For her capstone project, Emily Anderson created a historical fiction novel focusing upon the experiences of four women during the Vietnam War. The piece is a collection of four fictional short stories, each based on a close analysis of oral history interviews from four women who served as nurses at the 7th Surgical Hospital or the 12th Evacuation Hospital on the U.S. military base camp at Cu Chi. Each woman’s lived experience helps render a fiction that addresses important historical themes. The imagined Frances “Bobbie” Meyer, for example, captures the intense sexual pressure and violence women withstood during their service. Mary Hunt’s story recreates the world of Vietnam at war, the overarching military structure, the experience of life on base and life in the field. The pieces are grounded in the historical record and enriched with secondary scholarship on the Vietnam War, the women’s movement, and the socio-cultural fabric of 1950s and 1960s America.
Mortar Fire Skies is an experiment in this vein, an alternative mode of historical storytelling. It recreates the Vietnam War from the perspective of the American women who served, the approximately 5,000 female nurses of the Army Nurse Corps (ANC) who served in-conflict between the years 1962 and 1973. Their Vietnam experience is a reflection of the larger national trends that characterized the American female experience of the 1960s: despite military messaging and minor victories that insinuated equality, women were held by the unforgiving, traditional gender role boundaries under which they had been socialized.
Women were integral to the Vietnam War effort – and deeply impacted by it. Because they were not fighting in the field, female nurses have been denied as having an active combat role in Vietnam. Yet the women who served on frontline bases treated active combat wounds; their bases withstood active combat attacks. The violent world army nurses came to learn, and the violence they directly experienced, meant that theirs was an active combat role. It needs to be understood as such. Secondly, this piece illuminates an American society in transition, as the women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s struggled to redefine traditional gender roles and bring women into political and economic parity with men. This is a struggle that continues in our present time. Mortar Fire Skies thus serves a dual national need. It gives current and future generations an understanding of the historical underpinnings that shaped the contemporary fourth-wave feminist movement. Most importantly, it elevates women in to the Vietnam War narrative, writing them into a history from which they have previously been undermined and excluded.