This Is You: A Vietnam-Era Army Nurse's Long Route to a Microphone of Her Own

Beversdorf at the microphone for AGING MATTERS. Photo courtesy of Cheryl Beversdorf.

On the orthopedic ward at Camp Zama, Japan, the young men came in missing one leg, two, sometimes three limbs. Many of them had malaria too, picked up in jungle terrain that bred both wounds and mosquitoes in equal measure. Cheryl Beversdorf was the nurse working among them, and what stayed with her wasn't the injuries. It was the mood. These men were relieved. They'd made it out of the shooting, and Japan was the stop before home, so for a little while the war felt finished. They talked about prosthetics and whether the skills they'd learned in the field would translate into a civilian job, but they talked about it the way you plan a trip you haven't taken yet, curious rather than afraid.

She hadn't planned on any of it. She grew up in Stevens Point, Wisconsin, at a time when a girl became a teacher, a secretary, or a nurse and rarely much else. She chose nursing, finished her diploma program in 1966, and spent two years working in surgery before taking four months to travel with a woman she'd met in Milwaukee. When the trip ended she moved back home, worked at the local hospital, and by 1969 had landed on a plain fact: she didn't want to spend her life in Wisconsin.

She'd hoped to become an Air Force flight nurse, but the Air Force needed 20/20 vision without correction, and hers wasn't. So she drove to Milwaukee and talked to an Army recruiter instead. He asked if she wanted to go to Vietnam. She said no. He told her about Japan, the stabilization point where wounded troops were treated before being sent to what soldiers then called simply "the world." She'd never been to Japan. She said yes.

Eight weeks of basic training took her to Fort Sam Houston, Texas. From there she went to Camp Zama for about fifteen months, then finished her two-year tour at Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington, D.C. She served in the Army from 1969 to 1971.

Beversdorf at Fort Sam Houston, Texas, where she went through basic training. Photo courtesy of Cheryl Beversdorf.

At the time, women in the military fell into two categories: nurses, or administrative staff the Army called WACs. "It was pretty much men who were in all different kinds of categories," she says, "but women, not so much."

She didn't grasp the scale of what she was seeing until later. "I think I didn't realize at the time what the impact of Vietnam War would be," she says. The men on her ward were drafted, not volunteers, and most of them were still riding a kind of high, simply relieved to be alive and out of the jungle. The reckoning came later, back in the world, once the missing limb or the malaria or the war itself stopped being an escape and started being a life.

The country wasn't kind to them. "They were ostracized," she says. "They were told they were fools for going into the military." She got some of that same treatment herself, as a young woman who'd chosen to enlist during an unpopular war. "People really didn't understand why in the world I decided to go in the military at all," she says. She was serving as the women's movement gathered force nationally too, an overlap she was living through without fully naming it at the time.

Beversdorf during her Army service. Photo courtesy of Cheryl Beversdorf.

Leaving the Army gave her the GI Bill and a VA loan, and she used both, finishing a bachelor's in nursing and then a graduate degree in public health at Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health. Clinical nursing had never suited her. "I was not comfortable around sick people," she says. Public health made more sense to her: keep people well, rather than wait for them to get sick and treat it afterward.

Washington's association world became her training ground. She spent a year representing optometrists, then moved to the American Public Health Association. What she actually wanted was a job as a Congressional staffer on Capitol Hill, and she figured she had three things working for her: she was a woman, a veteran, and a nurse. The House Veterans Affairs Committee turned her down; there were no secretarial openings. The Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, chaired by Senator Alan Cranston of California, hired her in 1979.

As a staffer, her time in Japan gave her working knowledge the rest of the committee didn't have. She helped draft legislation on Agent Orange, the chemical defoliant linked to cancer and a skin condition called chloracne, along with what was then labeled Vietnam stress syndrome, spinal cord injuries, and VA hospital staffing shortages for nurses.

The job lasted a year. Ronald Reagan won the presidency in 1980, the Senate flipped Republican, and committee staffs were cut. Beversdorf, in her own words, was dispensable.

The next stretch of her career ran through New York's federal affairs office under Governor Hugh Carey, an association representing nursing homes, the Washington office of the American College of Surgeons, and the American College of Foot and Ankle Surgeons, whose members are podiatrists. She also ran the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, representing the people who run state health departments. That took up roughly fifteen years before she landed at Hill and Knowlton.

Beversdorf on her wedding day, May 12, 1990, outside the White House. Photo courtesy of Cheryl Beversdorf.

At Hill and Knowlton, the public relations firm, she worked on women's health, pharmaceutical products, medical devices, and clinical practice guidelines. It taught her something she still uses. "Your job is to find opportunities for your clients," she says. "They're pitching. They're always pitching." By her own account she wasn't especially good at it and didn't stay long. "I think I got hired because there was an assumption that I would know all these people in Washington, and I would get them to come over to Hill and Knowlton," she says. "It didn't work out that way, and it was fine."

"They're pitching. They're always pitching."

Before she returned to veterans work, she ran a health communications company of her own for four years. From 2002 to 2005, Beversdorf founded, managed, and performed with HealthonStage, producing educational events built around health promotion and disease prevention, with a focus on women's health.

After that, Beversdorf took the helm of the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans, running it from 2005 to 2009. The Vietnam veterans she'd once treated were now in their sixties. Many had already died of addiction. A striking number were homeless, more of them than the Iraq War veterans coming home at the same time, because of exactly the reception she'd watched decades earlier. The population had shifted too. More women were homeless veterans by then, and the VA, in her assessment, still wasn't built to meet their needs. Even the veterans who wanted work often couldn't get it, since nobody had figured out how to translate what they'd learned in uniform into a resume a civilian employer understood.

