American involvement in the Vietnam war was complicated. Vietnam’s struggle for independence against their colonizer, France, was long and costly for both sides. The Vietnamese revolutionaries let by Ho Chi Minh were nationalists, but they also embraced some ideas from communism that would redistribute wealth and help the poor in Vietnam. When France withdrew from Vietnam in 1954, the US saw only the communism and none of the nationalism in this revolutionary movement and they feared the spread of communism in Southeast Asia. The US began financial and covert initiatives to defend South Vietnam from its communist revolutionaries located in the north of the country. . When one of the US’s secret missions in the Gulf of Tonkin was uncovered, the Communists attacked. In an unprecedented move, Congress approved the Tonkin Resolution, which allowed the US to begin fighting an undeclared war: a war that involved women on both sides of the globe.

​

The reasons for US involvement in Vietnam were ambiguous, even to US citizens at the time. The 1950’s and 60’s showed an interesting blend of generational differences, with many older WWII Veterans raised on the patriotic ideal that when your country called, you responded. But younger generations, mothers, and civil rights activists were challenging the norms of their parents.

 

American nurses began training South Vietnamese nurses as early as 1956. Over the course of the Vietnam war, five nurses died, including 52-year-old Lieutenant Colonel Annie Ruth Graham, who served as a military nurse in both World War II and Korea before Vietnam. Sharon Ann Lane of Canton, Ohio was the only nurse killed in Vietnam as a result of enemy fire. Lane was posthumously awarded the Vietnamese Gallantry Cross with Palm and the Bronze Star for Heroism. 

 

Five Navy nurses were wounded when the Communist Viet Cong bombed an officer’s quarters in the southern capital of Saigon on Christmas Eve 1964. They were each awarded the Purple Heart and became the first female members of the U.S. Armed Forces to receive that award in the war. Commander Elizabeth Barrett became the first female naval line officer to hold command in a combat zone in 1972. 

 

The motivations for joining varied from military benefits to pay for nursing school to fulfilling the challenge posed by President Kennedy to “ask what you can do for your country.” Astoundingly, nurses in the military were all volunteers.

 

In 1962, the American Red Cross began sending volunteers to Vietnam to provide medical support and “a touch of home” to soldiers in the field. Affectionately called “Doughnut Dollies” by the troops, more than 1,200 women served on major bases and remote landing zones. They brought games, refreshments, and activities to tired soldiers who needed a break from the war. Women were sexually objectified and asked to act the “girl next door” to uplift the depleted soldiers.

​

Women also served as members of the U.S. Air Force Nurse Corps and the Women’s Air Force (WAF) during the Vietnam conflict. Captain Mary Therese Klinker was killed in a crash in April 1975 near Saigon when 138 people were killed including many Vietnamese children and a number of female civilians working for U.S. government agencies. Captain Klinker was posthumously awarded the Airman’s Medal for Heroism and the Meritorious Service Medal. 

 

Within the military, some women spoke out against the war, but they also articulated more general grievances, including sexual harassment and unequal treatment in all branches of the service. They criticized the pervasive sexism that regarded women as inferior soldiers and kept them in subordinate positions. Many women who voiced their concerns were subjected to surveillance, restrictions, undesirable job assignments, and excessive charges filed against them for minor infractions. 

 

The United Service Organization provided entertainment and programs to support military morale in combat zones since 1941. The best-known provider of USO entertainment programs was Bob Hope. Starting in 1964, Hope brought his shows to Vietnam nine times. While he was the main event, Hope’s shows featured female stars who were sexualized as rewards for the brave men fighting abroad. 

 

On the home front, some women supported the war effort as a crusade against communism. They engaged in protests and called on the military to achieve total victory. Women in conservative organizations such as Young Americans for Freedom, along with women whose interest in the war was in bringing their loved ones home, raised their voices in support of soldiers and the politics of anti-communism.

​

Vietnam impacted the lives of so many Americans, but it was also a distant war. New technologies like TV helped bring the faraway conflict home to the American people. Americans on the nightly news could actually see how the conflict was impacting everyday citizens in Vietnam–especially the women.

​

Diane Nash, a civilian leader in the civil rights movement, visited Vietnam in December 1966 along with three other American women and each brought back stories to the media describing what they saw. This was just one of many such "fact-finding" missions undertaken by US citizens early in the conflict in order to report on a war that wasn't receiving the kind of coverage they wanted. 

