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

Notes

Notes Abbreviations AJN American Journal of Nursing ANA American Nurses Association ANC Army Nurse Corps ANCA Army Nurse Corps Archives ASNP Army Student Nurse Program CFA Commission of Fine Arts MEDCAP Medical Civic Action Program NACP National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD NCPC National Capital Planning Commission NLN National League for Nursing NO Nursing Outlook NYT New York Times RG Record Group TVA, TTU The Vietnam Archive, Texas Tech University USAMHI U.S. Army Military History Institute, Carlisle Barracks, PA USAREC United States Army Recruiting Command VFW Veterans of Foreign Wars VVMF Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund VWMP Vietnam Women’s Memorial Project WAC Women’s Army Corps WIMSA Women in Military Service to America WRAIN Walter Reed Army Institute of Nursing Introduction. “Lady, you’re in the army now” 1. Kate O’Hare Palmer, interview by author, December 11, 2003, San Francisco, CA, and March 21, 2006, telephone interview, tape recordings in possession of the author. All information about and quotations from Palmer are from these interviews. 2. Mary T. Sarnecky, A History of the U.S. Army Nurse Corps, Studies in Health, Illness, and Caregiving (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 331–37. 3. Office of the Adjutant General, U.S. Army Data Services and Administrative Systems Command, Strength of the Army, June 30, 1966, June 30, 1967, and June 30, 1968, Headquarters, Department of the Army, Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel , Washington, D.C., held at the Center for Military History, Fort McNair, VA. All numbers of nurses assigned to Vietnam in any year or month were counted on one particular day. The actual numbers varied because nurses arrived and departed daily. 4. Sarnecky, History of the U.S. Army Nurse Corps, 350, 359, 377–78. 5. Undoubtedly, the experiences of air force and navy nurses are similar to those of army nurses. The responses of the air force and the navy to the changing gender concerns of the era are also no doubt similar to those of the army. This book, however, does not detail the history of those two institutions. I hope that future works will explore the issues pertinent to other women who served in the Vietnam War. 6. Sarnecky, History of the U.S. Army Nurse Corps, 344–45. The 85th Evacuation Hospital staff traveled together by ship to Vietnam in the summer of 1965. It was the only hospital whose staff traveled together to the war. Some reserve nurses were called to active duty with their reserve units and deployed to Vietnam, but these hospital staffs were augmented with other army medical personnel. See Sarnecky, History of the U.S. Army Nurse Corps, 347–48, 375; Spurgeon Neel, Medical Support of the U.S. Army in Vietnam, 1965–1970 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1973), 59–63. 7. Sarnecky, History of the U.S. Army Nurse Corps, 354, 361, 375; Neel, Medical Support of the U.S. Army in Vietnam, 60–70. 8. The National Vietnam Veterans Readjustment Study estimates that 6,039 military nurses served in Vietnam during the war. The Department of Defense estimates that approximately 7,500 military women (most of them army nurses) served in Vietnam between 1962 and 1973. The ANC estimates the total number of army nurses who served in Vietnam to be more than 5,000. See Richard A. Kukla et al., The National Vietnam Veterans Readjustment Study: Tables of Findings and Technical Appendices (New York: Brunner /Mazel, 1990), Exhibit B-18 on B-38, Table II-12 on II-12-1; Sarnecky, History of the U.S. Army Nurse Corps, 387–88; Linda Grant DePauw, Battle Cries and Lullabies: Women in War from Prehistory to the Present (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), 269. See also Elizabeth Norman, Women at War: The Story of 50 Military Nurses Who Served in Vietnam (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 3–4; Kathryn Marshall, In the Combat Zone: An Oral History of American Women in Vietnam, 1966–1975 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1987), 4–6; Paul Hendrickson, The Living and the Dead: Robert McNamara and Five Lives of a Lost War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), 403. 9. Women needed a parent’s consent to join the army if under the age of twenty-one. Men needed a parent’s consent if under the age of eighteen. On May 24, 1974, Public Law 93-290 changed this requirement and allowed women to join the military at age eighteen...