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

4. “Helmets and hair curlers”: Gender and Wartime Nursing

CHAPTER FOUR “Helmets and hair curlers” Gender and Wartime Nursing Again, thank you for the ladies. As I’ve said before and I repeat to each arrival;—the PX may not have everything, the mail frequently doesn’t get here and there’s a hell of a long wait between USO shows, but the one thing every US Forces man in Vietnam knows: he’ll always get the best of medical care with the round-eyed female type to nurse him back to health. —JAMES W. BLUNT, JR., COMMANDING OFFICER, 8TH FIELD HOSPITAL On Sunday May 5, 1968, U.S. national and local newspapers ran the weekly edition of Charles Shultz’s Peanuts. In this edition of the popular syndicated cartoon, a disgruntled Snoopy, the “World War I flying ace,” exclaims, “Curse this stupid war!” Despondently fearing the war will never end, he decides, “perhaps one of the nurses at the dispensary will talk with me.” When he finds Lucy, whom he believes to be an army nurse, he is moved by “these American girls coming over here to serve” and is pleased that this “dark-haired lass” is “quite a beauty too!” “It’s good,” Snoopy reasons, “to see a feminine face.” Deciding that “this lass has fallen for me already,” Snoopy then ponders his next move. “Who knows,” he muses, “what tomorrow may bring?” Impulsively kissing Lucy, he immediately feels much better. Smiling and content, he walks away, concluding, “All soldiers should kiss an Army nurse at least once in their lives!”1 Although Snoopy’s imaginary war was World War I, the publication of this cartoon at the height of the Vietnam War offers useful insight into the prevailing thought that army nurses were women who embodied all that despondent soldiers longed for. They comforted soldiers, distracted them from their trou- bles, and improved their morale. In these ways, the cartoon underscored the gendered roles inherent in nursing and the military and illustrated the popular perception that army nurses embodied feminine heterosexuality to the troops. These gendered characterizations of nurses, while seemingly outdated, nonetheless influenced the army’s use of nurses in Vietnam and, as General William Westmoreland’s kissing of ANC Chief Anna Mae Hays at her promotion ceremony had demonstrated, occasionally became public spectacle. The corps was a much more complex organization than these traditional ideas suggested. Its nurses were more educated than their predecessors had been, and they held higher positions in the military than nurses had in the past. The nurses were also not all women. In fact, the month that the cartoon appeared in the press, 30 percent of the army nurses stationed in Vietnam were men.2 Throughout the war, the army struggled with how these changing realities and shifting gender norms defined its nurses. Many army officials maintained the traditional belief that nurses should be women while ANC leaders argued that nurses’ duties should not be regulated by their sex. Not willing to abandon all of its gendered ideas about nurses and their work, however, the corps devoted considerable attention to ensuring that female nurses looked feminine in their uniforms and used them for purposes beyond nursing. The corps also struggled with how to use men in the corps without associating them with the feminine qualities it desired in women. As the experiences of these nurses in the war reveal, the ties between gender and nursing in the army were multifaceted and anything but cartoonlike. “Starched, clean and feminine” While army nurses saw their roles in the military elevated during the Vietnam War, first as officers and then as nurses, the army devoted a considerable amount of attention to their other, more gendered roles. ANC leaders and army officials debated different uniforms for female and male nurses, while several hospitals in Vietnam included beauty salons specifically built for women. A 1966 newspaper article about army nurses in Vietnam jested about how the army had to deal with these issues. “Did you ever stop to think how difficult it is to wear a steel helmet over hair curlers?” the article asked. “It can be a problem for the 39 American nurses stationed at the 85th Evacuation Hospital .” The article commented on the long hours the nurses worked, described their living quarters, and discussed the possible threat of danger to the hospi90 Officer, Nurse, Woman tal. “That’s where the problem of...