 

Like WWII before it, there were many ways women proved integral to the Vietnam War. Despite the precedent set by female correspondents in prior wars, they were not always accepted in the field. Nevertheless, women reported, including Gloria Emerson for The New York Times.  She received many awards and was praised for her stories.

 

Pictures of struggling Vietnamese people helped turn the war into one of the most controversial periods of US history. By 1972 many had turned against the war and one particularly powerful image that affected Americans was the photograph of a young Vietnamese girl running to escape napalm, the “liquid fire” that had severely burned her back. Nine years old at the time, the naked and vulnerable “Napalm Girl” symbolized the impact of American war technology on everyday Vietnamese people. This photo solidified the imbalance power dynamic between the United States and the small Southeast Asian nation, already torn by civil war.  We now know that the girl in the photograph is Phan Thi Kim Phuc from Trang Bang in South Vietnam. While visuals of Vietnam were startling, the horrors of war could not so easily be glorified when US citizens now had evidence of so many innocent women and children suffering.

​

The Vietnam War became increasingly unpopular. Tens of thousands of Americans were being drafted and dying every month in a war few could identify a purpose for. As the Vietnam War dragged on into the late-1960s and early 70s, women, especially college women and middle-aged, middle-class white mothers, were increasingly active in the anti-war movement. Organizations such as Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), founded in 1960 and active at as many as three hundred colleges, staged campus demonstrations against military recruitment, war research, and the war altogether. Their opposition stemmed from their opposition to broader Cold War logic.

 

By 1969, frustration with America’s continuing involvement in Vietnam led SDS to demand more direct action. Bernardine Dohrn led an SDS faction that  published a manifesto entitled, “You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows” in New Left Notes. This document  made the case for revolution. Dohrn was also active in the Weather Underground, a group committed to answering the violence of the war with violence here at home, including bombings at university buildings.

 

By 1970, Dohrn was on the FBI’s Most Wanted List, where she remained for several years. Participation in SDS and the Weather Underground inspired some women to join radical feminist groups, as they frequently felt that their voices in the radical anti-war movement were not heard. 

 

Some celebrity women protested American involvement in the Vietnam War. The most prominent of these women were Joan Baez and Jane Fonda.  Joan Baez was vocal in the anti-draft movement. She helped promote the slogan, “Girls say yes to boys who say no.” Fonda participated in a troupe of actors and musicians that performed under the name, ”Free the Army”” (more frequently, “F the Army”) that provided entertainment for soldiers in coffee houses near military bases. In May of 1970, Fonda distributed copies of a GI anti-war newspaper, Fatigue Press, at Ford Hood. She was arrested and barred from the base, but she spoke out against the fact that soldiers were prohibited from possessing anti-war literature.

​

​In 1972, Fonda traveled to  North Vietnam and posed with soldiers, both men and women, on an anti-aircraft gun used against American bombing raids. She spent two weeks in the north and spoke on the Voice of Vietnam radio, imploring the United States to stop the bombing that was destroying farmland, eliminating the livelihood of local farm families. She also spoke with American prisoners of war and reported that they urged their families to vote for George McGovern in the 1972 presidential election. Upon her return, Fonda was hailed as a hero by some but also broadly accused of treason. Even now, years later, her critics decry her as “Hanoi Jane.” 

 

For women of color the war in Vietnam was difficult. Black Power groups had long adopted an anti-imperialist agenda and found that American policies exploited people of color globally. They had no quarrel with the indigenous people of Vietnam.

​

One of the most far reaching and effective black anti-war groups was the National Black Anti-War Anti-Draft Union spearheaded by Gwen Patton. She had long been involved in Civil Rights work and felt activists needed an organization that fought at the intersection of racism and imperialism.

 

​Elaine Brown, the only female chairperson for the Black Panther Party, traveled to Vietnam. Her trip helped shape the Panther position on the war. She said, “we were not anti-war activists in the sense that we thought there should just be peace in Vietnam. Our position became very clear and very strong as it evolved. And that was victory for the Viet--Vietnamese, victory for the Vietcong, which was not a very popular position.”

 

On a broad scale, the relationship of women to the War in Vietnam reflected the relationships of all Americans to the conflict that took more than 58,000 American lives. Whether Vietnamese or American, women fought hard in Vietnam. Meanwhile, some women at home supported and others opposed the war, Some were willing to carry their convictions to radical acts. Most importantly, the actions of American women in the late 1960s and 70s paved the way for changes in society including feminist fervor that created the world we live in today.