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CHAPTER TWO “An officer and a gentleman” Gender and a Changing Army What really struck me was the real sense of people getting hurt and injured and my being a nurse and that I just had this sense that I could, almost that I had an obligation to serve. I was brought up in the environment where my father and his brothers and all of his friends were World War II veterans and there was this sense of obligation to do that . . . It was kind of like wanting to live up to him and what he did . . . I literally came home on my way home from work one day and stopped at the army recruiter’s and said, “I’m a nurse and I want to go to Vietnam.” And they said “sign here.” —ARMY NURSE JOAN FUREY Before their first assignment, new army nurses attended the Officer Basic Course, held at Fort Sam Houston’s Medical Field Service School. Whereas soldiers attended a basic training course meant to prepare them physically for the rigors of combat, members of the Army Medical Department (nurses, physicians , dentists, veterinarians, administrators, dietitians, and therapists) attended a basic training course intended to introduce them to medical care in the army. Before the buildup for the Vietnam War, the course had been longer, but the army’s need to send increasing numbers of nurses to Vietnam forced the medical department to shorten it. In six weeks, nurses learned administrative and record-keeping procedures, army protocol and hierarchy, medical department organization, and methods of treating common war wounds. Their preparation for war involved touring a makeshift Vietnamese village and practicing map-reading skills.1 Most nurses enjoyed their time at Fort Sam but did not take their training as seriously as the army might have hoped. For many young nurses in particular , this trip was their first substantial trip away from home. As Susan Kramer O’Neill explained, “it was the first real apartment type living that I’d ever done.”2 Free from parental or school restrictions on their comings and goings, many nurses enjoyed their newfound freedom to the fullest. “Oh God, we partied hardy,” Jennifer Lundberg fondly recalled. The hardest lesson for her at Fort Sam was “learning how to stay awake all day while, you know, while you partied all night.”3 The jovial atmosphere surprised Mary Curts, who described basic training as “not at all what I was expecting.” She and her friends partied at night, then went to formations in the morning, “sometimes without seeing our rooms other than maybe to put our clothes on for the day.”4 A sense of freedom accounted for many young nurses’ relaxed behaviors, but as Lundberg explained, impending assignments to Vietnam added a heightened sense of anticipation. “Everybody, not particularly the nurses, but all the guys with us knew they were going to Vietnam,” she explained. “This was the last hurrah.”5 Much of the nurses’ training consisted of learning military protocol that often seemed irrelevant to new army nurses who were unfamiliar with army culture. “Why do nurses know how to march?” Diane Carlson Evans asked. “Why do they have to know how to salute?”6 Medical training seemed more relevant to their work as nurses. Courses taught them the damage shrapnel and bullets could do to a body and the different ways in which they would have to treat wounds because of Vietnam’s tropical climate. Like Kate O’Hare Palmer, they also practiced performing tracheotomies on goats.7 The nurses’ army medical training was, Evans described, “a lot of just playing war games, learning how to carry a gurney, practicing on bodies that, you know, were bloody, and putting on splints.”8 Nurses found their practical test in map reading more exciting, though most still failed to approach the task very seriously. After a short course, the army grouped the nurses in teams, provided them compasses, and dropped them in a remote field with the task of reaching an assigned point on their map. Anne Simon Auger and her group were not too proficient in the task, but “we never had so much fun,” she declared. “We got lost twelve times to Tuesday—it didn’t matter.”9 O’Neill, self-described as “directionally challenged,” had similar map-reading experiences. The army “sent in a helicopter and picked us up because we were so far out in the field,” she laughed. But as both she and Auger described...

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