sandbags—as the bloody battle raged around them, the women were discovered on February 5, 1968, by NVA soldiers seeking to use the house as an observation post. Four days later, VC irregulars herded the Americans out of the city and marched them west into the mountains.
For nearly two months, Johnson and Nelson, a 1964 Indiana University School of Medicine graduate, were held as prisoners of war, eventually taken for safekeeping to a mountain camp. During the four months she had been part of a medical team treating horribly injured Vietnamese civilians at an American Friends Service Committee rehabilitation clinic in Quang Ngai Province, Nelson had learned enough Vietnamese to converse with her patients. During her captivity, she quickly developed a stock response when questioned about why she had decided to come to Vietnam. Nelson told the insurgents that she was a Quaker and a pacifist and came to their country because she “did not believe in the war. I told them I had come to help people suffering because of the war and that I wished all the soldiers, on all the sides, could go home. Well, the astonishing thing was that they believed me.”
Although several thousand South Vietnamese soldiers, government officials, and civilians were slaughtered by NVA and VC forces during Hue’s capture, occupation, and recapture, Nelson and Johnson were treated well during their captivity. When Nelson fell ill with dysentery, a “very competent” Vietnamese doctor trained in Hanoi traveled several hours on foot through the mountains to treat her. “The soldiers collected from the meager belongings such things as powdered eggs, a little sugar, and a can of sweetened condensed milk which they gave me ‘to help you regain your strength,’” Nelson recalled. The considerate treatment she received reaffirmed her belief that although nations had differences they could be settled without bloodshed. “Basically, people are the same everywhere,” she emphasized. “If it were left to the world’s peoples instead of governments, there would be peace.”
Released on March 31, Nelson returned to the United States for a brief respite. Being greeted upon her arrival at the Detroit airport by “a mob of cameras, microphones, and bodies” convinced her that she did not “ever want to become a celebrity.” During her time as a POW her mother Elda had died, only hours after Radio Hanoi had announced her daughter’s freedom. When Nelson visited her mother’s grave at a cemetery in Bad Axe, Michigan, the ground was still covered with flowers from the funeral. “I’ve always found cemeteries to be places of comfort and solace,” Nelson later said. “I cherish this one especially. Dozens of my relatives from both sides of my family reaching back at least four generations rest here. Now Mom was at rest here too.”
Granted a leave of absence by the AFSC after her ordeal, Nelson remained determined to return to Southeast Asia to complete her assignment at the clinic, where she treated civilian victims of the war and trained Vietnamese as nurses, physical therapists, and prosthetists. Before releasing the Americans, the VC, Nelson noted, had asked them, “If we release you, do you promise to go home?” She remembered answering, “Well, yes, of course. We want to see our family and let them know that we’re okay.” She later pointed out, “I told them I would go home, I never said I would not come back. And they never said I couldn’t come back.” She returned to Quang Ngai, finally returning home in 1969 after fulfilling her two-year commitment for the AFSC.
Although Marjorie’s parents had both been teachers in Michigan, her father decided the couple could not raise a family on a teacher’s salary and moved them to Kokomo. Earl found work as a foreman in a newly built Chrysler automobile transmission plant. “He always preferred the midnight-to-morning shift,” Marjorie remembered. “He said he liked to watch the sun come up. For twenty years, he never missed a sunrise.”
The Nelsons instilled in their children tolerance for those less fortunate than themselves. Earl and Elda had worked to help migrant laborers who came to Indiana during the summer to pick tomatoes in local fields. “Several times we had gone as a family to visit migrant camps and share meals with them,” Marjorie wrote in her memoirs. Taking Spanish as her foreign language her first two years in high school, she practiced her skills with the children of the migrant laborers, who were entertained when she made mistakes, for example saying, “Listen to the hen crow” instead of “Listen to the rooster crow.” She remembered one morning when her father came into the kitchen with tears in his eyes. “An infant girl had just died in one of the camps we were working with and the family had no money for a coffin and funeral,” Marjorie said. After making a few phone calls, Earl left home, picked up the deceased child’s grieving father, and together they bought burial clothes and a coffin. “He also arranged for burial and a local pastor as officiant,” she recalled.
Marjorie loved reading, spending half of her childhood absorbed with long-forgotten novels, including Zane Grey adventure novels and Westerns. “My mother used to get so frustrated with me because I had my nose in a book every time she wanted me,” said Marjorie. A shy child, she described herself as having “a terrible inferiority complex,” finding it painful to recite aloud in class. Majorie also found it difficult to convince herself she was both socially and academically equal to her classmates, “even though I did very well in school.” She forced herself to overcome her shyness by participating in the school’s dramatic and speech clubs. “I was encouraged by a couple of teachers who took an interest in me, and it really made the difference,” Marjorie recalled. By the age of twelve she had already undergone a “definite religious experience,” interpreting it as “a call to mission—that is, to work overseas.” That sense of calling never left her.
