Sisterhood of War: Minnesota Women in Vietnam

Conclusion

157 Conclusion For all the American wild flowers that were in Vietnam They gave us humanity in an inhuman place With love & respect, Paul (note left at the Vietnam Women’s Memorial) One day I met a stranger He was a major Nothing he said or did impressed me Two weeks later he was dead A helicopter blade had severed his head. (poem left at the Vietnam Women’s Memorial, presumably by a nurse veteran)1 MORE THAN FIFTEEN YEARS after the dedication of the Vietnam Women’s Memorial, visitors still leave personal mementos at its base. Objects don’t appear as frequently as they do at the Wall, but they do appear, many of them attesting to the compassion, strength, and exhaustion with which women rendered their service to the nation . The many notes of thanks left by male veterans highlight women ’s emotional and caretaking labor; the reminiscences of women veterans foreground the horrors of war, emotional suffering, and need for healing. This, then, may be the Memorial’s greatest success: that it lends itself to a variety of interpretations for those who visit it. Women veterans can be honored for performing caretaking duties that traditionally defined women’s place in the nation, and they can also be remembered as war heroes in their own right. It’s been forty or moreyears since the fifteen women whose stories 158 SISTERHOOD OF WAR are told in this book came home from Vietnam. They now have spent the majority of their lives as war veterans. As young women of the 1960s, they swam against society’s currents by joining the military and going to war. At the same time, however, they rode the waves of social change that redefined who women were and what they could be. Ultimately, they washed ashore in the turbulence of their generation ’s defining political battle, weathered survivors of the nation’s longest and most controversial war. Just as the Vietnam War was a transformative event in the life of the United States, so it was in the lives of these women. The twelve months they spent tending to the war wounded changed theirview of the war, their country, and themselves . They came home as more confident nurses but less certain citizens, confused by the turmoil that greeted them upon their return . Their wartime selves lay dormant while they tried to resume the lives they had left before the war and the country tried to right itself. But dormancy is not resolution, and eventually the emotional remnants of war began surfacing in frightening ways. When their gender became the grounds on which they were excluded from the psychological and social recovery made possible by the recognition of PTSD and the memorializing of male veterans, their passions flamed and their spirits ignited. They stepped out of the shadows, took each other by the hand, and marched toward a healing of their own. For many of these women, however, healing is an ongoing process rather than a finite state of being. The war is still a part of them and always will be. “There’s not a day that I don’t think about [the war],” Mary Lu Brunner said. “It might be fleeting, but it’s there. It’s always there. It’s always with me. It’s part of me.” The role the war plays in their daily lives varies from woman to woman, and for each individual woman, from year to year and month to month, even day to day. When I first met her in spring 2000, Penny Kettlewell was doing all right. She had found her lifeline in the nurses’ PTSD group and attended the dedication of the Vietnam Women’s Memorial several years earlier and was still working as a nurse in Duluth. Later that year, however, the flashbacks returned, and by spring 2001, she was in an outpatient PTSD program at the VA hospital in St. Cloud. This time, however, the VA came through for her. “Everybody was so kind,” she said. “It was like, hey, this cannot be a VA hospital. They were bending over backwards for everybody.” As of early summer Conclusion 159 2009, the war was “in the back forty” of Kettlewell’s life, along with nursing; she now co-owns and -operates a glass craft shop in central Wisconsin.2 Lynn Kohl, too, had suffered some setbacks after our first meeting in 1999. In...