Women at War: The Story of Fifty Military Nurses Who Served in Vietnam

1. Volunteering for the Vietnam War

1 Volunteering for the Vietnam War Why would a woman choose to go to war—especially the war in Vietnam? Men did not line up at the recruiting stations and women did not gather under the sign of the Red Cross. We remember men as draft resisters and women as draft counselors. And yet, as figures from the Department of Defense show, the great majority of those who served in Vietnam—men and women—volunteered.1 They did not shout about their choices. They went quietly. The fifty women in this book all volunteered for military service. Some joined the military to begin a career, some to get more training, some to pay for a nursing education. Thirty-four of the fifty volunteered to go to Vietnam. Only four of the others objected to being sent. History and heredity made them go. Most nurses in the 1960s and early 1970s (thetime of nurses' involvement in the war)were white, working class and middle class Catholic and Protestant daughters whose fathers were veterans of World War II and whose grandfathers recalled the Great War. Some were inspired by heroes like the fictitious Cherry Ames, the young nurse who 8 Women at War bravely served her country in World War II and whose exploits were told in a series of popular books published in the 1940s and 1950s.2 She was an inspiration, the female equivalent of John Wayne or Audie Murphy. Going to war also was part of the adult American experience. There were war movies at Saturday matinees, large Memorial Day parades down Main Street, and a president who was a war hero. An army nurse who grew up in North Dakota remembered this patriotic atmosphere and had volunteered to goto Vietnam to show people, "A little town girl can serve her country and be a hero." There were strong feelings of loyalty to country among the nurses. They had a sense of pride and a sense of duty. These women knew they could not be drafted like their brothers and high school friends, but they felt an equal responsibility to serve. "How could I say, 'Oh no, not me,' when men my age were going?" recalled another army nurse, "I really felt, 'How come not me?" The result of this enthusiasm was an excess of nurses volunteering for Vietnam duty. In 1965, for example, navy leaders planned to commission the first hospital ship for service in the waters off Vietnam. Twenty-nine nurses were to be part of the first crew. Navy administrators quickly had a list of 400 nurses who requested duty on the ship, out of a total of 1,874 active duty nurses in the entire navy.3 Early in their lives, young girls learned the responsibilities of caring for others. While boys were outdoors playing baseball, girls were indoors playing house. Girls learned to view themselves in relation to others, as mothers, sisters, and friends—not as individuals. As they grew up, nursingbecame a logical career choice. The task of caring for others is the core of the profession. And the war was an opportunity to care for others who really needed it—men their own age who were far from home, orphaned children , and wounded civilians. This was the profession at its most basic. No big medical bureaucracy, no stringent rules, just an opportunity to fulfill the basic, traditional female roles; to care and to feel needed. One nurse summed up the thoughts of others when she said, "Politics had nothing to do with it. I was very naive. But, if our men were fighting and dying, someone ought to be there taking care of them. We had to be there as nurses." Volunteering for the Vietnam War 9 The antiwar movement, so prevalent on college campuses during the war, was missing from the hospital schools ofnursing. During the 1960s, diploma schools—the term used to define hospital schools of nursingwhere the nurses received diplomas at the completion of three years of school—were the primary institutions for training nurses.4 A woman spent those three years living in a dormitory, usually on the hospital grounds, and working long shifts on the hospital wards. Her education involved classes in anatomy, nutrition, and other sciences, and hospital practice. At the end of the third year, she graduated and prepared to take the registered nurse licensingexamination. It was a cloistered , carefully monitored world. There...