By Todd DePastino
On November 3, 2025, Navy Corpsman Steve Giordano joined our Open Conversation livestream, and shared some of his story of serving aboard the USS Sanctuary (AH-17) off the coast of Vietnam in 1967. Steve offered eye-opening testimony life and work on the most advanced floating trauma hospital in the world, the first ever Navy ship equipped with air-conditioning stem to stern and operating rooms rivaling anything in stateside surgical centers.
Steve was a 20-year-old sailor from Kane, Pennsylvania, in the final year of his enlistment, which began at age 17 when he signed up for a “kiddy cruise”: a special enlistment that allowed him to serve until the day before his 21st birthday. Steve’s father had been a PT-boat sailor in the Pacific, and without job prospects after high school, Steve followed his father’s path into the Navy. He asked for medical training, and the Navy gave him all he could have wanted, and more.
After Basic Corpsman School, he was sent to St. Albans Naval Hospital in Queens, New York, the nerve center of Navy thoracic surgery. There he learned to scrub, circulate, and manage instruments on cutting-edge operations. St. Albans handled the most complex casualties returning from Vietnam. He saw bullet wounds to the chest, shattered ribs, and collapsing lungs.
“Sixty-seven operations on one young man,” Steve remembered. “He’d come up the elevator on a striker frame screaming.” That experience hardened his resolve to deploy: “I volunteered for Vietnam. I wanted to help where it mattered.”
Steve wanted to serve in combat with Marines. But the Navy had other plans and sent him to join the nucleus crew refurbishing USS Sanctuary at Avondale Shipyard in New Orleans.
The ship had a distinguished past. Built in World War II, she helped repatriate thousands of POWs after Japan’s surrender. Now the Navy was pulling her out of mothballs, gutting her, and rebuilding her to serve in a new war.
In March 1967, Sanctuary steamed west through the Panama Canal, across the Pacific, into Subic Bay, and finally to the coast of South Vietnam. At 1400 on April 10, the ship took aboard its first casualties: ten Marines burned terribly when their amphibious tractor hit a mine and the gas tank exploded. Steve later discovered that one of his own classmates, a Marine Corpsman, served in that unit.
That first day ended with 136 patients aboard. And for Steve, it was only the beginning.
To understand the Sanctuary, picture an emergency room, major trauma center, and full surgical wing packed inside a 520-foot hull. By the end of April she had treated 717 inpatients and 682 outpatients. Only two patients had died.
Surgeons and Corpsmen wrapped in gowns and masks tending to a wounded man aboard the USS Sanctuary, 1967.
The ship operated on a grueling cycle: 50 days on the line; 10 days replenishing at Subic Bay; then back out. She rotated among the collecting points on the coast of I Corps: Da Nang, Phu Bai, Chu Lai, and Dong Ha. The Sanctuary kept far enough offshore to avoid enemy guns, but close enough for medevac pilots to reach her fast. The pilots who brought the wounded to the Sanctuary became minor gods to the corpsmen: “Ubermensch,” Steve called them.
The landings themselves could feel like controlled chaos. Sometimes two choppers came in at once, rotors beating the deck, medevac teams leaping out carrying stretchers.
Steve served in neurosurgery, under the legendary Dr. Frederick E. Jackson, a brilliant flamboyant Navy neurosurgeon who seemed to live for trauma surgery. And Vietnam ensured there was no shortage of it.
Cdr Frederick E. Jackson, MC, USN
“We took half a brain out of two boys,” Steve said, still amazed fifty years later. “We even did open heart surgery on a kid who had a bullet in the pericardium.”
When every operating room was full, Steve and Dr. Jackson commandeered a closet and performed a craniotomy on a Marine who couldn’t wait. Steve lay on the floor, handing instruments up through a gap under the table.
You can see the intensity of that work in the photos Steve saved from the cruise book:
Close-up of the Hall Craniotome, a device still in its experimental stage in 1967. The Hall Craniotome was a Dremel before Dremels existed. It was an innovation that saved at least one life by saving time.
Steve Giordano in action aboard the USS Sanctuary, 1967.
“We experimented with everything,” Steve remembered. “Cryopreserved blood cells, Silvadene cream for burns, handmade tools when equipment broke. You figured it out.”
One statistic proves how well they figured it out: a mortality rate of around just 2 percent.
During a particularly heavy rush of casualties Steve entered the OR to help transfer a patient from a gurney to the table. He looked down.
There, small, blond, covered in shrapnel and blood, lay Catherine Leroy, the French photojournalist embedded with the Marines.
Someone said, “She’s wearing a ring—get a ring cutter.”
It struck Steve: even here, in the middle of war’s carnage, someone cared enough to protect her finger.
Leroy would survive. She would return to the field. Her photographs would help define the war for the world.
And for Steve, she became the symbol of a truth he’d try to explain to VA counselors decades later: he had never been in combat, but he had lived inside the consequences of it every day.
The Sanctuary‘s 1967 cruise book’s photos capture the sweep of patients who came aboard. One image shows two Vietnamese children. One staring levelly at the camera, the other with a heavy bandage wrapped around his head.
Military patients, civilian victims, ARVN troops, Marines, sailors, the Sanctuary treated them all.
Steve estimates he sometimes went days without seeing daylight. The operating rooms swallowed time. But the ship also offered comforts most troops in Vietnam never had: air-conditioning, regular meals and showers, and a clean place to sleep.
Steve is one of so many Service Members we’ve heard from who lives with a kind of survivor’s guilt. He knows plenty of people who humped the boonies and hauled wounded through enemy fire. He could have been that Corpsman serving in the bush. Instead, he was safe on a ship.
“My best friend stood up to help a guy and got killed instantly,” Steve said. “I could never call myself a combat vet.”
That humility is characteristic of so many Vietnam veterans, especially those who handled the wounded rather than inflicted the wounds. They saw too clearly what combat cost.
After his discharge in 1967, one day before his 21st birthday, Steve used the GI Bill to attend the University of Pittsburgh. He became a pharmacist and eventually opened his own store in Kane. Like the Sanctuary, it was open “24 hours” in spirit. If you called him at 2 a.m., he’d be there in 15 minutes.
“I kept going,” he said. “You do what you have to do. That’s what the Navy taught me.”
Years later, watching Hamburger Hill in the late 1980s, he broke down, suddenly, overwhelmingly, after decades of holding it together. Eventually he sought counseling at the VA. He wasn’t a combat vet. But what he witnessed was its own kind of trauma.
Still, he considers it “the greatest privilege” of his life to have served aboard Sanctuary.
“When I think of what that ship did, and how many lives it saved—I was proud to be part of it,” he said.
