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

7. “Not All Women Wore Love Beads in the Sixties”: Postwar Depictions of Vietnam War Nurses [Includes Image Plates]

CHAPTER SEVEN “Not All Women Wore Love Beads in the Sixties” Postwar Depictions of Vietnam War Nurses The President says how we all have suffered. He says the nation is healing . And he says how grateful the country is to all the men who served in Vietnam. My anger rises out of me in a shout before I know it’s coming. “What about the women?” —ARMY NURSE WINNIE SMITH, AT THE VIETNAM VETERANS MEMORIAL, 1984 The last U.S. army nurse left Vietnam on March 29, 1973. Ten years later, Lynda Van Devanter’s autobiography, Home Before Morning: The Story of an Army Nurse in Vietnam, sparked public interest in the experiences of women who had served in the war. Her book, however, also ignited debate about how nurses wanted the American public to understand their roles in the war. From 1988 to 1991, the popular television series China Beach brought the nurses even more into the public eye as it followed the stories of several fictional women in the Vietnam War. Like Home Before Morning, the series elicited questions among women veterans over how accurately the characters reflected their wartime experiences. These questions were important ones, not only for the veterans personally but also because a grassroots campaign was focusing public and government attention on the meaning of women’s service in Vietnam. As this movement worked to build the first memorial to women in war on the Mall in Washington, D.C., army nurses questioned how, and in what form, the nation should commemorate their service. The Vietnam Women’s Memorial, dedicated twenty years after army nurses left Vietnam, has become a lasting symbol of the service of all women in the war. These three representations of women in the Vietnam War elicited strong feelings and public debate. The nurses’ debates among themselves, as well as their engagement with public discussion, suggested the degree to which public memory of the war could include women, and on what terms.1 After many of the army’s understandings about the meaning of nursing and women’s wartime roles fundamentally changed, the postwar period saw an emphasis on, and even a reinscription of, many traditional definitions of nursing , femininity, and masculinity. Primarily, these conventional understandings of gender surfaced as Americans came to terms with a war that challenged their most basic understandings of their nation’s role in the world and an era that challenged social and cultural traditions of masculine martial service. In the late 1970s, popular culture reconciled the memory of an embarrassing war by casting the veterans as dangerous psychopaths and by ignoring the role of American ideology and policy in creating and then continuing the war. With the dedication of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in November 1982, however , cultural memory of the war began to focus on themes of heroism, sacrifice, and honor in a way that reaffirmed the virtues of martial masculinity and reinscribed the validity of U.S. imperialism. In this new narrative, the grunt soldier became the symbol of the war, one who represented a lost American innocence, masculinity, technological superiority, and global power. The war might have been a mistake, but the veteran emerged as an enduring hero who deserved honor, even if his government did not.2 Including nurses’ memories of the war in this traditionally heroic narrative presented problems, for nurses’ memories focus primarily on the death and destruction wrought by war, not on its victories or heroics. Nurses’ memories, wrote journalist Carol Lynn Mithers, “change forever a tradition in which we hear about those who have gained manhood from war, not those who’ve been castrated by it.”3 Nurses’ accounts of the Vietnam War describe much destruction and loss on all sides, serving—even unintentionally—as cautions about the costs of war. The simple inclusion of women’s wartime accounts challenges the conventional narrative of war as the exclusive domain of masculine warriors who defend the women and children at home. As the nurses in Vietnam could attest, the war made no distinctions in whose lives it disrupted or destroyed, even if the army maintained limits on the degrees to which women could participate.4 “Women who went to Vietnam,” Mithers wrote, “shared with men the horror , contradictions, and aftereffects specific to this particular war and, with 162 Officer, Nurse, Woman earlier generations of women, an exclusion specific to...