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

Women are more broadly engaged in the military in Iraq and Afghanistan than in any other conflict in our country's history. As pilots, mechanics, and military police and serving on battleships or in more forward strategic supply positions, women are a growing and critical part of our armed forces and shape our gendered notions of militarism and women's work. In her book Officer, Nurse, Woman: The Army Nurse Corps in the Vietnam War, Kara Dixon Vuic examines one of the most traditionally masculine and controversial institutions, the U.S. military, and provides an important foundation for understanding how military women reflect social and cultural gender roles, how institutions respond to and influence gender norms, and how the response shapes and challenges our understanding of citizenship and nation. Vuic uses nurses, a highly gendered profession, to illustrate her argument, which situates gender as a critical factor for understanding and acknowledging social change. Her title ensures that we acknowledge the complexity of women's roles in the military while also contesting traditional notions of gender, femininity, and masculinity.

The book begins with a narrative from one of her female informants and ends with an analysis of the controversy surrounding the Vietnam Women's Memorial in 1993. Throughout, Vuic provides the context for understanding, as her title suggests, the tensions between women of military rank who also worked in highly gendered roles as nurses during wartime. Using oral histories of men and women who served as military nurses as well as other rich primary and secondary sources, Vuic weaves together an explanatory framework to illustrate changing and conflicting gender roles. Female nurses served dual roles as icons of sexuality (especially when recruited for officers' parties) and nurturers while also expanding the traditional roles nurses held in civilian hospitals. Vuic explicates these competing images through discussions of the absurdity of requiring white uniforms in combat zones (as both sexual imagery and reminders of home) and an emphasis of female nurses' boot camp experiences (how to wear the uniform rather than weapons training) and contrasts these images to the advanced medical and nursing training the nurse recruits received before shipping out.

Female nurses worked with the military in both unofficial and official roles for over a century, fortifying their formal integration and officer status after World War II. The Army experienced a shortage of nurses even before President Lyndon Johnson committed large numbers of U.S. troops in 1965. The Army began major nurse recruitment efforts in the early 1960s during a time of changing roles for women, protest against the war, and the crucible of the civil rights movement. Vuic is at her strongest as she analyzes the Army's efforts to recruit nurses through various advertisements and education programs. Portraying nurses in magazine ads and posters as heterosexual, wholesome, and beautiful (and primarily white and female) while also highlighting their competence and expertise betrays the tensions within the Army about the role female nurses occupied in military hospitals and bases. But Vuic also complicates her gender argument by including and acknowledging men who nursed and the competing and conflicting expectations they also experienced.

Perhaps one of the clearest examples of the tensions Vuic illustrates (in chap. 2) is an episode during the promotion ceremony for ANC Chief Anna Mae McCabe Hays to the rank of brigadier general, one of the first women generals in the U.S. Army. After pinning on her stars, Chief of Staff General William C. Westmoreland kissed General Hayes on the cheek, instead of the typical salute or handshake. The kiss bestowed during a public military promotion ceremony highlighted the underlying sexual tensions while also exposing the politics of difference for female officers of high rank. The Army's promotion of women to this rank came after convoluted efforts to remedy a discriminatory promotion system based on...