Vietnam War Nurses at the Ready Edited by Patricia Rushton

People who read Vietnam War Nurses at the Ready: Seventeen Personal Accounts (McFarland, 244 pp. $39.95, paper; $17.77, Kindle) are in for a real eye-opener. Patricia Rushton has assembled the coming-of-age stories of sixteen women and one man who attended to Vietnam War casualties and other men, women, and children around the world.

Rushton, a retired as a U.S. Navy Nurse Corps Reserve commander, had a career as an associate professor of nursing at Brigham Young University. She served as a nurse in the Vietnam War and in the first Persian Gulf War.

Collectively, the nurses’ spellbinding memories resemble a plot line for a sprawling novel. The autobiographies overflow with recollections of young women coping with death amid the drama and trauma of war. Seven of the nurses served on hospital ships that cruised off the coast of South Vietnam, paralleling nearby action on land. As one of them, Irma Klaetke, said, “We received and admitted our young men right from the jungle.”

Reading about the wounds and diseases encountered by the nurses is like taking a short course in doctoring. Coccidioidomycosis, pseudomonas, and acromegaly were not part of my normal vocabulary. Learning about them in this book was worth the effort.

“Anyone brought to us was cared for,” Carol Brautigam said. “Patients were my whole world.”

“I never grew tired of clinical bedside nursing,” Patricia O’Hare added. “That’s where my heart remains.”

The job took a heavy emotional toll on the nurses. “If there were emotions, we just kept shoving them down. There was nothing related to helping our mental status,” Susan Miller who worked mostly with amputees, remembered. Susan Jackson agreed: “If you are upset, don’t show it in front of the patient.”

As Anne Gartner put it; “You had to be able to let go of what was going on around you.”

Pain and sorrow did not totally dominate the nurses’ lives. With great fondness, they talk about off-duty adventures and life-long associations with other members of the corps.

A primary responsibility of Navy nurses was training hospital corpsmen, Virginia Beeson said. To alleviate understaffing overseas and stateside, doctors often gave decision-making power to nurses, according to Stella Ross.

Beyond the United States and Vietnam, the seventeen nurses worked in Japan, Okinawa, the Philippines, Guam, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Iceland, Spain, Croatia, Egypt, and overseas during Desert Storm.

Their stories about these adventures are equally as entertaining and enlightening as what they say about the Vietnam War.

It seems only fair to list the book’s other contributors: Elaine Diouhy, Ellen Duvall, Helen Kranz, Janet Price, Elizabeth Roach, and Gloria and John Caffrey.

After I finished reading Nurses at the Ready, I thumbed through the book and read aloud several passages to my wife, Jan. She thought the stories were as captivating as I did.

—Henry Zeybel

Fly Girls Revolt by Eileen A. Bjorkman

Equality speaks: A hero is a hero is a hero, no matter if you’re a women or a man. Retired USAF Col. Eileen Bjorkman proves that point on almost every page of Fly Girls Revolt: The Story of the Women Who Kicked Open the Door to Fly in Combat (Knox Press, 288 pp. $30, hardcover; $14.99, Kindle), a book that shows clearly how women overcame the belief of legislators and military commanders that they are physically incapable of waging war.

Bjorkman’s timeline stretches from the 1940s to 1995, with the emphasis on her generation’s activities in the ’80s and ’90s, as she addresses the multitude of obstacles that prevented women from attaining military equality with men. She shows how women struggled against limitations in enlistment and career assignments; discrimination in promotions; insufficient pay for dependents; sexual harassment; and arbitrary regulations such as automatically being discharged for being pregnant.

The Vietnam War did little to help military women attain equality as U.S. leaders considered duty in a combat zone too dangerous for women. Initially, only 300 service women served only as nurses in-country. Meanwhile alongside them, hundreds of civilian women held government jobs with the Red Cross and USO.  

Gen. William Westmoreland changed that ratio by assigning WACs to administrative jobs at MACV headquarters. Simultaneously, WAF (Women in the Air Force) Director Col. Jeanne Holm (who later advanced to two-star rank) lobbied to bring women service personnel into Southeast Asia beginning in 1967. Her rationale: sending women would reduce the number of men making a second tour.

In 1968, a female major became operations officer of the 600th Photographic Squadron in Saigon, the first WAF working in a non-nursing or admin job in Vietnam. She supervised 100 men and monitored the work of 600 photographers. Eventually, about 7,500 military women served in Southeast Asia during the war—6,000 as medical specialists, Bjorkman says.

Although she does not include footnotes, Bjorkman’s bountiful bibliography lists many interviews with people on the scene. The book opens by highlighting achievements of Jacqueline Cochran, Oveta Culp Hobby, Ann Baumgartner, and Jeanne Holm. From there, Bjorkman describes the milestones in detail: women’s 1969 acceptance into ROTC and in 1976 into the service academies; women’s 1973 entry into pilot training; the 1991 repeal of a ban on women flying in combat; and the 1995 flight over Iraq of Cpt. Martha McSally, the first American woman to pilot a fighter in combat.

