Sisterhood of War: Minnesota Women in Vietnam

Introduction

3 Introduction I don’t go off to war So they say I’m a woman. Who then Has worn my boots? Diane Carlson Evans, “Our War,” 1983 But this too is true: stories can save us. Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried1 VETERANS DAY 2008 was chilly but sunny in Washington, D.C. As they do every November, Vietnam veterans from across the country gathered at the Wall to pay their respects to those who had served and died in the United States’ longest and most controversial war. Flowers adorned the pathway along which visitors descend into the earth, swallowed by the seemingly endless listing of names of the war’s dead. A stage stood on the grassy lawn in front of the Wall. News trucks lined the nearby streets as cameras captured the swelling throngs, military color guard, musical performers, and featured speakers. Filling the hundreds of chairs in front of the stage were the day’s honorees—veterans who had encountered in Vietnam the heights of human bravery and depths of human depravity and had come home to a divided, sometimes indifferent and sometimes hostile, nation. The veterans wore jackets and ties, jeans and sweatshirts, black leather vests and boonie hats. They sported clean-shaven faces and crew cuts or beards and ponytails, mellowed and graying with the passing of time. But clustered among this crowd of men were women who had also served 4 SISTERHOOD OF WAR in Vietnam, for on this day, they were the special guests of honor at the annual celebration. Veterans Day 2008 marked the fifteenth anniversary of the dedication of the Vietnam Women’s Memorial. Standing just south of the eastern tip of the Wall, the memorial statue depicts three uniformed women in various expressions of women’s service in the war. The campaign to build the memorial had spanned ten years, but women’s battle to be recognized as soldiers and veterans had lasted even longer than that, and their struggle to come to terms with their wartime service longer still. Those struggles receded on this occasion, however, as women Vietnam veterans were feted not just by each other but also by their admiring brother veterans and civilian supporters. For four days, these women assembled to reconnect with each other, to share laughter and tears, to remember and be remembered. Among those who gathered in the nation’s capital for this celebration was a group of women from Minnesota who had served in the war as military nurses and whose efforts had helped bring the Memorial to fruition fifteen years earlier. It is their stories that this book tells. More than a quarter million women served in the U.S. armed forces during theVietnam War era, and about 7,500 of those women served in Vietnam. Of the twenty-three thousand women veterans living in Minnesota in September 2009, almost four thousand of them had served during the Vietnam era, whether in Vietnam itself, in the sur­ rounding area of operations, or at other overseas or stateside bases. Military women who went to Vietnam worked as officers in military intelligence; as clerk-typists, administrative assistants, and commun­ ications specialists in the Women’s Army Corps; as photojournalists and historians in the Air Force; and as line officers in the Navy and enlisted Women Marines. Women also went to Vietnam as civilians, working for the American Red Cross, the United Service Organizations (USO), and the Army Special Services. They were journalists , U.S. government secretaries, nurses employed by the Agency for International Development (AID), and missionary doctors. In short, American women served in a wide variety of capacities during the U.S. war in Vietnam. Sixty-eight of them—eight military nurses and sixty civilian women—did not make it home alive. By far the Introduction 5 largest number of military women to serve “in-country” in Vietnam were nurses. Nurses made up approximately 80 percent—six thousand or so—of female military personnel who served in Vietnam.2 Sisterhood of War focuses on the experiences of fifteen nurses from Minnesota who went to war in Vietnam. It is a story of venturesome women who chose to practice their traditionally feminine career in a decidedly masculine setting. The story told in the following chapters rises to heights of excitement as they embarked on their generation’s defining adventure, falls to depths of despair as they experienced the carnage...