Nurses in the Vietnam War: A Guest Post by Lynn Kanter
At the moment, the Vietnam War is on America's collective minds once more, thanks to Ken Burns' amazing documentary. Burns dealt briefly on the story of the women who served--just enough to make those of us who are interested in the roles of women in war want to know more. Luckily, I knew the right person to ask: Lynn Kanter, the author of Her Own Vietnam--an excellent novel about an American nurse who served in Vietnam. I asked her to share her experience researching and writing about nurses here on the Margins. Several things Lynn shares left me gobsmacked--and not in a good way.
Take it away, Lynn!
As a long-time reader and admirer of History in the Margins, I was delighted when Pamela invited me to write a guest post. Here is my contribution to Pamela’s current obsession about women in war.
On the Vietnam Wall in Washington, DC, you will find 8 women’s names carved into the glossy black granite. All were nurses. The list of American women who died in Vietnam swells to 67 if you include the civilian women who worked there or served as volunteers. Of these unnoted dead, two were journalists; four were taken prisoner and either killed or remain missing in action; and two were murdered by U.S. servicemen.*
This fall, Ken Burns’ and Lynn Novick’s documentary series about the Vietnam war threw a brief spotlight on some of the approximately 10,000 women who served.** For most of the previous decades, they have lingered in the margins of history.
I spent more than 10 years exploring those shadowy corners, conducting research for my novel about the lifelong grip of the Vietnam war on a middle-aged nurse who had served there in her youth. I pored through books,*** articles, and websites. Best of all, I stumbled upon a listserv for women who had served in Vietnam. Most were nurses, as were almost 90 percent of all the military women there. Although they knew I was a civilian researching a novel, and that I had been an anti-war protester, these veterans welcomed me to their online community, revealed some of their memories, and answered my many questions.
The woman who shared the most with me was a nurse who had served two tours in Vietnam, from 1969 to 1971, based in Quang Tri and then Chu Lai. Her name was Chris Banigan. We lived on opposite sides of the country, so after a year of emails I was thrilled to meet her in person at the Vietnam Women’s Memorial**** on Veterans Day of 2003, where she told me a remarkable story.
She had just run into a soldier who had been her final patient in Vietnam. It was no accident: year after year he had been visiting the Vietnam Wall on Veterans Day, asking everyone he met if they knew a nurse named Banigan. Finally, he asked her.
I had to imagine the excitement, the conversation, maybe the emotional hug between a nurse and her patient. That’s not the kind of thing that Chris, reticent and matter-of-fact, would have shared with me. But she did tell me in a later email, “I remember when I took him to x-ray. He was terrified that his eye had been blown out, and he could not be reassured until he saw the reflection of his left eye in the x-ray machine. Odd, the things you remember.”
For years, Chris had been collecting and compiling an archive of information about the women who served in Vietnam. This, she believed, was historical data that would be invaluable to future scholars and historians. In her dogged way, Chris Banigan was preparing for that future. She never lived to see it.
In March 2004, just four months after the miraculous meeting with her last Vietnam patient, Chris died suddenly. She was 58 years old. I have not been able to discover what happened to the historical archive she built so painstakingly.
Vietnam had haunted her all her life and turned her staunchly anti-war, but Chris had some advice for me and other civilians who sought to write about military nurses. “They didn’t pick their war,” she told me. “They only served.”
*Some of their stories: http://www.virtualwall.org/women.htm
**No one really knows how many U.S. women served in Vietnam. The military did not keep track. [This is Pam butting in: !!!!!?????]
***A few good books: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/men-werent-the-only-heroes-of-the-vietnam-war/2017/09/15/59340c16-98d3-11e7-87fc-c3f7ee4035c9_story.html?utm_term=.ff6c223e4db0#comments
****The Women’s Vietnam Memorial is only yards away from the Wall, but not as well known. It was erected in 1993 after a 10-year struggle, led by former Vietnam nurse Diane Carlson Evans, against misogyny and opposition, including a suggestion by the Chairman of the Commission of Fine Arts that a commemoration of military scout dogs would be the next logical step (http://www.vietnamwomensmemorial.org/pdf/dcevans.pdf).
Lynn Kanter is the author of the novel Her Own Vietnam, which was published in 2014 and released as an audiobook in 2017. She is a lifelong activist and has the t-shirts to prove it. Lynn works as a freelance writer for national progressive organizations, and blogs at www.lynnkanter.com. You can buy Her Own Vietnam at http://www.shademountainpress.com/lynnkanter.php. The audiobook is available at https://www.audible.com/pd/Fiction/Her-Own-Vietnam-Audiobook/B074JH42LJ
Road Trip Through History: Arbor Day Farm
My Own True Love and I spent last weekend at Arbor Day Farm in Nebraska City. It was a reunion with cousins from several branches and generations of his family. There was lots of laughing, talking, card-playing, and trash-talking. We walked Tree Adventure--a wonderful facility designed to combine education and amusement for kids. We tasted heirloom apples,* heard their stories, and learned some apple cultivation trivia. And being history nerds to the core,** we were fascinated by the story of J. Sterling Morton and the beginning of Arbor Day.
In 1854, Morton settled with his brand-new wife in the brand-new town of Nebraska City, where he founded and edited the Nebraska City News. The Nebraska Territory was a treeless prairie. Ads that called for settlers described houses built of "Nebraska marble"--also known as sod.
