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Women and the Experience of War
55 Plays1 year ago
Host: Jason M. Kelly
Guests: Leah Nahmias and Elliott Nowacky
Audio Engineers: Jason M. Kelly and Kelly Kerr
In this episode, Jason sits down with Leah Nahmias and Elliott Nowacky to discuss the experience of women in the Spanish-American and Vietnam Wars. This is the first of three episodes focused on gender and the experience of war.
Readings:
- Halsted, Carolyn. “War and Women: Patriotic Attitude of the National Organization.” Los Angeles Times, April 7, 1898.
- Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) International Congress: Vietnam Visit, 1971. http://archive.org/details/AudiotapeReel003401.
- Janis Alyce Nark. Interview with Janis Alyce Nark. Roaring Fork Veterans History Project, October 22, 2009. Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/afc2001001.70597/.
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Transcript
Introduction to Podcast
00:00:05
Speaker
Welcome to the Justice and War in American History podcast. I'm Jason Kelly. And I'm Ray Habersky. War has long been an indelible part of America's story, shaping national identity, values and principles. The experience of war has transformed the lives of each generation. And because of this, it has historically elicited impassioned debates and conflicting perspectives.
Exploring War's History with Diverse Voices
00:00:28
Speaker
This podcast aims to explore this history by bringing together a diverse range of voices, veterans, active service members, citizens and scholars. Through our conversations, we will consider the ways in which war has shaped and reshaped notions of justice. In the process, we will engage with broad themes such as duty, heroism, suffering, loyalty and patriotism. Our broad framework during this season is to compare and contrast the histories of the Spanish-American
00:00:56
Speaker
Philippine-American and Vietnam wars, wars that had a profound effect on the people of the United States.
Women's Roles in Wars
00:01:02
Speaker
The National Endowment for the Humanities has generously provided funding for this project, making it possible to have conversations about the effects of war on American veterans, their families, and the generations who bear witness to conflict. Welcome back to Justice and War in American History.
00:01:19
Speaker
Today's guest includes a colleague
00:01:34
Speaker
both the home front and the folks who are on the front and compare some of those experiences with each other. We look at how women organized as part of the war movement in the Spanish American war.
00:01:49
Speaker
on the one hand, but also women's roles in the Vietnam War. And one of the things that's very interesting about this is we get to talk a little bit about the Gulf War and the decades that followed and the experience of families more broadly. And just like other episodes, Jason, are there other places that people can find information about this particular episode? Yes. As always, you can find the information at justiceandwarseminar.org.
00:02:17
Speaker
And if you would prefer, you can open up your podcast app and find the links to the readings that we discuss in this conversation online through there.
Guest Introductions
00:02:29
Speaker
Leah, Elliot, thanks for joining us today to talk about the NEH dialogues on the Experience of War podcast. Today we're going to be talking about gender. And both of you have read through a series of primary documents. We've all sat through the training together to learn a little bit more about the experience of gender during wars, specifically the Spanish-American War and the Vietnam War. But of course, our conversation will probably go much more broad than that.
00:02:56
Speaker
But before we get started, I'm going to ask you each to introduce yourselves and tell the audience a little bit about yourselves. So Leah, could you get us started?
00:03:04
Speaker
Yeah, my name is Leah Namias. Currently, I'm a grantmaker, community leadership officer with the Indianapolis Foundation. Prior to that, I had worked in the kind of public humanities field for many years. So I was the director of programs for Indiana Humanities. And before that, a program officer with the New York Council for the Humanities. When I was with the New York Council for the Humanities, I led
00:03:29
Speaker
reading and discussion programs for adults, including some specialized programming for veterans with the Great Books Foundation. We kind of piloted a program called Talking Service that rolled out nationally. So very excited to be here, and thanks for the invitation.
00:03:46
Speaker
Thanks, Leah. It's great to have you here. Elliot. Yes. Good morning. My name is Elliot Nowacki. I am currently the Student Services Coordinator, AKA Graduate Advisor and Military Relations Coordinator at the Hamilton Luger School for Global and International Studies at IU Bloomington down in Bloomington, Indiana.