Bjorkman includes many short biographies of women who courageously faced inequalities, along with autobiographical episodes from her 30-year Air Force career. These first-hand remembrances add up to an oral history of women’s quest for military equality.

The book provides a flow and glow of satisfaction for readers who favor underdogs.

—Henry Zeybel

Round Eyes by Diane Klutz

Round Eyes: An American Nurse in Vietnam (Tri-Star Press, 184 pp. $17.95, paper; $5.99, Kindle) is a light, and at times humorous, story of Diane Klutz’s Vietnam War tour of duty with the U.S. Army’s 67th Evac Hospital in Qui Nhon in 1969-70. It’s a short and pleasant read.

Klutz takes us smoothly through her early years in southwestern Pennsylvania, then on to Basic Training, and her commissioning as a U.S. Army nurse. With lots of short anecdotes all the way though, this is a conversational book—you can almost hear Klutz holding forth during an after-dinner session over coffee and dessert.

There are more than twenty short chapters with titles such as “The Realities of War,” “Christmas in Vietnam,” “Singing in the Band,” and “Men, Sex, and Other Lies.’

Klutz often waxes philosophic as she describes the conditions she operated under and the people she dealt with. But this is not a grisly, daily chronology of her tour for duty; it’s a pleasant, smile-producing story.

Klutz’s website is dianeklutz.com

–Tom Werzyn

Stories Untold by Charlotte McDaniel

Assessing the significance of an author and her topic is a primary duty of a book reviewer, especially when dealing with oral histories and memoirs. Likewise, forging a connection with a writer is vital. In both respects, Charlotte McDaniel and her book, Stories Untold: Oral Histories of Wives of Vietnam Servicemen (Bowker, 196 pp. $20, paper), made a dominant impression on this reviewer.

McDaniel focuses on more than thirty women whose husbands took part in the Vietnam War. She lost a family member in that conflict, which she barely mentions. Her interviews include wives of officers and enlisted men from all military branches. She identifies the women only with their first names.

Each interviewee speaks several times about the stages of war-time family separation. Their collective stories evolve chronologically: deploying, adapting to absence, managing children, supporting each other, losing a loved one, reuniting, and coping with the lingering effects of war.

The book’s major revelation is illuminating the spirit and the depths of involvement of young and inexperienced women with duties they never expected to encounter. Anxiety tempered by an acceptance of responsibility dominated most of their behavior. Those with children found themselves fulfilling the roles of mother and father. They look back on their year—or years, when a husband served multiple tours—as character building.

The chapters about loss and its lingering effects describe extreme hardships and disappointments. Those events presented the ultimate test of love. Within the same framework, a few of the women’s stories—such as the one titled “The Horizontal Christmas Tree”—read like outtakes from a script of “The Dick Van Dyke Show.”

I can’t say that Charlotte McDaniel opened my eyes, but she did refresh my view of nearly forgotten drama.

A former Fulbright Scholar, McDaniel’s academic career included appointments at Yale University and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center prior to her retirement from Emory University in Atlanta. She has written many research studies and academic books.

The book is available on line at Amazon.com.

—Henry Zeybel

Courageous Women of the Vietnam War by Kathryn J. Atwood

In Courageous Women of the Vietnam War: Medics, Journalists, Survivors, and More (Chicago Review Press, 240 pp. $19.99, hardcover; $12.99, Kindle), Kathryn Atwood examines the American War (as the Vietnamese call it) and the Vietnam War (as Americans know it) from the perspectives of women from both sides—including the French who started it.

In this young adult book Atwood presents the war through the eyes of a French Army nurse captured by the Vietminh at Dien Bien Phu; a South Vietnamese revolutionary inspired by Ho Chi Minh; Joan Baez trapped in Hanoi during the Operation Linebacker II bombing; and eleven other vignettes.

Atwood’s accounts blend the women’s actions into an overall picture of the war. Therefore, the book covers material familiar to students of the war, but it also serves as a primer for younger readers. I was familiar with the lives of only four of the women. At the end of each chapter, Atwood lists two or three books suitable for further study on the topic she just covered.

K.J. Atwood

The book’s story line begins with the Viet Minh Revolution led by Ho Chi Minh, and progresses through the Ngo Dinh Diem Civil War and the machinations of Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon.

In her book Atwood gives life to people who otherwise might be forgotten. For the most part, without wielding weapons, the women featured in the book faced dangers equal to those faced by many men who saw combat.

Atwood praises the women for their contributions to their countries. She writes about more American women than Vietnamese.

She is the author of three previous YA books about heroic women who served in World Wars I and II. “Young people might not believe they like history,” she says, “but [they] might be enticed toward interest in a particular historical woman if the narrative is compelling.”

In Courageous Women of the Vietnam War, Kathryn Atwood makes the personalities tick for readers of any age.

Her website is kathrynatwood.com

—Henry Zeybel