Women who served with the United States armed forces in Vietnam. About 10,000 U.S. female soldiers served during the Vietnam War (1965—1973). The majority, about 80 percent, worked as medical personnel in the army or air force. But women were also deployed in non-medical positions, as secretaries for the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, which was located in Saigon, and on U.S. bases throughout the country. They also served as air traffic controllers, photographers, cartographers, with the Army Signal Corps, in intelligence, and in other jobs requiring security clearance. All women held officers’ ranks. With an average age of 23, the medical personnel in Vietnam were the youngest in the history of U.S. wars. Women were not subject to the draft; they joined the military voluntarily, and with a few exceptions, all female personnel deployed to Vietnam had volunteered for service in the war zone. Like their male peers, they served an individual 1-year tour of duty in Vietnam, with the exception of the 36 female marines, who, like their male peers, had to stay 1 extra month. Women were not allowed to serve in combat units; they were officially classified as noncombatants by the military and not allowed to carry weapons. Nevertheless, female veterans experienced and described their situation as being at the receiving end of combat. Hospitals, for example, were not exempt from attacks by North Vietnamese forces.
Most women who joined the military and volunteered for service in Vietnam did so out of altruistic, patriotic, or idealistic notions; out of a sense of adventure; or following romantic, Hollywood-induced images of nursing in a war zone. Most were ignorant about the country and the actual military and political situation in Vietnam. The grim realities of the war zone hit them as soon as they landed. Many were shocked by the constant threat to all U.S. military personnel from guerrilla fighters, mines, or satchel charges. They were appalled by the hot climate, the smells, and the poverty. The peculiar nature of the Vietnam War, a war that had no front lines and consequently no safe rear area, made the U.S. bases and hospitals constant targets of guerrilla attacks. One of the eight female soldiers killed in Vietnam, First Lieutenant Sharon Lane, died during an enemy attack on the Evacuation Hospital at Chu Lai.
Nurses tend wounded American soldiers as they prepare to depart from a Vietnamese air base for the United States, 1967.
A few days after arriving in Vietnam, women were sent to their duty stations around the country. Nurses joined one of the nineteen medical facilities scattered throughout South Vietnam. On most of the bases, especially in the early war years, there were few provisions for female soldiers and no separate showers or latrines, and the post exchanges (PXs) did not cater to the specific needs of female soldiers.
Duty in the war zone proved to be vastly different from all scenarios nurses had been trained for in the States. The workload and the conditions they had to face in Vietnam exceeded all expectations. The medical facilities in Vietnam were typically connected with a specific unit or firebase. Usually, the hospital staff was notified of major operations and of the estimated number of casualties in advance. Under normal conditions, nurses worked twelve-hour shifts six days a week, but during "pushes," when battles were going on and a constant stream of wounded arrived at hospitals, the nurses stayed for days and nights on end. When the wounded arrived from the battlefield, the primary goal was to stabilize them, to operate on them, and to evacuate them to better-equipped large military hospitals at bases in Danang or Japan as soon as possible. Triage was often performed right on the helicopter pad. Nurses and doctors decided which patients were wounded so badly that they needed treatment at once, which ones could wait, and which were "expectants"—too severely wounded to survive. Due to the constant lack of doctors and the overload of patients, nurses quickly learned to carry out many tasks usually performed by doctors, including minor operations.
Nurses had to deal with mutilated, wounded, and dying GIs. Many nurses felt that they had to repress their emotions in order to function properly. Strategies such as not talking to the wounded soldiers about their private lives or even refusing to learn their names enabled the nurses to keep emotionally uninvolved and to regard their patients merely as bodies and not as individuals. In hindsight, many nurses judge their tour of duty as the most demanding and at the same time as the most satisfying year of their professional careers. For many, Vietnam represented the peak of professionalism, and any stateside employment with the strict hierarchical delineation of duties paled in comparison.
In their spare time, many women tried to help the civilian population by working in orphanages or U.S. aid programs. Initially, many women were interested in Vietnamese culture and tried to establish relations with Vietnamese civilians. Soon, however, they were confronted with the hostility of many South Vietnamese and their lack of enthusiasm for the United States and the anticommunist cause. The impossibility of distinguishing a South Vietnamese friend from a Viet Cong sympathizer or even from a North Vietnamese foe was a major problem for all U.S. forces, and many women developed a general feeling of mistrust toward the Vietnamese. Additionally, they often displayed racist attitudes similar to those of many male U.S. soldiers. In contrast to the altruistic stereotype of the nurse and the general image of the nonviolent, forgiving woman, female soldiers often shared their male counterparts’ anger and hate for the Vietnamese, seeing them as responsible for the wounded U.S. soldiers who were their patients. In some cases, nurses even tried to avenge the deaths of soldiers on Vietnamese prisoners of war in their care.
Like many male soldiers, women grew more and more disillusioned as their tour of duty progressed. Many saw the official explanations for the involvement in Vietnam as not sufficiently convincing to justify the amount of suffering they witnessed. The war seemed insane and out of control, and government officials appeared either ignorant or consciously lying. Values such as patriotism or anticommunism, which many women had adhered to before they went to war, lost their validity.
To suppress the recurring memories and to endure the contradictions inherent in the war, many nurses used drugs, chain-smoked, and drank heavily in their leisure time, either alone or with their comrades. Many also became romantically involved with male soldiers or doctors. Those relationships were abruptly broken off when the tour of duty of either partner ended. Other nurses saw the men they had been dating brought into the hospital as casualties. Thus, most nurses preferred short-term, occasional affairs and avoided engaging in long-term relationships. Similar to their male peers in fighting units, many women described the intense comradeship as one of the most impressive and meaningful experiences of their entire tour of duty.
Women could not escape the negative and threatening aspect of living in the predominately male military system: many were sexually harassed by U.S. servicemen and reported problems from pranks to being threatened with disciplinary measures for refusing to engage in a sexual relationship with a superior officer. Female soldiers sometimes tried to avoid officers’ clubs and invitations by fellow soldiers or officers and usually kept to themselves during their off-duty hours.
After their return to the states, women encountered the same problems as many male veterans: they were frequently confronted with indifference and even hostility by their families, friends, and U.S. society as a whole. The everyday problems of civilian society seemed trivial for women who were accustomed to life-and-death situations. Further, due to their war-related psychological problems, many woman veterans found it difficult to readjust to civilian life. Many suffered from posttraumatic stress disorder and used drugs or alcohol to numb their feelings and to repress the recurring nightmares and flashbacks of their time in Vietnam. All in all, about 25 percent of female veterans were affected by service-connected disabilities. In contrast to male veterans, many women, military as well as civilian, additionally felt that they were not entitled to call themselves veterans and had no right to their troubled emotions because they had not experienced what society, the military, and many male veterans saw as "the real war"—combat. Consequently, many women withdrew from their friends and family. They did not admit to being Vietnam veterans and therefore did not seek help for their problems.
In the years following the end of the war, the service of female soldiers in Vietnam was largely ignored in public discussions evolving about the war and warriors. Not even the veterans’ organizations took note of the contribution of female soldiers or catered to the needs of female veterans.
In 1979 Lynda Van Devanter, a former Vietnam combat nurse, founded the Vietnam Veterans of America’s Women’s Project, which was explicitly designed to aid women veterans in coming to terms with their war experiences and to offer psychological help to overcome the problems they had faced since their return. In the 1980s female veterans began to lobby for their rights more intensely, and they gradually became part of the public memory of the war. Twenty years after the end of the Vietnam War, in 1993, the service of women in Vietnam was publicly recognized and honored by the dedication of the Vietnam Women’s Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.