00:04:04
Speaker
I've been there for about a little over five years. Prior to that, very briefly, I served 20 years in the U.S. Army as a field artillery officer and was trained as a Russian Foreign Area Officer, spent most of my career abroad in Germany, in the former Soviet space at various times, and also in the Middle East, originally from Montana, and I'm looking forward to our conversation today.
Primary Documents on Women's Roles
00:04:30
Speaker
Great, thank you, Elliot. So we circulated three documents to each of you, as well as we'll have those documents available online for people to look and listen at. But the three documents are Carolyn Halstead's piece on war and women patriotic attitude of the National Organization, which is a primary document from the Los Angeles Times from April 7th, 1898. And this is right at the
00:04:59
Speaker
earliest stages of what becomes known as the Spanish-American War. And then we have two other documents. The first one is the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom International Congress. This is a visit that women on behalf of the organization took to Vietnam in 1971, and this is them reporting on their experiences back.
Gender and War Experiences
00:05:20
Speaker
And then we also have an oral history interview with Lieutenant Colonel Janice Nark from October 2009. So those are going to be the documents that we're talking about. So for those of you listening, you can go online and you can find these documents and read through them or listen to them before or after the conversation. But we'll be referring back to those.
00:05:42
Speaker
To get us started though, like I said, our conversation today is about gender. And I thought a big question was in order to frame all of this. And I was curious for both of you, why do you think gender is important when we talk about the experience of war?
00:06:03
Speaker
I'll start, but I'll let Elliott go. I mean, this is hardly comprehensive, but here are some of the ideas that kind of occur to me. So one, how you experience war is gendered, in part because roles within the military, women are limited from combat roles, right? And so the kinds of roles that women play, and they're consequently the kinds of roles that men play,
00:06:24
Speaker
have in military are different. I think that we have examples of this throughout the readings, which we can go into, but obviously we're reading the stories of, or listening to the stories of nurses. We are listening to activists who are visiting women who have been victims of various kinds of violence and their children have two because of the war. And we have a long list of things that women in 1898 are saying they can do to support the war.
00:06:53
Speaker
We also see in these readings, and of course in the experiences of veterans, the ways in which certain kinds of gendered behavior is valorized in war. Even the idea of valor is kind of a masculine idea. The idea of the warrior is often a very masculinized gendered idea.
00:07:15
Speaker
Um, we hear Janice, I was really struck by, you know, the recruiting pitch that worked on her was that she could go meet 2000 eligible men on at a base. And so these are really, you know, kind of gendered experiences. There are gendered ideas.
00:07:33
Speaker
around what it means to serve. I mean, again, the idea of service for women is often in these kind of support roles that are caring for others, caretaking, nurturing, whereas service for men is about valor and bravery and courage, which are also really gendered, especially in the context of
Personal Reflections on Military Service
00:07:53
Speaker
war. So I think that
00:07:57
Speaker
It's useful to think about, I mean the obvious thing I think people go to are what are the experiences of women in war and how are those different than the experiences of men, either whether they are serving in the military or you know civilians caught up in a conflict, but I also think it's important to think about how
00:08:15
Speaker
men's experiences, you know, how war props up ideas about masculinity. A lot of the Janice's talk in particular is about PTSD and kind of wrestling with the disconnects between maybe ideas about gender and bravery and courage and valor
00:08:31
Speaker
and the experience of being scared, the experience of being conflicted about what you're being asked to do or whatever other reasons you may be experiencing PTSD, those feel to me very tied to gender as well. Wow, that was an impressive answer to Jason's question. I'm not sure I can follow that with such eloquence. I mean, I'm trying to
00:08:58
Speaker
Keep what we're talking about in the context of this, these events happened 50 years ago or more. I was seven in 1971. I have very vague memories of Walter Cronkite speaking on the news and vague memories of the war and what happened in 1975 and all that.