Elda suffered from Multiple Sclerosis, a debilitating, chronic neurological disorder that eventually led to her being dependent on a wheelchair when venturing beyond her home. “Until she got sick, she was very energetic, a fastidious housekeeper who canned and sewed and cooked, did all those things, and still managed to be very active outside the home,” Marjorie remembered, including helping to run a church daycare center for the children of migrant farm workers. Marjorie often cared for her mother, sparking an interest in pursuing a nursing career. Her aunt Lola, Elda’s sister, worked as a nurse, and Marjorie recalled being “rather in awe of her and her skills. Particularly when I saw her in her white uniform with the stiff, starched cap that she pinned so carefully on top of her dark hair.” Marjorie’s career path changed, however, when a couple who attended her church, Bob Smith, a doctor, and his wife Mary Beth, a nurse, told her she should think about becoming a physician. “From that time on, I planned to be a doctor,” said Marjorie, who dreamed about life as a medical missionary.
After graduating from Kokomo High School in 1956, Marjorie attended Earlham College, majoring in chemistry. She had earned money for her education by working in the Delco-Remy transistor quality-control laboratory. She also attended classes at an Indiana University extension school in Kokomo before entering Earlham as a sophomore. The Quaker institution in Richmond, Indiana, became the “bedrock” for both her and her brother, Beryl. “It influenced the way that we thought about things and motivated us to do things that I’m certain we wouldn’t have done if we hadn’t had the Quaker upbringing,” Beryl said. During her days at Earlham, Marjorie also supported her education by waiting on tables in the dining room, answering phones in the dormitory office at night, and selling postcards in the college’s museum.
Applying to attend the IU School of Medicine the year before she graduated from Earlham, Majorie had to withstand an intense interview before a committee of half a dozen men, who peppered her with such questions as, “Why do you want to go into medicine? Where will you practice? What guarantee do we have that you won’t quit the practice of medicine once you have a family—waste the investment we spent training you?” Nelson endured these queries, not posed to male candidates, and became part of a first-year class that included approximately 180 students, eight of whom were women. “One of the women dropped out in the first week,” she said. “The other seven of us bonded into a tight-knit sisterhood.” Nelson believed it took more stamina than brains to get through medical school. “You just have to work hard,” she pointed out. “You have to read a lot of books, and you have to be able to get by on very little sleep.”
For her internship year, Nelson worked at the Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia with dreams about becoming a medical missionary, working overseas, possibly in Africa. A surgeon at the hospital, Doctor Harvey J. Lerner, suggested she gain some experience by serving on the hospital ship SS Hope, which traveled around the world providing medical services to developing countries. Nelson spent two months aboard the Hope during its 1965 visit to Conakry, the capital of the Republic Guinea on Africa’s west coast, working most of her time at a hospital clinic on shore.
During Nelson’s time studying to become a physician, the war in Vietnam had begun to dominate newspaper headlines. On March 8, 1965, U.S. Marines dressed for battle from the Ninth Marine Expeditionary Force stormed onto the beach outside of Da Nang, South Vietnam. The United States had sent advisers for many years to aid the South Vietnamese government in its fight against VC guerillas supported by Communist North Vietnam, but the March 8 landings represented a major escalation when it came to American troops engaging the enemy. Secretary of State Dean Rusk warned that if the marines were shot at, they would, of course, return fire. A few months after the marines had landed, an editorial in Time supported the growing American presence in South Vietnam, saying the struggle there was “absolutely inescapable for the U.S. in the mid-60s—and in that sense, it is the right war in the right place at the right time.”
Nelson had known for a couple of years that Vietnam “was where I was really supposed to be.” She believed the war was wrong, as it was not “at all according to the way we are to treat our fellowman,” and the United States could not justify its intervention there either on “moral or historical grounds.” Nelson wondered if her Quaker faith might stand up when exposed to war’s ferocity. “Well, I felt I had to find out. I didn’t want to be an armchair quarterback—talking about the way things ought to be, but doing nothing, is too easy. That was a very important issue for me,” she recalled.
Beryl joined the Phoenix crew despite warnings from U.S. government officials that he risked losing his passport and citizenship. He and his sister had discussed the risks involved. “We spent many hours talking about this and agree that we must help people,” Marjorie explained to a reporter from the Kokomo Times. “We are trying to relieve suffering wherever we find it—across political lines.” Beryl believed it was easy for Americans to be a hawk or dove about the war while sitting safely in the comfort of their homes. “But, let them come over here and they may not feel as they do,” he pointed out. “I am only doing something about the way that I feel.”
