Scope and Contents

More than one linear foot containing books, slides, photographs, VHS tapes, Navy Nurse Corps Association Information, Vietnam Womens War Memorial information, a guest book from the Station Hospital in Danang, and an essay titled 'Nursing Under Fire' by Lieutenant Commander C. Edwina Todd, documents Helen Louise Brooks service in the Navy Nurse Corps during the Vietnam War. The materials date from the pre-war, the war, and the post-war periods.

Biographical / Historical

Helen-Louise Brooks was born in Lowell Massachusetts and graduated from high-school there in 1936. She attended nursing school at St. John's Hospital in Lowell, graduating in 1939. She worked in private hospitals and in the Public Health Service before joining the US Navy's Nurse Corps in 1944. Captain Brooks served at Charleston, South Carolina from 1944-45 and was assigned with the Royal Netherlands Marine Corps at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina in 1945. She served as an operating room supervisor onboard the hospital ship USS Consolation in Korea and Japan from 1950-52. Captain Brooks served in Vietnam from 1968-69 as Chief Nurse at the Fleet Support Activity facility in Danang. She also served as Chief Nurse at the Naval Hospital in Charleston, South Carolina before retiring in 1971. Helen Brooks then worked at a hospital in Panama before retiring to the San Diego, California area.