Sisterhood of War: Minnesota Women in Vietnam

4. "Home to a Foreign Country"

93 4 Home to a Foreign Country” From War in Vietnam to War at Home CAPTAIN BARBARA “BOBBY” SMITH returned to the United States in August 1967 after having spent one year at an Air Force hospital in Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam. For the two years prior to her tour incountry , Smith had worked with the ill and injured on air evacuation flights from Southeast Asia; she would spend the two years after her time in Vietnam doing the same. For five years, then, Smith tended to Americans wounded in Vietnam. When she left for Vietnam in August 1966, controversy about the war “wasn’t a really big thing,” she said. “We were going to do all good things.” By the time she came home a year later, however, things had changed: “It was like I came home to a foreign country. Because it wasn’t the country I left.” Many returning veterans felt the same sense of alienation that Smith did. One day theywere toiling in the dust and heat of a poverty-­ stricken, war-torn Vietnam; the next day they were back in a shiny, wealthy United States that seemed to be at war with itself. They were disillusioned to find that the world to which they had so longed to return no longer held a place for them and that what they viewed as honorable service to their country brought so much dishonor. These kinds of homecoming experiences have become a central component in the overall story of the war, but usually the focus is on the male combatveteran. This chapter places the returning nurse at the center of the story. Like their male counterparts, many of the women I met swept their service under the rug and descended into a long silence “ 94 SISTERHOOD OF WAR about their experiences in Vietnam. Their gender provided women who wished to hide theirveteran status a ready disguise; they simply put away their uniforms and resumed lives as wives, mothers, and nurses. Although they may have seemed to be just like the civilian women around them, the year they spent in a war zone changed them in important ways. Sinking into the Quagmire: Questioning the War in Vietnam When Bobby Smith was at the Air Force hospital in Cam Ranh Bay, a young Marine patient asked her if she thought the United States should be in Vietnam: “I thought, ‘Wow. I don’t think so.’ But I didn’t say that. I said, ‘Well, I don’t know. I don’t know enough about it. People smarter than me are running this. If they think so, then yes, I guess so.’That’s about all I could tell him. If I had said no, he probably would have curled up his toes and died.” Smith’s view of the war changed during her time in-country, but she “didn’t want to deal with it” and instead focused all of her attention on her patients. One of the most profound and unsettling changes that many of these women underwent began while they were still in the war zone as they started to question the war and, by extension, their country. Declining morale among troops was one of the most obvious signs of discontent with the war. The later in the war the nurses in this study served, the more they noticed low morale in their patients, their colleagues, and themselves. Ann Rudolph was in Vietnam from September 1965 to July 1966 and doesn’t remember low morale being a problem. When she was in-country from February 1967 to March 1968, D-M Boulay thought the spirit among her patients was “pretty good.” Mostly, she said, they kept themselves busy to avoid thinking about the wounds they had just sustained. By the time Diane Evans left Vietnam in August 1969, however, “the morale was terrible.” She attributed this decline in attitude, at least in part, to the chaos that was occurring at home. “The war protests were at their height,” she explained. “The morale definitely was going down. I think it was noticeable amongst everybody. The other nurses that I served with, we were all tired. We were exhausted. Some of us were sick.” It wasn’t just the home front that was chaotic, though. Lynn Bower described her brief time in Vietnam—six weeks in late sum- “Home to a Foreign Country” 95 mer 1971—as “craziness...