00:09:17
Speaker
But as Leah said, what we were asked to look at, you're seeing women, and I'm just going to focus on the women because that's really who we're talking about here, in different roles. And as Leah said, the different roles are really
00:09:34
Speaker
Complete opposites. The nurse, the second lieutenant in arc in Vietnam is living experiencing a completely different situation than the two people who are the two women who are speaking at the Friendly Broadcast Society in Pennsylvania.
00:09:50
Speaker
after their return trip from Vietnam. Obviously, they have completely different roles. And as Lea said, the second lieutenant, Lieutenant Narke, you know, got into the nursing program and then was decided to go into the nursing corps. I have a colleague from over 30 years ago. It was funny listening to this because she essentially took the same track except in the 90s.
00:10:14
Speaker
and went to Fort Sam Houston and probably had the same kind of instructors. Though my guess is the language used, etcetera, their training was probably quite a bit different than what Second Lieutenant Narke experienced in the late 60s before she went to Vietnam.
00:10:32
Speaker
The other thing that struck me, just kind of referencing this in today's terms, the two activists, of course, the amazing part of our society is they had the ability to travel to Vietnam unrestricted, without fear of coming back to the United States and being persecuted.
00:10:52
Speaker
If you look at what's going on in Russia and the Russian Federation right now, if you criticize the war there at all, it's 10 to 15 years in prison. In fact, they just sent one journalist sent him to 20 years in prison last week. So that kind of situation did not exist here in the United States, and it still doesn't exist today, fortunately.
Women's Patriotism in Historical Contexts
00:11:14
Speaker
And I'm not saying there aren't difficulties between our government and the press and male or female reporters, but the situation certainly was conducive to her and her colleague Pat and the other international members traveling to both South and North Vietnam in 1971, really without fear of being in danger at all.
00:11:37
Speaker
Yeah, that's really interesting to hear both of you talk about this because the experience of the gendered experience of war that were present in the documents just kept washing. If you listen to them or read them, they keep washing over you.
00:11:55
Speaker
again and again and again. Gender is not removed, but it's actually central. And it's interesting to hear how over the decades scholars have talked about these things, right? Because 50 years ago, Elliot, you know, if we were talking about these things, gender wouldn't have been central to our conversation.
00:12:13
Speaker
50 years later now, you go back and read the same documents and gender just sits right in the middle of how we think about these things because it's so important for understanding these experiences.
00:12:27
Speaker
We had lots of different experiences we were looking at. Let's go back to 1898 to get us started. For those of you who are not familiar with the Spanish-American War, we are not going to go over that here. Rather, you should go back and listen to the podcast about the Spanish-American War. Instead, let's jump right into the document itself.
00:12:52
Speaker
Can you tell me, Elliot, the framing of this document? What's happening in this newspaper article by Carolyn Halstead? Yeah, so it appears to me that Carolyn Halstead is framing what may come in the event that the US military becomes engaged in Cuba. And I'm assuming the Philippines, but I think she's focusing here more on Cuba.
00:13:19
Speaker
There's some very interesting, I mean I took some notes and I can just, I'd like to just go through what I wrote down here. The first thing that's jumped out at me is there's of course no mention of what I'm going to talk about a little later of any kind of unit family readiness group and the spouses and children of the soldiers who are serving in the different units being taken care of by a government entity or agency. That's non-existent.
00:13:46
Speaker
There's at least one female who is reference to that she's willing to take up arms and fight, which kind of jumped out at me.
00:13:57
Speaker
The mention of the hospital ship, what a forward-looking person, because as you may know, I mean, I'm not an expert in this in World War I and World War II, but I know during Desert Storm and Desert Shield, Desert Shield, Desert Storm, they had these ships on alert. And then even most recently during the pandemic, you may remember, I believe there was a Navy vessel, hospital vessel sent up to New York to try to help with the COVID pandemic up there. And I don't know how much it was used,
00:14:26
Speaker
That caught my eye that such a ship now exists, and the military has, and perhaps the State Department has something as well, but the military definitely has these vessels that can help. I think the other thing that's important to know or remember is women did not have the right to vote in 1898, and there was no mass communication. So there's no radio, of course, no television, and the newspaper is the primary way, and word of mouth, oral communication.
