Officer, Nurse, Woman: The Army Nurse Corps in the Vietnam War

Conclusion: Officers, Nurses, and Women

CONCLUSION Officers, Nurses, and Women The simple, limited images of nurses that emerged in the years after the war revealed none of the complexity of their experiences or the negotiation that occurred between the nurses and the Army Nurse Corps (ANC) over the nature and meanings of their service. A more accurate depiction of their service would have acknowledged multifaceted understandings of what it meant to be women and men at a tumultuous time when many Americans reconsidered their definitions of gender. Such a nuanced consideration of nursing in Vietnam would have grappled with what the experiences of women in the military suggested about how feminist ideology permeated society and effected change. And this more complete description of their service would have contemplated the larger implications it raised about national service and the status of women in society. The army and its nurses responded in much more calculated ways to the social and political turmoil of the Vietnam era than the lasting images of wartime nursing suggest. Simple pleas for American women to go to war did not elicit enough volunteers to meet the medical needs of the army in Vietnam. The ANC believed it had to offer a new message of equal opportunity to po- tential female recruits, so it promised equal pay, equal rank, career advancement , and advanced nursing practice—progressive job benefits unheard of in the traditional medical hierarchy. At the same time, however, the army stopped short of radically altering its historical presentation of nursing as women’s natural and patriotic wartime role. The corps pleaded for young women to come to the aid of the wounded soldiers it featured in advertisements. It implied that they would enjoy the attention of army men around the world and that finding a husband would be a simple matter. This curious blending of tradition and change in recruitment materials indicated the complexity of the army’s response to changing social and gender norms. Its response was no less curious in the ways it used nurses. The army made significant strides toward removing historical barriers against women’s advancement in the military during the Vietnam War. It lifted restrictions on the ranks women could attain, removed restrictions against married women and mothers serving on active duty, and pushed for nurses to achieve an educational background equal to that of all other army officers, all while the war itself demanded a higher level of nursing practice than nurses experienced in stateside hospitals. And still the army retained its old idea that women symbolized femininity in a world of masculinity. After all, William Westmoreland, an iconic image of the Vietnam War, had kissed the ANC chief when he promoted her to become the military’s first female general. Army and ANC officials continually sought ways to make women appear more feminine, while some women faced the more direct order to attend parties of highranking officials as tokens of femininity. The corps also used male nurses in more conventionally “masculine” ways that ensured their masculinity would not be in question as they violated the historically gendered nature of nursing. Under the pressure of war, the army and the ANC offered neither an unambiguous vision of progress nor a rigid adherence to the past in its understandings of the gendered roles of nurses. Nurses were not merely the objects of the army’s attempts to define their gender during the Vietnam War. The women and men who joined the ANC and served in hospitals throughout the war developed their own understandings of what it meant to be women and men, nurses and officers in the army. Women wanted something more out of their lives than the usual roles of wife, mother, and homemaker. They wanted a career and to experience life beyond their hometowns. Many believed that they, like men their age, had an obligation to serve their country, or at the very least, to offer their nursing skills to 188 Officer, Nurse, Woman men who had no choice but to serve. Outwardly, they might have seemed to continue a long history of women going to war and serving in the military. However, they also broadened their understandings of what nursing entailed. In their minds, nurses were not merely handmaidens to physicians, nor were they mindlessly traveling along a well-trod path of women who nursed. These nurses chose the profession for a...