Maryanna Hiester enlisted in the Army nursing program while at Mount Mercy College, Pittsburgh in 1967. Upon graduation, she was commissioned as an officer and sent to Fort Sam Houston, Texas for basic and military medical training. She volunteered to go to Vietnam, was given four months of additional trauma training at Fort Dix, New Jersey, and then deployed to Vietnam at the age of 22. She was assigned to Long Binh, but traded for the 85th Evacuation Hospital in Phu Bai because she knew a Chinook pilot there. She describes the excitement of her very first helicopter trip, on the final leg of her journey to Phu Bai, and the realization when it crash landed on the beach that while no one was badly injured, she was “not in Kansas anymore.” She did not relish her initial assignment to the medical floor dealing with diarrhea, hepatitis, malaria, and other jungle ailments because caring for wounded Soldiers was her passion. She was finally assigned to the ICU after eight months in-country. Hiester fondly recalls her friendships with the Dust Off pilots, and the pain of losing one. She remembers her frustration when Bob Hope visited her ward and spent too much time with a patient who had “shot himself in the foot just to get out of doing things.” She especially loved encouraging young amputees, because her father had been one after his service in World War Two.