00:14:55
Speaker
is the primary way people are communicating with each other when this article is written. So yeah, I feel like I'm reading someone who's saying, like, we are real citizens, and we can really participate fully in the civic life of this country. And if this country is going to go to war by God, we're there with them, right? And it's our kind of patriotic duty to do that.
Home Front Contributions
00:15:17
Speaker
And the fact that you brought up the fact that they couldn't vote, I mean, not even 20 years later during World War I,
00:15:23
Speaker
Suffragists are going to make the case that they are ready for full citizenship and the right to vote because of their support for the war effort. Now, some of those same suffragists found the peace group that we are going to talk about later.
00:15:39
Speaker
So she's kind of listing, here are all the things that women can do, right? And she's also, I think really importantly, starting by talking about the Daughters of the American Revolution, Daughters of 1812, the Society of the Cincinnati, right? These are all these kind of like groups of women that are making a claim on kind of their real Americanness because they can trace their ancestors who fought in the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812.
00:16:03
Speaker
And I, you know, because I'm a super nerd, I mean, that's part of what the DAR is doing in this period. They're also saying we're going to claim our real heritage because there's this massive wave of immigrants and they're maybe not real Americans, but we are because our ancestors fought. But they're kind of saying, you know,
00:16:19
Speaker
We are going to participate in life fully. And then there's something kind of charming about the ways in which they're like, we can do this. We can help as nurses. That's women's natural role in caretakers. We can help collect supplies and distribute them. We can raise money to do that. Maybe the government doesn't even need to pay for that. We can do that. That's something that they're very excited to do.
00:16:41
Speaker
Um, they can run homes for injured veterans. And I, this to me, I don't know if this is as direct in the reading, but it feels like it's kind of threaded throughout, which is like women's job is to keep up morale, right? We've got to like stay strong and support the troops.
00:16:57
Speaker
So I think that I was also really struck, Elliot, by the one person who's like, I'll take up arms. And everyone's like, that's such a wild and ludicrous claim. We're just going to rush right past that. That was an unimaginable thing. But I just think that there is this kind of desire to make a claim in public space and make a claim in civic life.
00:17:16
Speaker
And this has been, I mean, one of the gendered aspects of war, right, is that for a long time it was like, women don't fight. Do they, you know, how full as a citizen can you be if you're not fully participating in kind of one of the most serious things that a government can participate in, which is to go to war. And so women are kind of negotiating this.
00:17:36
Speaker
you know, they are negotiating it in a very unquestioning way. Like these women are not saying, should we be fighting? Should we go to war? And there was a really robust anti-war movement in 1898. So, but I find that that's kind of the charmingness and there's something really pathetic in that it
00:17:55
Speaker
like, creates pathos, right, for these women trying to make this claim in public life, in an American life, and by listing all the ways they can support the war effort and be taken seriously. That's, they're talking to men, right? Maybe they're talking to women, too, like, hey, women, step up. But they're also talking to men who are not letting them fully participate in civic life.
00:18:16
Speaker
Yeah, this is kind of an interesting moment, right? Because the unspoken portions of this document are speaking to racial tensions and anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States. By, as you say, saying what makes a patriotic American, you're also attempting to distinguish who is not a patriotic American. And of course, tracing back one's roots is one of the ways that these groups do that and continue to do that.
00:18:45
Speaker
into the into the present day but what's really important about this when we talk about gender in the experience of war is often we talk about war we talk about battles you know in the war itself but there's this whole other apparatus that makes war possible and that's the home front and what these women are doing even before the war breaks out is
00:19:10
Speaker
articulating the language of war. They are setting a framework for broad citizen support for this war, and they're articulating where women fit in this larger process, as you've already said.
00:19:28
Speaker
But this home front piece is really important and often gets left out of the conversation. We've been talking about caregiving, how it's been gendered over the last century or so, and the ways that institutions have, or the institution of the military has begun to play a role in all of this, although it sounds like not a complete role yet, that this is still an unfolding process.
