Literature and Medicine

Sun, Sue.
Where the Girls Are : The Management of Venereal Disease by United States Military Forces in Vietnam
Literature and Medicine - Volume 23, Number 1, Spring 2004, pp. 66-87

The Johns Hopkins University Press

Sue Sun - Where the Girls Are : The Management of Venereal Disease by United States Military Forces in Vietnam - Literature and Medicine 23:1 Literature and Medicine 23.1 (2004) 66-87 Where the Girls Are: The Management of Venereal Disease by United States Military Forces in Vietnam Sue Sun Introduction Military health-education films form an intriguing branch of cinema from the standpoint of ideology critique. Inasmuch as they serve military purposes, assisting in the constitution of dependable soldier-subjects (i.e., subjects of the United States military), they are produced and received as unabashed works of propaganda. On the other hand, as films serving purposes of health education, they are yoked to the imperatives of a certain realism, a communication of medical knowledge regarding actual conditions in the field that soldier-viewers can put into effective practice. This contradiction, and the special pressures it exerts on cinematic form, manifest especially graphically in the military sex-education materials of the Vietnam period. Where the Girls Are -- VD in Southeast Asia (hereinafter referred to as Girls) was commissioned as a basic sexual-education film just as United States involvement in Vietnam was deepening. Completed as the American military presence reached its height in Southeast Asia, it was first shown to overseas air force personnel and shortly thereafter adopted by the United States Army as well. The film served as an important...