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

On June 11, 1970, during a well-attended ceremony, the Army Chief of Staff, General William C. Westmoreland, gave a congratulatory kiss on the cheek instead of the typical handshake or salute to a colonel who was being promoted to brigadier general. Others present at the ceremony, including male generals, responded to the act with applause. The colonel receiving the promotion was Anna Mae Hays, the thirteenth chief of the Army Nurse Corps and the first woman in the U.S. Armed Forces to wear insignia of a brigadier general. Hays’ promotion was meant to remedy the military’s institutionalized discrimination against women and was an attempt to demonstrate the military’s commitment to establishing a more egalitarian, and less gendered, service. Westmoreland quipped that the kiss was a “new protocol for congratulating lady generals,” but this kiss was not simply a kiss: it represented one of the many ways in which the American military—and Americans generally—struggled with ideas of gender and notions of femininity and masculinity during and after the Vietnam War. In her work, Officer, Nurse, Woman, Kara Dixon Vuic uses wartime nursing to provide a critical foundation for understanding and interpreting gender roles, institutional transformation, cultural norms, and rights of citizenship during the 1960s and 1970s, as well as their legacy in the post-Vietnam period.

The core of Vuic’s work is oral history interviews with female and (some) male nurses who served in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War; these interviews are woven together with policy issues and complemented by other rich primary and secondary sources. Each chapter of the book looks at a different aspect of wartime nursing, from the recruitment of predominantly white women to their deployment in zones near active combat and from marriage, motherhood, and fatherhood in the military to the American television show China Beach and the controversy surrounding the commission of the Vietnam Women’s Memorial in 1993. Throughout the text, Vuic analyzes the gendered assumptions of military officers, enlisted soldiers, and nurses themselves and delves into the gender dynamics that came about from and caused changes in the traditionally masculine institution of the U.S. military. She explores competing images (traditional and progressive) of women through discussions of, for example, the lack of weapons training for female nurses prior to deployment (male nurses received the same basic training as other enlisted men), the debate over whether female nurses should wear fatigues in combat zones, and the necessity of building hair salons for nurses on some military bases. In doing so, Vuic aptly demonstrates that during the war the military reinforced traditional gendered assumptions about nurses and nursing, while at the same time it deconstructed many of the barriers that women faced professionally.

Female nurses were seen as nurturers/mothers/girlfriends who took care of injured men and, at the same time, as the objects of soldiers’ sexual desire (especially when recruited as playthings for officers’ parties); male nurses were typically assumed to be homosexual, though often were the only nurses assigned to frontline duty, due to, one assumes, their innate masculine heartiness for combat. Yet all nurses, regardless of gender and beliefs about femininity and masculinity, had the opportunity to move beyond the professional confines of their standard civilian medical responsibilities—practicing advanced medical and surgical techniques without the supervision of physicians—techniques that they were then not allowed to perform after leaving the military and returning to civilian medical positions. In addition, during the war, female nurses were given equal rank and, just as significantly, equal pay to their male counterparts. The Vietnam War and the care for wounded soldiers, as Vuic argues, created a situation in which the American military needed to address a shortage of nurses and in doing so ultimately transformed the American military’s and the American public’s perceptions of nursing, femininity, and the role of women in war...