Sisterhood of War: Minnesota Women in Vietnam

1. "I Knew I Had Something I Could Contribute"

15 1 I Knew I Had Something I Could Contribute” Nurses and Soldiers VALERIE BUCHAN is a soft-spoken woman whose reserved exterior belies her venturesome spirit. In a crowd, Buchan tends to dwell in the background, doing more listening than talking. When she does speak, however, she is forthright and good humored. She seemed younger than her seventy years when I met her in 2005 in her quiet apartment in St. Paul. Three years later she was in Washington, D.C., for the fifteenth anniversary of the Vietnam Women’s Memorial. From September 1968 to September 1969, Valerie Buchan worked as an Army nurse at the 12th Evacuation Hospital in Cu Chi, Vietnam. She spent a total of twenty-one and a half years in the Army and Army Reserves, retiring with the rank of colonel. This chapter explores the factors that inspired women such as Buchan to become nurses and then to become soldiers. As girls growing up in an era of gradually escalating change, they were surrounded by mixed messages, some telling them that their future destinies were at home with husband and children, others modeling the possibilities for independence and personal achievement. A combination of idealistic notions and practical considerations, shaped by both family and culture, led these women to nursing, the military, and, eventually, Vietnam. Buchan’s recollections of her path to war revealed themes that emerged in many military nurses’ stories. Born in 1935, Valerie Buchan grew up on a farm in Henning, Minnesota. While her father tended the fields, her mother worked as “ 16 SISTERHOOD OF WAR a teacher in a small country school. Even as a little girl, Buchan knew she wanted to be a nurse. She recalled seeing an ad for a nursing program in her church bulletin that featured a beautiful nurse “standing in a ray of sunlight.” Instantly, Buchan knew that she, too, wanted to be a nurse. In June 1954, she began the official pursuit of this long-held dream when she enrolled in Hamline University’s threeyear nursing diploma program. After graduating in 1957, she worked for nine years as a nurse, during which time the Cold War standoff between the United States and Soviet Union escalated dramatically. Fearing, even hating, communism seemed as American as apple pie and baseball, and Buchan and her familywere good Americans. They and their fellow citizens in Henning firmly believed that the United States was the “best place in the world” and that communism posed a very serious threat to their way of life. No wonder, then, that Buchan “never had a second thought about going to Vietnam.” When she began getting letters from the armed forces in late 1965, asking her to help care for wounded soldiers, she didn’t hesitate. Despite the fact that some people believed military women to be “immoral,” “sexually loose,” defeminized women who used bad language, Buchan responded to the Army’s entreaties by joining its nurse corps in 1966. “It was a personal means of doing some service for my country,” she said. “We were all girls in our family. We didn’t have any brothers to go. So I thought it was my job to do that. I knew I had something that I could contribute.” From Florence Nightingale to Cherry Ames: Becoming Nurses What did little girls in postwar America dream of becoming when they grew up? For many, the vision of their future lives included a husband, children, and a comfortable home. Raised by parents who had suffered the privations of the Great Depression, baby boomer children grew up in a culture that, understandably, valued material comfort and the security of family life; for girls, this usually meant being a housewife. Still, like Valerie Buchan, many women who served in Vietnam knew from an early age that they wanted to be nurses, too. Their heads were filled with romantic images of nurses as angels in white, tenderly caring for those in need. “I don’t ever remember not wanting to be a nurse,” recalled Edy (Thompson) “I Knew I Had Something I Could Contribute” 17 Johnson of her midwestern childhood. As a young girl, she would ask her mother to make a nurse’s hat for her out of tissue and pin it in her hair: “I thought they must be angels, and I wanted to be an angel.” This Florence Nightingale, “lady with the lamp” persona took on...