Kara Dixon Vuic . Officer, Nurse, Woman: The Army Nurse Corps in the Vietnam War . (War/Society/Culture.) Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2010. Pp. xii, 271. $50.00.

Abstract

Despite the title, this thought-provoking study is not a general history of army nurses in the Vietnam War. Kara Dixon Vuic goes beyond a history of army nursing during that time to discuss army nurse recruiting policy, how army nurses framed their experiences, and how the changing roles of army nurses illuminate “the ways in which other individuals and institutions defined gender in the 1960's and 1970's” (p. 12). Army nurses' experiences, Vuic notes, “reveal both the possibilities and limitations of the broader changes that defined the war and the era” (p. 10). The monograph begins with a chapter titled, “Lady, You're in the Army Now,” which follows the story of Kate O'Hare Palmer, who joined the Army Nurse Corps in 1967. Despite assurances that she would not be sent to Vietnam, Palmer received her orders and boarded a flight for Vietnam in June 1968. Her experience reveals, Vuic explains, “some of the themes common to all army nurses who served in Vietnam and highlights the peculiar experience of women serving in an army composed mostly of men” (p. 2).