00:19:54
Speaker
This struck me as I was listening to all of this because I was thinking back to Lieutenant Colonel Janice Narke and the speech that she gave to commemorate the Women's Vietnam War Memorial because of course it centers caregiving in the statue itself.
00:20:19
Speaker
But also in her speech, she spoke to a different element of the caregiving, which was really important for her in all of her comments in her oral history. And the phrase she used in her speech was that it's time for the caregivers to heal.
00:20:37
Speaker
And this is yet another thing that doesn't get talked about enough or very much or certainly more than it used to but not enough Which is the experience of people like nurses and and she was a nurse in the Vietnam War with undiagnosed PTSD for decades after this and so I thought maybe we could turn to Janice narc and learn a little bit about
Nursing and PTSD in Vietnam
00:21:01
Speaker
her life. So Leah, I'm just wondering how
00:21:04
Speaker
having listened to her, what your thoughts were on her story? I mean, she was a great storyteller, so I recommend everyone to actually take the time to watch her oral history. And, you know, I think she presents herself as like, I'm just an ordinary, normal person. I'm like, you're a pretty remarkable person in a lot of ways. So she, you know, is in nursing school. They're recruiting in Vietnam 1968.
00:21:30
Speaker
She buys the pitch that she's never going to have to go to Vietnam. In fact, she gets to go to Europe where she would really like to go. She's going to meet all these eligible men. I am fascinated by the fact. I mean, I'm kind of disgusted, honestly, by the fact that that's like the recruiter pitch. But she's like, this sounds like a grand adventure, right?
00:21:48
Speaker
But she spends a little short time in Wisconsin kind of on a base dealing with folks who are medevaced out of Vietnam, but then she's deployed to Vietnam and she's in country, right? So she is working in hospitals. I was struck by how seldom she actually talked about what that work looked like.
00:22:09
Speaker
I just have to imagine how gruesome a lot of work that was and how many people she would have cared for that passed away. She talks about one patient who died. She talks about the first patient that dies that she treats. So that later when, you know, 20 years later after her time in Vietnam, you know, she's starting to kind of recognize PTSD in herself. So it's interesting. She's still kind of, there's like this kind of silence in her own narrative about the actual
00:22:38
Speaker
really hard and difficult parts. I mean, she talks about times when she was, you know, their base was being attacked or something like that and things like that. But she's always telling it in kind of a self-deprecating way, like, oh, I was just so naive. I had no idea.
00:22:56
Speaker
And she's very plucky, I guess, is a thing that's striking. She does say, it's interesting because the time elapsed is hard to read how long she's in Vietnam. But when you looked at the notes on the Library of Congress website, she was serving for six years. And then she comes home. She says, basically for a year after I got home, I did nothing. I went hiking and fishing and just kind of skiing and enjoying the mountains. So that tells you already kind of the need for this
00:23:24
Speaker
care, this decompression. But yeah, it's when she's being redeployed during the first Iraq war. And the, she talks a lot about the holidays, kind of just sitting on base waiting for
00:23:43
Speaker
something to happen, right? They're all kind of ready. And she says one of the few things that kind of feels explicitly more political. I was also struck by how apolitical most of her comments were, which was, she kind of says, you know, I just, like war doesn't need to exist. Like war always does this, war causes harm, war is bad, right? And this kind of, and I'm just so,
00:24:08
Speaker
There's kind of a hint of some anger about the fact that someone will get killed, people will be injured. And she says later, reflecting on her career, especially around the outbreak of the Second Iraq War in Afghanistan, if women were just in charge, they could negotiate their way out of this. The testosterone is what drives us to war.
