'Army Nurse Corps Essay\r'

'All women in the soldiers served thence in either the soldiers suck corps or the Women’s soldiery Corps (WAC). All Army shelters were officers, and were Direct Commissions. That is, they became nurses first and then attended a ten day or so Orientation Course at (Ft. surface-to-air missile Houston, Texas) to teach them how to be officers, the rudiments of military life, who to drink and when, etc. (There were a small number of antheral nurses who went by means of the same program. ) Nurses were assigned to Army hospitals, nigh(prenominal) Stateside and overseas, and were billeted separately from male officers.\r\nIn Vietnam, Army nurses served unaccompanied in rear-area hospitals at major bases. The Women’s Army Corps (WAC) provided all Army female enlisted violence and also had its throw officers. Most WAC officers exclusively administered WAC units, notwithstanding a handful received assignments to staff positions and otherwise rear-echelon duties. In Vietnam, enlisted WACs performed mostly clerical duties, although some worked as medical technicians. Whatever their duty assignments, all enlisted women, on any base, regular(a) in the ‘States, were billeted together as a single WAC Company in a guarded compound.\r\n(WAC officers had separate quarters, of course. ) Within 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 move to Vietnam had only rudimentary firearms training. ) One small 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 conflict than this. Eight US servicewomen died in Vietnam.\r\nOf these, four Army nurses and an Air Force flight nurse were killed in three separate, non-combat, plane crashes, and another died from disease. An older nurse died of a stroke. Only one woman, Army 1LT S haron Ann Lane, was really killed in a combat action, in a VC rocket attack on Chu Lai, in 1969. alike 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 judicature or contracting firms, newspaper correspondents, Christian missionaries, that active covers it.\r\nARC girls made brief daylight visits (a hardly a(prenominal) 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 restricted to US troops, the exception being Saigon. Any women billeted on US bases also lived in guarded compounds. ” Susan O’Neill served as an Army nurse in Vietnam from 1969 to 1970. â€Å" enter’t Mean No intimacy” is her first book, written nearly thirty years after the experiences it depicts.\r\nO’Neill tel ls us that, (O’Neill, p. 15) â€Å"Before I went, I affluent assumed that war would involve injury and closing; that’s why I was being sent there, after all. But it’s one thing to look at it from a distance, and form decent mental pictures. Once you step through the looking for glass, as it were, into the reality of itâ€once your sneakers are full of somebody else’s bloodâ€you look at the whole thing quite differently. The blood’s no longer a metaphor; it goes through to your socks and into the skin of your feet.\r\nInto your soul. ” O’Neill gives us a clearer rendering of what Vietnam was truly like. She offers that it wasn’t a place where you compete around because people’s lives were at stake. The motive goes on to tell us that, â€Å"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 distan t notion of empathy. Gradually, in Vietnam, I became horrified at how callow my ideas had been.\r\n'