Army Nurse Corps Essay

completely women in the Army served then in either the Army Nurse Corps or the Womens Army Corps (WAC). All Army hold ins were officers, and were Direct Commissions. That is, they became nurses first and then at decenniumded a ten day or so Orientation Course at (Ft. Sam Houston, Texas) to teach them how to be officers, the fundamentals of military life, who to salute and when, etc. (There were a small number of male nurses who went through the same program. ) Nurses were designate 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 study bases. The Womens Army Corps (WAC) provided all Army female enlisted personnel and also had its own officers. just about WAC officers exclusively administered WAC units, but a handful received assignments to staff positions and other rear-echelon duties. In Vietnam, enlisted WACs performed mostly clerical duties, although some worke d as medical technicians. Whatever their duty assignments, all enlisted women, on all base, even in the States, were billeted together as a single WAC Company in a guarded compound.(WAC officers had separate quarters, of course. ) inside this compound, in their barracks, WACs pulled their own guard, armed with baseball bats and whistles. (Neither WACs or nurses were issued weapons, and even those sent to Vietnam had only inherent 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, four Army nurses and an Air Force course nurse were killed in three separate, non-combat, plane crashes, and another died from disease. An older nurse died of a stroke. Only nonpareil woman, Army 1LT Sharon Ann Lane, was actually killed in a combat action, in a VC rocket attack on Chu Lai, in 1969 . Besides nurses and WACs other American women would also go to Vietnam. TOD and China Beach cover most of the categories. American Red Cross girls, entertainers, civilian employees of the US government or contracting firms, paper correspondents, Christian missionaries, that about covers it.ARC girls made brief daylight visits (a few hours) to advance bases. The rest had rear-area jobs. (Christian missionaries were commonly older, married women. ) American civilian women lived in major Vietnamese cities, which were off-limits to US troops, the exception beingness Saigon. Any women billeted on US bases also lived in guarded compounds. Susan ONeill served as an Army nurse in Vietnam from 1969 to 1970. Dont Mean Nothing is her first book, written nearly thirty long time after the experiences it depicts.ONeill tells us that, (ONeill, p. 15) Before I went, I just assumed that war would select injury and death thats why I was being sent there, after all. But its one thing to look at it from a distance, and form neat mental pictures. Once you tempo through the looking glass, as it were, into the reality of itonce your sneakers are full of somebody elses simple eyeyou look at the whole thing quite differently. The bloods no longer 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 around 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 foreign it on some cool-headed philosophical basis, from some distant notion of empathy. Gradually, in Vietnam, I became horrified at how callow my ideas had been.