Monday, Apr 11, 2005

WALLA WALLA, Wash. – Given her interest in gender and women’s issues, Lucy Palmersheim was surprised to learn that relatively little has been written about the thousands of American women who served in-country during the Vietnam War.

After researching and writing a paper for one of her history classes, Palmersheim talked about her findings at last week’s Whitman Undergraduate Conference. She was one of about 140 Whitman students who gave research presentations or musical and artistic performances.

Palmersheim, a junior history major from Gig Harbor, Wash., titled her presentation “Forgotten Veterans: Women Who Served in Vietnam.”

“Despite the large body of historical works about the Vietnam War and the men who fought there, very little information has been compiled about the 10,000 military women and 50,000 civilian women who served,” Palmersheim told her audience in Olin Hall.

While women did not participate in combat, they worked in government agencies and support positions. The vast majority of the military women were nurses. In returning to the U.S., they were “forced to confront the issues of isolation faced by all Vietnam vets,” Palmersheim said. Their difficulties were heightened, however, because they also felt isolated from male veterans.

The hardships endured by combat nurses in Vietnam were extreme, she noted. “They were very young and inexperienced, but they were expected to do work far beyond their training. They were also in constant danger. In previous wars, hospitals had been behind the front lines, but in Vietnam, the entire country was a battleground, so nurses served in hospitals that were regularly under enemy fire.”

“They were expected to be everything for a young soldier – nurse, doctor, girlfriend, mother, therapist,” Palmersheim said. The assisted doctors, made triage decisions, performed surgery when necessary. Some “days” lasted 24 to 48 hours, in some cases longer.

In the decades following the war, Vietnam’s women veterans have gone through three distinct adjustment periods, Palmersheim said. The years from 1965 to 1983 were marked by an inability to come to terms with their experience. The years from 1983 through 1993 marked a struggle for inclusion. Only during the past decade have female veterans received greater, although still incomplete, recognition.

From the moment they returned home, nurses faced discrimination and insensitivity. Most civilians discounted their wartime experiences, viewing them as less difficult than what soldiers had gone through. The public was generally unaware that “these women had been in a combat zone, where they could have been killed by enemy fire,” Palmersheim said. They felt ignored and isolated with no way to network with other female veterans. No one wanted to hear about their experiences. One nurse wrote that she and others “kept quiet and tried to pick up our lives. I was bitter, disillusioned and felt like 22 going on 80.”

“When women tried to join veterans groups such as the VFW, they were usually told that they were not combat veterans, and so were not eligible to join,” Palmersheim said. While their painful and eye-opening experiences in Vietnam turned many female veterans against the war, they were not welcomed by the anti-war movement at home.

The initial post-war period of confusion and depression began changing in 1983, when a nurse named Lynda Van Devanter published a book titled “Home Before Morning,” which chronicled the many tragedies she faced in Vietnam. With Devanter’s book, coupled with the passage of more time, women “started to realize the full extent of the psychological pain they still carried,” Palmersheim said.

“During the 80s, new understandings of the psychological and physical problems confronting veterans allowed women to stop labeling themselves as crazy or over-emotional,” she continued. But when Post Trauma Syndrome Disorder (PTSD) was first accepted by the psychological community in 1979, it was applied to male combat veterans only. Recent estimates indicate that as many as 50 percent of the nurses suffered from the disorder.

The initial lack of recognition, Palmersheim said, had “terrible repercussions for female veterans, especially for at least one who was put in a mental institution for nine years, diagnosed with schizophrenia, and given 45 shock treatments before she was correctly diagnosed with PTSD.”

“Many felt emotionally numb, or unstable, and nightmares and flashbacks to traumatic scenes were common,” Palmersheim said. Many avoided counseling and psychological care, fearing they would not be allowed to continue in the nursing profession. Others were denied treatment at veterans’ hospitals. When they petitioned for care, they found a system unprepared to deal with women’s issues.

The Vietnam Memorial, built in 1982, includes the names of eight U.S. nurses who were killed in the conflict. Nurses and combat veterans alike were drawn to the wall of names, taking comfort in society’s recognition and from meeting onsite with other survivors. Palmersheim quoted the writing of one nurse, who went to the memorial’s dedication, not knowing what to expect:

“But when I saw all those guys, I felt so at home … Because they greeted me so affectionately and warmly. And you know you just don’t think of some big brute of a guy, an ex-marine, coming up to you with tears in his eyes, hugging you, thanking you, being so open about his feelings … I sat down and looked at all the names. And suddenly I couldn’t stop crying … It was as if I’d never be able to stop. And I’d always had this thing about self-control and nobody seeing me crying.”

When a statue at the Vietnam memorial was commissioned and portrayed three soldiers, women veterans successfully petitioned Congress for a second statue, one that showed nurses aiding a young G.I. The second statue was dedicated in 1993.

In the years since 1993, the female veterans of Vietnam have continued to gain more recognition and support. As Palmersheim notes, however, academic research about their experiences is still lagging. Little has been written about them with the exception of a few articles in the 1980s.

“It is important to examine the experiences of women Vietnam veterans because many of the same issues they have faced are resurfacing today with veterans of more recent conflicts,” Palmersheim said. “It is important to see what support systems were helpful for women Vietnam veterans so that women veterans today can benefit … The experiences of Vietnam veterans also show what issues still must be addressed.”

Palmersheim is considering doing more in-depth research next year, using it as the basis for a senior honors thesis.

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Vietnam Women’s War Memorial dedication

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CONTACT: Dave Holden, Whitman News Service

509 527-5902; holden@whitman.edu