Before leaving for Vietnam, Marjorie had gone on a sailing trip in Canada with her father. Feeling regretful, she realized she had never asked him how he felt about her journeying into a potentially dangerous spot, with a chance she might never return. Taking her hand, Earl reminded her he and her mother had raised her to “do what you think is right. Now, go ahead and do it and don’t worry about it.”
Nelson arrived at Quang Ngai in October 1967 to start work at the AFSC clinic, which accepted patients without regard to their religious or political affiliation. She had believed that being in a war zone meant normal parts of life stopped, but that was not what she experienced. “Although you could always hear bombing, and there were always planes and helicopters around and army trucks and soldiers everywhere, you came to realize that life does have to go on in spite of the war,” she noted, “and people still fall in love and get married and have children and have to figure out how to raise them, and people still die naturally, and there are funerals and all the rest.”
Although the clinic had opened five months before Nelson came to Vietnam, she was the first doctor to work there. It served 125 to 150 patients per month, of which 80 to 95 percent suffered from wounds caused by the war, including land mines, shrapnel, grenades, and booby traps. Nelson noted that the nearby hospital had no rehabilitation facilities, resulting in many patients being released “permanently crippled who need not have been—either because they lost a leg and couldn’t get an artificial leg or because they had suffered an injury and then did not get proper exercise or physical therapy thereafter.”
Conditions at the hospital were primitive by American standards, with a shortage of doctors (nurses had to do a lot of the surgeries) and no running water in the emergency room. “There were two American military doctors and a Spanish-speaking surgeon full time and two Canadian doctors part-time,” she remembered. “That was it, for six or seven hundred patients in a four-hundred-twenty-bed hospital.” Conditions did later improve, as the South Vietnamese government began to assign military doctors to province hospitals and assistance came from the U.S. Agency for International Development.
There were times when what she saw became too much for Nelson. She made rounds at a temporary ward established for patients selected for rehabilitation, surgical wards, and, for a time, the burn ward. Patients in the burn ward included those injured in domestic accidents involving cooking fires and spilled pots, as well as those horribly disfigured from napalm, phosphorous bombs, and general explosives. “Maybe, during a firefight, the thatch of a house would ignite—we didn’t call them firefights for nothing, I guess,” Nelson said. Because of inadequate facilities, most of the burn patients were left in bed to see if they might get better on their own; many did not. She estimated that treating ten burn patients would have exhausted all their resources, which otherwise could have cared for fifty or seventy-five amputees or orthopedic cases. “In short, it was a very depressing situation. I finally realized I was not going to be able to function if I continued to go into that burn ward, I could not help all of those people,” Nelson confessed. “I found the suffering so overwhelming that I was simply immobilized. So I quit going. I had to.”
With the hospital emptying with the approach of the Tet holiday in early 1968, Nelson accepted an invitation from a Vietnamese woman she worked with to visit her in Hue. “I was very interested in visiting this woman’s family, also in seeing some of the cultural aspects of this country that I was getting to know,” she recalled. “Certainly, nobody I talked to knew there was going to be Tet offensive.” The NVA soldiers who took Nelson and Johnson prisoner were quite well organized, knowing the names and locations of all the foreigners that lived in Hue. Nelson remembered that their captors told them they were going to be taken to the mountains “to study,” and when there was peace they would be returned to their families. “That sounded sort of ominous,” she said, “and we really thought we were in for the duration of the war.”
Nelson and Johnson spent about ten days at a small mountain camp with twenty-five American men (some military and some civilian) captured at Hue. Nelson provided medical treatment to some of the prisoners, who were eventually taken to Hanoi. The VC separated the women from the other prisoners and took them to another mountain camp, assigning them to a small house built out of bamboo, saplings, and jungle leaves, and equipped with a bomb shelter. “We were frequently shelled or bombed, so it was tense,” Nelson said, “but we were not confined in any way. We were free to move about.” The number-one rule, they were warned by Bon, a veteran of the fight against the French, was simple: “Don’t Escape!”
Often asked by the VC if she had any requests, Nelson responded by saying she wanted to be able to write her family, so she could tell them she was safe. She also asked to continue to study Vietnamese. Finally, Nelson wanted to continue to help wounded civilians. “I explained that I wasn’t willing to work in the military but that I was willing to work in Communist Vietnam if I could work in a civilian setting,” she said. The VC allowed her to write her family and continue studying Vietnamese, but declined her offer of medical assistance, telling her, Nelson remembered, “We would never ask you to live under such difficult circumstances. We appreciate your offer, but we don’t need your help.”
