Officer. Nurse. Woman. Army Nurse Corps Recruitment for the Vietnam War

Abstract

In April 1969, the American Journal of Nursing (AJN) ran U.S. Army advertisement featuring the headline Officer. Nurse. Woman. In it stood young, smiling, attractive nurse wearing combat fatigues and carrying surgical scissors in her pocket. This confident and determined officer, nurse, and woman appealed to other women to join her in the Army Nurse Corps (ANC), where she was Heading up her own staff and Making her own decisions. Working where it counts. She called women like her to be Army nurses, emphasizing that Today's Army Nurse can do because Army Nurses were not just nurses-they were also officers and women1 (Figure 1). The advertisement in Figure 1 was of many tactics used by the ANC in its efforts to recruit nurses during the Vietnam era. As the number of U.S. troops in Vietnam increased, the ANC needed larger numbers of nurses for the hospitals in Vietnam, along the chain of evacuation, and to continue staffing Army hospitals in the United States. The first Army nurses in Vietnam had actually arrived in 1956, when three female nurses were assigned to help train Vietnamese nurses at military hospital in Saigon.2 The first U.S. military hospital, the 8th Field Hospital, arrived on 6 April 1962, and the Army began regularly assigning nurses to the Republic of Vietnam with its arrival, but until the call-up of troops in 1965, die number remained relatively low. By 1966, however, there were approximately 333 Army nurses stationed in Vietnam, number that rose to approximately 640 in 1967, more than 800 in 1968, and peak of 916 in January 1969. Thereafter, the numbers declined with the removal of U.S. troops until the last Army nurses left on 29 March 1973.3 In all, more than five thousand Army nurses served in Vietnam during the Vietnam War, and thousands more served in other locations during the era.4 Recruiting these nurses was major focus of the ANC throughout the Vietnam War. Compounding the immediate need for nurses brought on by the war was an already problematic national nursing shortage that had begun in the early post-World War II period.5 This overall shortage was the result not of fewer nurses but of greater demand due to larger population seeking medical care, longer life expectancies, expansion of medical insurance programs, and shifting of particular facets of health care from home to hospital.6 In addition, in the 1960s and early 1970s nursing was predominantly woman's occupation, and as many women began to move to occupations previously closed to them where they could find higher pay and more advancement potential, the pool of potential nurses decreased. Moreover, as an occupation historically linked to traditional femininity, some factions of the growing women's movement criticized nursing as one of the ultimate female ghettos from which women should be encouraged to escape.7 Regardless of women's positions on feminism, however, as socially acceptable careers for women changed, nursing became of many career options for women instead of of few. In the ANC, the retirements of thousands of World War II era nurses in the late 1950s and early 1960s further compounded this shortage. The number of Army nurses fell from wartime peak of 57,000 in 1945 to 2,961 in 1963, far below the authorized strength of 5,000.'' Until the Vietnam War, the ANC managed its nurse shortage by using corpsmen for clerical and supply duties and hiring civilian nurses to work in stateside hospitals.10 However, the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis demonstrated that this solution was not completely effectual because civilian nurses could not be assigned overseas. As active duty nurses were sent to four field hospitals and two hospital trains during the crisis, base hospitals were left short-staffed and the Army realized that the low numbers of Army nurses posed a hazardous situation in the event of national emergency.11 The following year, the ANC stated that recruiting enough young women to be Army nurses is the most serious personnel procurement problem the Army faces today. …