00:24:33
Speaker
So there it's very interesting, but she anyway, her own PTSD is kind of triggered. And she describes depression, right? And the fact that she realized there were a lot of unresolved
00:24:48
Speaker
feelings about her time in Vietnam and that she needed to talk to others, she needed to write to recover some of those memories and process with them and to kind of acknowledge that that was the feelings and that she suspected that many other caretakers had this unresolved
00:25:07
Speaker
you know, psychological and emotional harm. And that, you know, I also will say I'm the daughter and the granddaughter of nurses. And nurses don't get taught this kind of self care, right? They are their values around service, there's values around, you know, you're there to help heal others. And so that resonated a lot for me as someone who's grown up around a lot of nurses that
00:25:36
Speaker
I don't know. It's like nurses are like veterans in that way. They don't always talk about what they've actually seen. It's very hard to talk to non-nurses. My mother worked in emergency rooms and worked in heart surgeries and things. And getting specific details about what was traumatizing about those experiences is very difficult, let alone in a theater of war.
00:25:58
Speaker
the language she used, I found to be really evocative, she used the phrase, individual prices. I don't know if that stuck out to you, but she said that all of us who were there paid our own individual prices for being there, and it spoke to
00:26:15
Speaker
The ways that war inscribes itself far beyond the battlefront, right? Elliot, you're talking about families back home on the home front. We're talking, of course, about the veterans themselves who served on the front. We're talking about nurses and caregivers who are there. Everybody pays a price for all of this.
00:26:39
Speaker
Oh, I mean, the thoughts that just come to mind are, you know, it's service. You know, many of my colleagues who I served with as second lieutenants, they decided to leave the military after four or five years and have went on to have very successful careers in business, making much more money than I ever made when I was on active duty.
00:27:03
Speaker
And I'm not saying that's bad, not at all. But for those that serve, you know, 10, 15, 20 years or longer, and it's a volunteer force now, they're doing that for some fairly, you know, unique reasons. And not everyone's the same, of course, but it's service.
00:27:24
Speaker
You know, my father lost almost two years of my brother's life. He never got to experience, you know, I don't know what that must. I often think about what it must have been like for my dad to show up in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. I don't believe my mother knew he was coming because he didn't he only had $5. He was on a Greyhound bus from Pennsylvania. And what was that like?
00:27:46
Speaker
There was no advanced warning. There was no flags or celebration. The unit was in Pennsylvania. The whole geographical aspect that I mentioned earlier. And then my brother, who's around two, what was his reaction? And what was their relationship? Because I didn't come along until nine years later.
00:28:07
Speaker
That's always something that for the folks who are listening that are not in the military or don't have anyone they know serve in the military, and I use this a lot, less than one half of one percent of our fellow Americans are in uniform.
00:28:23
Speaker
And that is a very small number.
Peace Efforts and Activism
00:28:25
Speaker
So not many people have friends who are veterans or know people who are on active duty. Sure, there are, of course, but the vast majority of our fellow Americans do not know anyone who has worn the uniform and served, whether in Vietnam, the Korean War, some World War II veterans are still alive, and then Desert Shield, Desert Storm, and of course, the global war on terror after 2001. So, I mean, that's what I would add to this.
00:28:55
Speaker
Leah, you brought up something really interesting and important, I think, where where Janice Stark ends her conversation with which is negotiation and the role of women potentially in forging a new way for thinking about international diplomacy and the importance of more women being in positions of power. She's very explicit about that. And I think that's
00:29:18
Speaker
That's a great connection to another group of women who were involved in the Vietnam War from a very different perspective. And this is the third set of documents, which are actually
00:29:33
Speaker
recording of women reporting on their experience in Vietnam. And this is the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, which was a, it's a nonprofit organization that was founded right after World War One by Jane Addams, who's, if you've listened to previous podcasts, whose name will be familiar to you.
00:29:55
Speaker
And this is an international organization focused on, of course, peace and freedom. And this group of women had just come, had been in Delhi, India, at a peace conference, and then had gone to Vietnam, both Saigon and Hanoi, as representatives of this organization.
00:30:19
Speaker
Leah and Elliot, I'm wondering if you can give us your impressions or thoughts on what you heard from these women when they were on site. Yeah, I think...
