Bringing War Home Symposium: stories of women on the warfront
The Bringing War Home Project aims to connect the Utah State University community with the history of war and the people who fought in them. By hosting discussions of gender equality in the military and collecting stories from veterans, the project memorializes lives lost while revealing the formerly invisible narrative of women in war.
A hallmark event of the project is the Women and America’s Vietnam War Symposium, meant to highlight the unique experience of women during the war.
The symposium is set for March 1, from 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. in the Eccles Conference Center.
The symposium features speakers with a range of perspectives on the war, from veterans to refugees. Thi Bui, Susan O’Neill and Kara Dixon Vuic will share readings and perspectives on the significance of women in the Vietnam War.
Susan O’Neill, who served as a nurse, will present a reading of her book “Don’t Mean Nothing” at the symposium, which offers a female perspective of the war loosely based on her own experiences.
“It’s a collection of short fiction pieces centered around hospitals,” O’Neill said. “It gives you a picture of what it was like for nurses and doctors during the Vietnam War.”
March 8, 1965, marked the beginning of U.S. involvement in the 19-year long conflict known as the Vietnam War. O’Neill was 21 when she began serving at Fort Sam Houston in Texas.
“To be a nurse, in my day, meant getting a cheap education,” O’Neill said. “My parents couldn’t have paid for college. I didn’t go because I wanted to be a nurse per se, but it got me out of my hometown and got me an education that I could use afterwards.”
Education was one of the biggest reasons women entered the war effort. According to the Vietnam Center and Sam Johnson Vietnam Archive, women often volunteered “to receive training and an education,” to work alongside men who were drafted or to prove themselves.
The women’s liberation movement arose alongside the Vietnam War in the late 1960s, taking inspiration from the Civil Rights Movement and anti-war sentiment. Protests and new ideas regarding feminism would characterize this era of change.
Kara Dixon Vuic is a professor of war, conflict and society at Texas Christian University.
“This is the era of women marching in the streets for equal rights,” Vuic said. “You have women doing all kinds of things and going to war in Vietnam, doing important things there.”
The war involved women in a way largely unprecedented, reflecting societal shift at the time.
“If you’re fighting a war, you’re going to let a lot of things slide,” Vuic said. “You might have thought women do this or don’t do that, but war opens up opportunities for all kinds of people to contribute.”
O’Neill took part in protests and fought for gender equality when she was recruited.
“At that time, I was playing my guitar at coffee houses and singing protest music at various campuses,” O’Neill said. “I was not excited about the idea of going to Vietnam, but they lied and I had to go.”
O’Neill served at three different hospitals in Vietnam, the first two being some of the smallest units in the area. American women mainly served in the Army Nurse Corps or the Women’s Army Corps.
“After the first hospital closed, I served at the second hospital for three months,” O’Neill said. “The attitude was terrible. We didn’t get as many soldiers as we did locals who were injured, often by us.”
According to statistics from American War and Military Operations Casualties, estimates of Vietnamese casualties range from 966,000 to 3 million while U.S. casualties total 58,220.
“The attitude there was ‘Why should we open our doors to these people?’” O’Neill said. “Because you’re creating a war on their turf.”
O’Neill moved to a larger hospital near South Vietnam’s former capital city Saigon, now known as Ho Chi Minh.
“I got transferred to what my commanding officer said would be the worst hellhole in Vietnam,” O’Neill said. “But actually it was a great team of people, and I really felt that I was of much better use there than where I was.”
According to Vuic, women have always faced unique challenges when it comes to the military.
“They were joining an organization that was built for men,” Vuic said. “The military was constructed around men’s bodies, men’s needs, around social and cultural ideas of what men do.”
O’Neill said being a woman in what was essentially a man’s world was incredibly difficult to navigate, especially when it comes to sexuality.
“You represented so many things to these guys,” O’Neill said. “We’re thrown into this situation that’s totally untenable in terms of what the adolescent mind is going through, in terms of your self-image and sexual being.”
O’Neill said most people serving were in late adolescence, ranging in age from 19 to 24. Patriarchal perspectives regarding women’s role and autonomy within society have had severe implications for women, especially for those fighting for a place in the military.
“I know entirely too many women who were raped over there,” O’Neill said. “Who were treated terribly badly. There are dark things that come from our attitudes towards women.”
Today, women are fully integrated into the military, serving in roles from supplementary to combatant. O’Neill said the military has improved, but it still struggles when it comes to its treatment of women.
“It’s still not exactly equal,” O’Neill said. “The guys, in a lot of cases, are not kind to the women who do join. That’s what they’re working on; they’re trying to make it better.”
Vuic said gender integration raised questions as simple as having uniforms that fit women to debates over letting mothers serve alongside fathers.
“They’re continual efforts to try and deal with this lingering discrimination,” Vuic said. “Lingering ways in which this institution that was crafted for men has had to integrate and accommodate women.”
Sexual assault in the military has been an issue of contention ever since the Department of Defense began recording instances of sexual assault in 2004. The 2021 DOD report found 8% of women experienced unwanted sexual contact.
“Women used to have to report to a commanding officer and up the chain of command,” O’Neill said. “If it was the next person up who did it, then you were stuck, so a lot of these women were just left in the lurch.”
The Military Justice Improvement Act sought to reform policy regarding sexual assault cases in 2013. Reporting has moved away from those in the chain of command to outside sources, safeguarding women afraid to report because of retaliation.
“It is an improvement,” O’Neill said. “For so long, I was hearing stories of severely abused women because there was no recourse.”
Still, sexual assault in the military remains a prevailing issue. In 2022, only 37% of reported cases resulted in criminal charges, as compared to 68% of cases in 2012.
O’Neill said creating a truly equal military is a large undertaking, and the elements perpetuating issues like sexual assault are complex.
“It’s such a testosterone area of being,” O’Neill said. “You don’t just easily overcome that stuff. Society lurches; it doesn’t exactly jump into ideal positions overnight.”
According to Vuic, the mindset surrounding gender in regards to the military has to shift, and will only do so according to need.
“Part of it is not treating men as the default, that there is no default,” Vuic said. “Right now, we’ve got a huge recruiting crisis and maybe part of that is rethinking how we’re crafting this institution and what we’re asking people to do.”
Including women in the draft has been the newest point of contention and will be discussed further at the symposium.
Vuic said women must be treated as truly equal first.
“On the basis of having served in wartime,” Vuic said, “people say to the state, ‘I’ve done my job, I’ve done my duty. I need equal rights and I need full citizenship.’ We see this with African Americans, with LGBTQ+ service members, and we see it with women.”
Vuic and O’Neill will expand on and share stories about how women have historically been involved with war and discuss the future of gender integration in the military at the symposium.
O’Neill hopes attendees of the symposium understand not just the significance of the roles women play in war, but of the untold story of women throughout history.
“You need a historical grounding if you’re ever going to progress,” O’Neill said. “There is a woman’s narrative to war, on both sides of it. We can’t be a sidelight to history because we are equal participants in it.”