Army Nurse Corps Essay

All women in the military served then in either the ground forces Nurse army corps or the Womens Army Corps (WAC). All Army nurses were officers, and were Direct Commissions. That is, they became nurses first and then tended to(p) a ten day or so Orientation pedigree at (Ft. Sam Houston, Texas) to teach them how to be officers, the rudiments of military life, who to reward and when, etc. (There were a small number of male nurses who went through the alike program. ) Nurses were assigned to Army hospitals, both Stateside and overseas, and were billeted separately from male officers.In Vietnam, Army nurses served exclusively in rear-area hospitals at major bases. The Womens Army Corps (WAC) provided all Army female enlisted personnel and also had its own officers. near WAC officers exclusively administered WAC units, but a handful received assignments to staff positions and about other rear-echelon duties. In Vietnam, enlisted WACs performed close toly clerical duties, altho ugh some worked as checkup technicians. some(prenominal) their duty assignments, all enlisted women, on any base, even in the States, were billeted together as a single WAC Company in a watch compound.(WAC officers had separate quarters, of course. ) Within this compound, in their barracks, WACs pulled their own guard, armed with baseball gaga and whistles. (Neither WACs or nurses were issued weapons, and even those sent to Vietnam had only rudimentary firearms training. ) One tiny WAC unit (peak strength, 20 officers and 139 enlisted women) was assigned to Saigon, and nowhere else in-country. No WACs, even medical personnel, got any closer to combat than this. Eight US servicewomen died in Vietnam.Of these, quad Army nurses and an Air Force flight nurse were killed in cardinal separate, non-combat, plane crashes, and another died from disease. An older nurse died of a stroke. Only ace woman, Army 1LT Sharon Ann Lane, was actually killed in a combat action, in a VC rocket a ttack on Chu Lai, in 1969. Besides nurses and WACs other American women would also go to Vietnam. TOD and China Beach covered most of the categories. American Red Cross girls, entertainers, civilian employees of the US government or contracting firms, newspaper correspondents, Christian missionaries, that about covers it.ARC girls made abbreviated daylight visits (a few hours) to advance bases. The rest had rear-area jobs. (Christian missionaries were usually older, married women. ) American civilian women lived in major Vietnamese cities, which were off-limits to US troops, the expulsion being Saigon. Any women billeted on US bases also lived in quiet compounds. Susan ONeill served as an Army nurse in Vietnam from 1969 to 1970. Dont Mean Nothing is her first book, written nearly thirty historic period after the experiences it depicts.ONeill tells us that, (ONeill, p. 15) Before I went, I skillful assumed that war would involve injury and death thats wherefore I was being sen t there, after all. But its ace thing to look at it from a distance, and form neat genial pictures. Once you step through the looking glass, as it were, into the reality of it once your sneakers are full of somebody elses bloodyou look at the whole thing quite differently. The bloods no daylong a metaphor it goes through to your socks and into the skin of your feet.Into your soul. ONeill gives us a clearer definition of what Vietnam was truly like. She offers that it wasnt a place where you played near because peoples lives were at stake. The author goes on to tell us that, Back in the states, when I so glibly thought I knew what Vietnam and war, in general, was about, I had opposed it on some cool-headed philosophical basis, from some distant notion of empathy. Gradually, in Vietnam, I became horrified at how fledgling(a) my ideas had been.