Morton jumped into local politics almost immediately. He served two terms on the territorial legislature, was territorial secretary of state from 1858 to 1861 and acting territorial governor from 1858 to 1859.
Morton didn't think the development of the Nebraska territory was a simple as "build it and they will come".*** He felt strongly that planting trees was the answer to drawing settlers to Nebraska--and consequently selling more newspapers. Trees provided shade, wind breaks, fuel, building materials, and fruit and nuts. For years Morton urged Nebraska to set aside a day to encourage people to plant trees.
The first Arbor Day was celebrated in Nebraska in April, 1872. Prizes were offered to the individuals and communities that planted the most trees that day. Altogether, Nebraskans planted more than one million trees that day. (Ironically, the trees for the Morton estate arrived several days late. The task of planting them fell to Mrs. Morton. Presumably not with her own two hands.) Morton summed up the spirit of the holiday in one sentence: "Other holidays repose upon the past; Arbor Day proposes for the future."
Arbor Day never became an official national holiday, though several presidents proclaimed national celebrations.**** Most states now observe Arbor Day on the last Friday in April, but the date varies from state to state depending on best tree planting weather. (In a nice twist, Earth Day occurs on Morton's birthday, April 22.)
The Morton home, Arbor Lodge, is now a state historical park, run by the Arbor Day Foundation.
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As an addendum: Morton served as the US Secretary of Agriculture from 1893 to 1896. Evidently it's Ag week here on the Margins.
*I strongly recommend the Edward VII and Calville Blanc D'hiver varieties and will be keeping an eye out for them.
**Pardon the apple pun. It wasn't intentional, but I'm owning it.
***That's an Iowa story.
****This means I don't have to feel bad about not tying this post to the actual day.
Driving Through Iowa
The state of Iowa offers the road-tripper princely rest stops, complete with grand historical markers. For instance, the rest stop near Iowa City--home to the University of Iowa , the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, and the legendary Prairies Lights bookstore--is dedicated to the history of education in Iowa. I was delighted with the bookish decorations, which included giant alphabet blocks set along the wall. (S is for soybeans.)
Even a rest stop of modest scale and amenities had a long marker telling the history of the Amana Colonies.
At yet another stop, I was reminded of the quintessentially Iowan story of Henry A. Wallace, Roswell Garst, and the agricultural revolution they launched.
Wallace and Garst met in 1926 in Des Moines, Iowa, where Wallace edited his family's newspapers and Garst sold real estate. In his free time, Wallace experimented with creating corn hybrids.* At the time, farmers saved the best-looking ears of corn from each crop for seed, selecting them based on uniformity and size. By the time he was fifteen, Wallace had already proved these factors did not necessarily predict which ears would produce the best crop the next year. Now, in his late thirties, he was trying to crossbreed plants to produce higher yields.*
Wallace invented hybrid corn and the concept of hybrid vigor. Garst, an Iowa farmer turned salesman, recognized their importance and demonstrated their value in practical ways that small farmers could understand.
Garst was so fascinated by the possibilities of hybrid corn that he bought several bushels of the seed from Wallace to use on his home farm. After several years of watching the performanceof Wallace's high-yield, strong-stalked hybrid in his own fields, Garst asked Wallace for a franchise to sell the virtually unknown product in northeastern Iowa.
It was a literal case of betting the farm. Even in good times it would have been hard to convince farmers to buy expensive, genetically modified seeds** instead of using the open-pollinated kernels from their own fields. During the Depression it was virtually impossible. Garst had to come up with ways to prove that his advertising slogan, "An Astonishing Product--Produces Astonishing Results," was the simple truth. His most successful tactic was the "half the increase" trial, in which a farmer planted both types of seeds. If the farmers' seeds produced a typical yield (usually 25 bushels to the acre) and Garst's seeds produced 45 bushels, Garst would get half the increase. Growing both Pioneer hybrid corn and their own seed corn gave farmers a graphic demonstration of the new corn's value. In the worst drought in America's history, Wallace and Garst's hybrid corn not only grew, it flourished. In fewer than ten years, more than half the fields in America's Corn Belt were planted with the new high-yield corn.
The green revolution that began with Pioneer hybrid corn had a dark side, including the effects of farm chemicals on the environment and loss of biodiversity. But for a country coming out of the lean years of the Depression, it was a miracle.
*Wallace came by his interest in scientific agriculture naturally. His grandfather and father, both also named Henry Wallace (a potential source of confusion for the careless reader), founded the influential farm journal that they imaginatively named Wallace's Farmer. His grandfather was a former Presbyterian minister who who went on to teach the gospel of scientific farming. His father was Secretary of Agriculture under Warren Harding. Our Wallace, having spent some time as a boy with agronomist George Washington Carver, was experimenting with plant breeding in a small garden plot by the time he was ten. He later studied agriculture at Iowa State. Wallace went on to become Franklin D. Roosevelt's secretary of agriculture from 1933-1940 and his vice-president from 1941-1945.
**Not necessarily a dirty word. Humans have been fiddling with plant genetics to make bigger/tastier/more digestible/higher yielding plants since the first unknown innovator discovered the power of planting a seed in the earth in ancient Palestine. Says the woman who loves her heirloom tomatoes and apples.