Beversdorf with Barack Obama at a National Coalition for Homeless Veterans conference. Photo courtesy of Cheryl Beversdorf.

Advocating for funding meant walking Capitol Hill again, this time in front of a generation of staffers with no connection to military service at all. One of them once asked her, flatly, why veterans were even homeless. She didn't let it pass. "Do you know what it's like to watch your buddy get blown up in front of you?" she asked him. "Do you know what it's like to have PTSD, because you've had to shovel up body parts, because somebody has just been blown up?" He had no answer. Neither did most of the staffers she met by then, since the draft had ended and only a small fraction of young people went into the military anymore.

"Do you know what it's like to watch your buddy get blown up in front of you?"

One of her board members once described the public's picture of a homeless veteran as a man on a street corner holding a cardboard sign. Beversdorf isn't convinced that picture has been replaced by a more accurate one.

Her next stop was the VA's Office of Veterans Health Communications, work that put her close to the growing toll of veteran suicide. She doesn't pretend to have an answer for it, even with the hotlines and support programs already in place. "I don't know if it's ever gonna change," she says.

What she carries instead is a visceral memory from her own era, of Vietnam-era nurses working surgery units so soaked in blood that staff were, by their own accounts, standing in it. She still absorbs other veterans' stories in smaller doses these days, often through foreign films with subtitles she watches while walking on the treadmill, one of them about a veteran and his service dog trying to explain to his wife what he'd seen overseas. A novel about a Vietnam nurse came recommended to her more than once. She never picked it up. "I don't need to read about this," she says. "I lived it."

"I don't need to read about this. I lived it."

After leaving the coalition, Beversdorf spent a few years consulting on veterans housing and nonprofit work before building two ventures of her own. In 2011, she partnered with two other women to launch Epilogue LLC, running support groups to help people over 50 find new work or reinvent themselves heading into retirement. Around the same period, she partnered with elder mediation attorney Jeannette Twomey on a project called Talking About the Tough Stuff, staging interactive dramatizations meant to force families into conversations they were avoiding: whether Mom could still live alone, whether the family could afford caregiving, who would step in once Dad could no longer drive safely. It was there she first saw up close how unprepared most adult children are for the decisions aging forces on them.

The show that followed came out of her husband's classical music program on WERA 96.7 FM, Arlington's community station. Watching him produce it, she thought about a TV journalist and interviewer named Charles Kuralt and figured she could do the same thing: she was a nurse, she knew how to ask people questions, and she was getting older herself, with more topics to draw from than she'd ever run out of. AGING MATTERS radio launched in January 2017; a television version followed the next year, taped with a volunteer crew of six or seven people running cameras, the teleprompter, and sound, and editing the video. The TV episodes covered whatever seemed useful that week: adaptive clothing, the warning signs of a stroke, durable medical equipment. A recurring segment called Stories of Life let guests talk through the experiences that had shaped them, on camera, at whatever length the story needed.

An AGING MATTERS television taping, from an episode on mentorships. Photo courtesy of Cheryl Beversdorf.

When Arlington Independent Media closed during COVID, Beversdorf moved production into her own home. By then Arlington Independent Media had already named her its 2019 Producer of the Year for AGING MATTERS. The show now runs as a podcast on Apple, Spotify, and Mixcloud. The Pacifica Network counts roughly two hundred affiliated community stations nationwide, and a small but growing number of them, currently fifteen to twenty, have started carrying her show, including outlets well outside Virginia.

She runs nearly all of it herself: booking every guest, writing every question, doing every interview. An audio engineer records and edits the show, and a marketing associate keeps her website and newsletter current, but that's the extent of the staff. When a listener writes to "the Aging Matters team," she laughs, because there is no team to speak of. "This is you," she says. "That's me."

"This is you. That's me."

After decades spent explaining one population to people who'd never lived it, homeless veterans to staffers who'd never gone without, wounded soldiers to a country that didn't want to look at them, Beversdorf finally built something that answers to no one but her. "I'm just not wired to work for anyone," she says. At this point in her life, she doesn't have to.

Cheryl Beversdorf. Photo courtesy of Cheryl Beversdorf.

Resources

Aging Matters | https://www.agingmattersonline.com/

Cheryl Beversdorf's weekly radio show, podcast, and television program covering health, finances, aging related programs/services, and community life for older adults.

National Coalition for Homeless Veterans | https://nchv.org/

The organization Beversdorf led from 2005 to 2009, connecting homeless veterans to housing, health care, and job placement.

VA Homeless Veterans Programs | https://www.va.gov/homeless/

The VA's central resource for veterans experiencing or at risk of homelessness, including outreach, transitional housing, and permanent housing assistance.

Veterans Crisis Line | 988, then Press 1 | https://www.veteranscrisisline.net/

Free, confidential, 24/7 crisis support for veterans and service members, also reachable by text at 838255.

VA Agent Orange Registry | https://www.va.gov/disability/eligibility/hazardous-materials-exposure/agent-orange/

VA information on Agent Orange exposure, related health conditions, and how eligible veterans can request a free registry health exam.

Eldercare Locator | https://eldercare.acl.gov/

A free public service that connects older adults and their families to local help with home care, transportation, meals, and caregiver support, at 1-800-677-1116.

Women Veterans Call Center | https://www.womenshealth.va.gov/programoverview/wvcc.asp

Call, text, or chat with trained women representatives about VA health care, benefits, and resources at 1-855-829-6636.

VA Caregiver Support Program | https://www.caregiver.va.gov/

Support, counseling, and local referrals for anyone caring for a veteran, with a toll-free Caregiver Support Line at 1-855-260-3274.