Women+in+the+Vietnam+War

Women Getting Into The War  When the government decided to take women into the nursing corps for the war, they decided that women who applied had to be plain and considerably older than the soldiers they would treat, so that there would be no scandelous behavior between the nurses and the patients. Also women had ti have at least one character reference from a pastor or priest to prove that they were of the highest moral caliber. When the American troops were sent to Vietnam, armed forces recruiters visited nursing schools seeking volunteers for the army, navy, and air force nursing corps. And any nurse who agreed to serve for three years after receiving their license were given a monthly payment that would cover living expenses and tuition. This was often a very appealing benefit to women from poor families because women thought it was hard to pay for tuition while going to school too. About seven thousand women served in the war as nurses. Many of these women were in the army and t hey worked in one of the ten surgical facilities, ten field hospitals, or eleven evacuation centers, which were sites in which seriously wounded soldiers were sent to other hospitals in Asia or America to be treated.

Being in Vietnam and Caring for the Wounded Although many women were caring for the wounded they did face the same hardships as the men did. And they were also in the line of the of fire from mortars and rockets especially in the Tet Offensive with the Viet Cong attacks on Saigon. The women trucked through the same mud and blood as the men did, they saw the same horrors of the war, and they even suffered the same cruel treatment as the men did when they returned to the United States. Since there were bunches and bunches of medical facilities and there were more than enough helicopters just about all the soldiers were ten minutes or less away from medical help. This made saving the lives a the soldiers a lot easier. This also meant that more of the wounded soldiers would survive than they did in other wars. But many of the fresh, just out of college nurses were not prepared to see the horrors that they saw in Vietnam. One nurse, Ruth Sidisin, said that not even earthquake victims could compare to what she saw in just a single day in Vietnam. She saw stomache wounds, amputations, head injuries, burns, but the worst wasn't this, it was the infections and other complication that the soldiers had on top of their wounds. Amd most of the soldiers had diseases when they came to the hospitals such as Dengue Fever, Hepatitis, Malaria, and the Bubonic Plague which were diseases that a person got once in a blue moon. But caring for the wounded was the easy part for the nurses. The hard part was working the thirty hour shifts during emergencies or extreme events, such as the Tet Offensive, before having exhaustion overtake their bodies. Note a normal shift for a nurse in the Vietnam War was twelve hours.

Hospitals Being a Big Target In a guerrilla war during the Vietnam War, hospitals were always a very susceptible target. If a hospital was hit nurses gave their patients the best protection they knew how and could give to them. Once a hospital was hit, the nurses gave their patients helmets to wear, they would place them under their beds if they could be moved and if they couldn't a mattress was placed on top of them to protect them. If and when the electricity would go out in the hospital the nurses would run the back up generators to keep respirators and important lifesaving equipment running in order to keep the patients alive and comfortable. They also would walk around with flashlights checking on the patients to make sure they were ok. But the biggest job for the nurses when the hospital was hit was trying to console the soldiers, who yelled out for a weapon to fight back during these attacks. During a guerrilla war, the attacks on hospitals killed patients, doctors, nurses, and medics. Anyone who was in the building could possibly be killed during any of the attacks. Army Lieutenant Sharon Lane, who was twnety-five years old at the time, was about to awaken her patients in the hospital on June 8th, 1969 at 5:55 am, when the hospital was attacked by the Viet Cong. When a rocket exploded near Sharon she was instantly killed and she was the first ever woman to die as a result of an enemy attack.