00:30:34
Speaker
A couple of things jumped out without like recounting everything that they talked about. So one is, you know, first they arrive in South Vietnam and they talk about how surreal it is to be flying out from the same into the same airport that like bombers are taking off. Right. But also, and I think that they're, you know, they are there to bear witness. I think that's the large idea that really
00:30:56
Speaker
is a takeaway. So in South Vietnam, they want to bear witness back to Americans that there is a large Vietnamese peace movement, right? And that it's cross-class. They talk about, you know, there's educated folks and there are peasants that are, and there are lots of women and of course then lots of Buddhist monks who are engaged in the peace movement. So right, this idea that there is an international pressure from below for leaders of
00:31:24
Speaker
Vietnam and of the United States to negotiate a peace and then they travel to North Vietnam and they are met with a delegation that tours them around to kind of show the damage of the bombing campaigns and the war in North Vietnam and the real harm caused by different kinds of weapons and they talk about you know women who are in prison orphanages of children who are either their parents have been killed in the war or they're
00:31:54
Speaker
you know, the children of a Vietnamese woman and an American soldier who's been given up and abandoned. And then they talk about the particular damage of chemical warfare. And there you really get, I mean, to me that was the most compelling part of the talk, but this need to bear witness, right? Like let's look in the face at what the cost of war is.
00:32:19
Speaker
and who our government, you know, in our government's name, you know, what harm is being done and violence is being perpetrated. So the kind of seriousness, I mean, there's something about where you can be like, oh, these kind of do-gooder, Quaker, hippie ladies going to Vietnam. Like, what do they think they can really accomplish? But I think the seriousness of their intent and that
00:32:44
Speaker
very real desire to to bear witness is is really striking from from this and that you know the kind of moral urgency of that and I think this this is like the larger question of women in peace movements but kind of women's particular role to
00:33:03
Speaker
to be the keepers of that morality, I think, in society, right? If men are gonna go off to war and they're gonna kill each other and their testosterone's gonna be out of control, right? Like, that women have to remind us of kind of our higher and better moral values. So those are some of the things that struck me in that listening. Again, it's tough to follow, Leah, because that was a very articulate answer. I would add,
00:33:45
Speaker
experience with security assistance when I worked in a couple embassies is when she mentions that 10% of the security assistance budget for Vietnam, for South Vietnam, is going to the South Vietnamese, for lack of a better word, Department of Interior, or Ministry of Interior and Minister for Correctional Affairs.
00:33:49
Speaker
I was struck by
00:34:08
Speaker
For our listeners out there, the security assistance programming that she references is those programs are still alive and well. They're being implemented all over the world by the Department of Defense and sometimes by the Department of State.
00:34:26
Speaker
and various countries receive more money or less money than others, and there's lots of reasons for that, which I won't go into. The other thing that struck me again, and I mentioned this at the beginning of our conversation this morning, it's important to remember there were only three news networks at the time, ABC, CBS, NBC, and radio. No internet, no instantaneous communication.
00:34:51
Speaker
So what these two women and the delegation they were traveling with did, in my mind, was extremely important in order to bring back the message of actually what's going on on the ground. And, you know, Second Lieutenant Nark would not be in a position to say most of what these two women said because that would be completely out of her lane. And also she's much younger. I don't know how old these two women were who testified or spoke,
00:35:20
Speaker
My guess is they're a little older, perhaps even a couple decades older, it's hard to tell. So that was important and then I also recognized that they were having difficulty getting their message out. That the news wires in Vietnam, probably AP and the others, you know, I'm not an expert, but were not picking up their stories, though it was interestingly being published in the newspapers in South Vietnam.
00:35:46
Speaker
and how much of it actually got back to the states and made it into the LA Times or New York Times or other papers of record. I guess that would make for a good research project, but I just don't know.
00:35:57
Speaker
It's interesting because they're talking about a grassroots movement, that this is like, OK, maybe we can't rely on the New York Times. And I mean, there are dozens of news agencies at this time. So there are maybe only three broadcast networks, but a lot more robust newspaper reporting. But I do think that they're saying, you have to go back to your PTA. You have to go to politicize every institution in American life that you are connected to.