Just before the VC released Nelson and Johnson, the Americans met with the ten or twelve soldiers then in the camp for a goodbye party. One of the men brought a dishpan filled with peanut brittle and a few canteens of tea, which they ate and drank and discussed life in America. The camp’s commander was particularly interested in whether Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy might win the election and, if so, would end the war. Nelson shared her belief that Kennedy might well end the war, but for the wrong reasons. “I think he will end the war not because he thinks America is wrong, that we shouldn’t be in Vietnam,” she explained, “but because he thinks the war is costing too much. The American people are not willing to pay the cost—you know, the casualties and the money both are beginning to wear on people.” The commander listened and agreed that her explanation made sense. Finally, he asked them if instead of using the word “prisoner” when they returned home, they would “consider ourselves to have been their guests,” Nelson recalled.
As to why they were freed, Nelson supposed it had happened due to several reasons. She credited it to the will of God, as well as because of the excellent relationship Quakers had established with the Vietnamese. She pointed out that she and others involved with Quaker projects in the country “had always been assured that no harm would come to members of the Quaker team.” Nelson also credited Beryl for his efforts on her behalf, including flying to Phnom Penh, Cambodia, to talk with North Vietnamese officials at their embassy. “Another explanation might be that the local people who got to know me sent a report up and said they thought it would be in the best interest of North Vietnam to let us go,” Nelson noted.
Upon returning to the Quang Ngai rehabilitation clinic in September 1968, Nelson took up her old duties as well as providing medical treatment to inmates at a local prison. Originally built by the French to house 500 inmates, the prison, during the time Nelson worked there, had a population ranging from 800 to 1,300, a number that included 150 to 300 women. “Many of these women had their children with them—40 to 120 children,” she remembered. According to the inmates, about 80 percent of them had been incarcerated for such “political” crimes as having improper or incomplete papers, being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or, for many women, an “inability to account for the whereabouts of their husbands, who were therefore assumed to be guerrillas.”
Nelson also regularly examined inmates who had been tortured, not at the prison but at the nearby Province Interrogation Center, which she said a U.S. adviser told her had been a project begun by the Americans to teach “enlightened intelligence and interrogation procedures.” Nelson later testified before a House Committee on Government Operations that she saw dozens of patients suffering from bruises of varying severity, as well as those “who had coughed up, vomited or urinated blood after being beaten about the chest, back and stomach.” She went on to accuse South Vietnamese officials of torturing people with electricity by attaching wires “to ears, nipples and genitalia; by being forced to drink concoctions containing powdered lime and other noxious substances, and by being tied up and suspended by ropes upside down from the rafters for hours.” A South Vietnamese province chief, a Colonel Khien, Nelson remembered, acknowledged to her that some beatings had occurred at the center, but some of the prisoners were “‘very hard’ and refuse to talk, and in such situations physical force was necessary and was employed to get information.” The colonel did add: “There are limits.”
Although Nelson admitted it was difficult decision for her to leave Vietnam, she left to return to the United States to marry Robert Perisho, a Yale University graduate student studying physics. They married in 1971 and had a son, Christopher Robert. In 1975 the family moved to Salt Lake City, where Robert died from encephalitis. After working as the medical director for Planned Parenthood in Utah, Marjorie and her son moved to Athens, Ohio, where she eventually joined the faculty of the Ohio University College of Osteopathic Medicine. Up until and after her retirement in 2009, she returned to Vietnam, doing volunteer work for the nonprofit Madison Quakers Inc. Nelson acknowledged that a part of her heart would “always remain in that patch of land and water—Quang Ngai.”
Before her death from a stroke on December 29, 2022, Nelson had been selected for inclusion in the Howard County Historical Society’s Howard County Hall of Legends. She had remained committed to her Quaker pacifism throughout her life, protesting paying U.S. taxes for military spending, especially when it came to nuclear war, by writing “war tax deduction” on her tax returns. The Internal Revenue Service responded by fining her $500 for filing a “frivolous tax return.” Nelson believed the fine had been a way for the federal government to place limits on her free speech rights. “It seems to me the government’s main purpose should be to collect taxes, not to stifle a statement of conscientiousness,” she told an Associated Press reporter in 1984. “I get the feeling the government is trying to chill dissent, to intimidate people so they won’t speak up over issues of conscience.”
Her actions seemed true to the character of what Nelson’s father once described as a person always looking “for ways to live out her belief that war is wrong and that the lives of all people are to be valued.”