Bobbi Hovis told her story often.
She was a Navy nurse who served in Korea. In 1963, she volunteered to go to Saigon to set up a small hospital unit for the American advisers supporting Prime Minister Ngo Dinh Diem’s South Vietnamese government.
On Nov. 1, one of her corpsmen went for lunch and came back with news that a coup against Diem had begun. This was one of the key steps toward expanding U.S. forces to eventually include 3.1 million servicemen and women over the next decade.
“I walked out in the middle of the street and couldn’t believe what I saw,” the Annapolis woman wrote in her book, “Station Hospital Saigon: A Navy Nurse in Vietnam, 1963-1964.”
“I was looking right into the barrels of two .50-caliber machine guns set up in sandbag gun emplacements. ‘Oh, my goodness.’ I thought. ‘What is happening here?’ Well, it wasn’t very long before the shooting started.”
Hovis, who retired to Annapolis at the rank of lieutenant commander in 1969, died at a retirement community May 5 after a brief illness. She was 98.
Born Vila J. Hovis to Myron and Doris Hovis on Aug. 31, 1925, in Girard, Ohio, she moved with her family when she was young to Edinboro, Pennsylvania. It was there, with the help of her father, that she built a 10-foot sailboat and learned to sail it on Edinboro Lake.
She earned her pilot’s license while in high school and received a nursing degree from West Penn Hospital School of Nursing in Pittsburgh.
She joined the Navy Nurse Corps and completed flight training at Naval Air Station Jacksonville in Florida, and later used her salary to buy a Piper Cub J7. In October 1947, she was ordered to active duty.
As a flight nurse during the Korean War, she cared for wounded soldiers being transported aboard airplanes to hospitals in Japan and Hawaii.
It was there that she met her lifelong friend and fellow nurse Owedia Searcy. A decade later, Searcy was one of the nurses who volunteered with Hovis, then 38, to serve in Vietnam.
Starting in August 1963, they converted a dilapidated apartment building in the Chinese quarter of Saigon into a hospital complete with an operating room, intensive care unit and post-operative beds.
According to her memoir, the building was chosen because the South Vietnamese government wanted its American backers to keep a low profile. Nine days after the hospital opened, the staff treated their first patient, a Green Beret sergeant shot in an ambush.
On Nov. 2, Diem was assassinated in the coup led by his top general and supported by the CIA. Hovis watched the violence unfold from the fifth floor of the hospital. A .30-caliber bullet struck the balcony wall where she was standing, missing her chest by inches. Years later, she would display the bullet to reporters writing about her book and her life.
“I was extremely lucky. Well, somebody was looking over my shoulder,” she said in an oral history interview with the U.S. Naval Institute in Annapolis.
Hovis remained at the hospital for another year, treating thousands of patients before returning to the United States. She took every chance she could to hop on military planes and see the country from the air.
During her tour, she wrote regular letters to her parents and asked them to keep them in order. She eventually used them, along with a journal she kept, to write “Station Hospital Saigon” in 1965 but was unable to find a publisher.
Hovis spent the rest of her career at Navy hospitals across the Pacific, learning to scuba dive. Sandy Harned of Edinboro, one of her cousins, said the love of her life was a Navy pilot who died during a failed carrier landing.
She and Cmdr. Searcy, known as “Tweedy,” finished their careers at Portsmouth Naval Hospital in Virginia. After retiring in 1967, the friends looked around for a place on the water and moved together to Annapolis.
“They were the best of friends. They had the same political views, and they wanted to live on the water,” Harned said.
Together, they became the first women members of the Naval Academy Sailing Squadron. Hovis would go on to coach sailing for seven years.
After leaving the Navy, she unsuccessfully tried to get her memoir published. It wasn’t until 1990, when she was out with friends after a Navy basketball game, that fellow nurse Karen DiRenzo encouraged her to write a book about her experience.
“There was a story to tell about a segment of history of the Navy Nurse Corps,” she told The Baltimore Sun in 1996. “Few, if any records were kept out there. In fact, there were none, and it is a history that should not be lost in time as we who remember it pass on.”
Direnzo’s husband, Joe, worked at the U.S. Naval Institute, which would eventually publish the 157-page book. It was a rare look at the Navy Nurse Corps, the first of many books that eventually focused on women’s experiences in Vietnam.
In a 2017 interview with Annapolis radio journalist Donna Cole, Hovis said she suffered numbness and pain in her legs from being exposed to the defoliant Agent Orange while in Vietnam.
Some of it came from soldiers brought into the hospital. One of her jobs was to cut off their damaged clothes. Often, they were soaked in the chemical compound, later linked to cancer and other ailments. More of it spilled on her from a drum during one of her sightseeing flights around the country.
Two weeks after the interview, Searcy died at a facility in Pasadena. Her obituary named Hovis as her best friend.
Survivors included 11 cousins, including Harned. Over the years, they tried to convince her to move back to Pennsylvania, but she said her life was in Annapolis.
“A friend of mine just showed me her high school yearbook,” Harned said. “The write-up for her was, she never stopped, she never walked, she ran.”
A memorial service will be held at 11 a.m. Friday at Edinboro United Methodist Church, 113 High St., Edinboro, Pennsylvania. Her ashes will be buried with full military honors at Edinboro Cemetery.