00:36:21
Speaker
and demand that your government listen to the 71% plus of Americans who actually want this war to be over. So yeah, it's interesting because their theory of change is really a bottom up. That feels
00:36:37
Speaker
It's very remarkable, right? And that it's an international movement to do this. That part's really inspiring. So yeah, I just am thinking about how they imagine that this message will get shared and spread, and who is responsible for ending the war, and that everybody kind of has a role to play in delivering that message up. Not related to that comment, though, is
00:37:02
Speaker
Of the three readings, this is the only one that really touches on the actual violence of war. And so that really is striking, just the physical harm that is done to people's bodies, to their homes, to their livelihoods.
00:37:19
Speaker
To me, it's a big absence in Janice Nark's oral history is that she's not really talking about that, even though she has PTSD from it.
War's Impact on Civilians
00:37:28
Speaker
Even though she is a nurse, that's what she's there to do.
00:37:35
Speaker
you know, you want to question like, why is that something that she's not talking about? And it may be just that that's the kind of conversation she's dealt with in other spaces. This is not what she wants to talk about now. But there's something, I think there is something kind of political in that fact, even though she's otherwise presents what she's talking about as pretty apolitical, because I think that that is the real cost of war is and and and
00:38:03
Speaker
it's important to be reminded that that's what's happening. So anyway, it's a good counterpoint because the other piece is really not in any very particular way. And really, this is also the other piece that talks about the effect on
00:38:18
Speaker
the civilian population in Vietnam, right? That this is not just the harm that's done to American soldiers and American families, but that this is the cost of war for the civilians in Vietnam who are just caught up in this unprecedented bombing campaign. I don't, yeah, anyway.
Conclusion and Resources
00:38:38
Speaker
And this gets to that concept of the home front, right? So, you know, we were talking about the home front in the US during these wars, but the home front in Vietnam is also the front, right? So everybody is affected by this. And the stories that these women are telling
00:39:03
Speaker
are not just stories of soldiers, right? As you've just said, Leah, they recognize that the war filters down into all facets of society. And what I found really profound was they were meeting with these women's groups, these peace groups, and
00:39:22
Speaker
what they were seeing in that grassroots is that women were taking leadership in Vietnam as well. And as you say, these international connections are so important to framing the peace movements. And I think in some senses, even though she doesn't talk about the violence or the physical cost of war, I think this is kind of where Janice Narke and these peace groups come together, which is
00:39:49
Speaker
These women's groups calling to task these governments for going to war. Yeah, that's actually a really good point, you know, and I mean, I just thinking about Janus narc like
00:40:04
Speaker
You know, the original, the wall, the memorial didn't include women's service at all, right? Because it's only listing the names of those killed in combat. It's an unbelievably powerful monument. But then there's these efforts to kind of fix the memorial in the next 20 years. And she's there at the time at which they're going to build, you know, the statue that commemorates, you know, nurses and other women who are in support roles.
00:40:27
Speaker
in the war. So she's there to hold government accountable in this certain kind of way around remembering women's service. Yeah. Well, I realize we've been here a little longer than we had initially planned because the conversation has been so rich and I feel like we could sit here for another hour talking about these things because these are incredible rich documents and I do encourage all the listeners to go listen to these things, watch these things, read these things because
00:40:56
Speaker
We are just touching the surface of them and they're deeply profound documents of these histories, so I encourage you all to have a look at them. Leah, Elliot, thank you for joining us today and participating in this podcast. We will have you back for other podcasts in the series, so we appreciate it. Thanks for having me. Thanks for having me.
00:41:21
Speaker
Thanks for listening to Justice and War in American History. Please stay tuned for our next episode, which you can find on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, or through any of your favorite podcast providers. Please be sure to rate the podcast and to be in touch with us if you have any questions or feedback. You can find more information about this podcast and the broader justice and war project at justiceandwarseminar.org.
00:41:45
Speaker
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