I’m currently reading ‘…and a hard rain fell’ by John Ketwig about his experiences during the Vietnam war. As he described his rather brutal training I realised I’d never really seen this part of the military experience described from a female perspective.
I realise women weren’t drafted and weren’t assigned to combat roles but what was the initial training period like for female volunteers? I can’t imagine it was the same brutalisation process male recruits went through but what was it like?
Descriptions of other eras or countries are fine, it just happens that I’ve read the above book and previously watched Full Metal Jacket. Yes I realise FMJ isn’t a documentary.
Be gentle, I’m neither American nor have I ever been in the military. I have watched Hot Shots though.
The great majority of women involved during the era were nurses. (Cite) So we’re dominantly talking about volunteers that already had professional medical certification and entered the military as officers.
There was some involvement of the Women’s Army Corps and Women’s Air Force in Vietnam. Some of those were enlistees but all were volunteers. There was no draft for women. They names should drop an important hint. Women, who weren’t nurses, still only served in sex segregated parts of their given branch of the military. They were largely responsible for their own training instead of going through initial training with men who were expected to be able to fight even in support roles. The end of those separate women’s corps and integration of women into the rest of the force didn’t happen until after the withdrawal of US forces from Vietnam.
A friend of mine joined the Army in the mid-70s. From my recollection of what she said, the aim of Basic was to accustom the the recruits to doing everything communally, and to think in terms of the needs of a team rather than their own goals. There was some humiliation involved (I remember her saying that they were made to wax the barracks floor using tampons), but no overt brutalization. IIRC they did receive some small-arms training, but no exposure to grenades, mortars, &c.
She ended up a pharmacy tech at a hospital near the East German border. She said that since the Reds would overrun the hospital long before it could be evacuated, their plan was to clean out the pharmacy and head for the hills; I never did find out whether she was serious.
I would look more on the Vietnamese side for experiences of women joining the army and serving as front-line combat troops, due to the numbers involved. For example Vietnamese Women at War by Sandra C. Taylor, and Even the Women Must Fight by Thanh and Turner contain many interviews.
The OP says nothing about US women specifically, except insofar as the book she read was by an American, and the British film she saw was about Americans. I read it as, she wants to know about women’s experiences joining the military during the Vietnam war, and their subsequent training. Granted, this is going to be potentially a lot different between the different sides, and not only for the women.
Yes, sorry, I wrote my OP quickly and it was a little ambiguous. My question was inspired by the book I’m currently reading, and therefore the Vietnam War era from the American perspective, but if people have information on the training and military experience of women (not combat per se) from different nations or periods of time that’s also OK.
As I say I’ve read and watched material about the ‘boot camp’ experience but it has all been, not surprisingly, about men going through it and I realised I’d never read anything from a female perspective and I was wondering how it differed.
Offfff…just remembered, I did read ‘Love My Rifle More Than You’ by Kayla Williams, who served in the US Army in Iraq, I don’t recall any particular descriptions of her training though.
I have a friend who was a lawyer in the Air Force Judge Advocate General office. She mentioned once that she had to qualify for small arms training. This was not a problem for her; she grew up on a farm and had at least a passing familiarity with firearms.
