Incountry Women: A Closer Look

This is a paper I delivered in Spring 1998 at the Popular Culture Association convention.  It is based on a previous, more primitive version of my website at  http://www.illyria.com/vnwomen.html    Also Yahoo has now added a category for women in Vietnam.

© Marilyn Knapp Litt, 1998
Permission to reprint in part or whole is granted.

This is about a marriage of two subjects that interest me, Vietnam and computers. I’m going to talk today about what information there is on the Internet about women who were InCountry. I promise not to use technical jargon. You don’t need to take notes because I have a handout with all the Internet address information.

Someone said the Internet is like a library — with all the books thrown on the floor. To find the information you want in this library is not simple. There are indices online which help, called "search engines." These are websites where you enter words that you think would be on the websites you are looking for. It requires a bit of luck and guesswork.

The most popular index on the Internet is yahoo.com. Yahoo is one big index, but it also divided into smaller indices by topic. To research women in Vietnam, you would go to the Vietnam Veterans index and search on the word "women." You will get this result: Found 0 matches. So if you rely on the Internet’s most popular search engine, you would find nothing about women who served in Vietnam. I wonder how many students have stopped here and changed their term paper topic? Yahoo’s librarians are selective about what they index. They review each website and decide whether to add it. The idea is to make Yahoo more useful by making it less comprehensive, but on this topic, Yahoo is no use.

A search engine, such as altavista.com, takes another approach and tries to index every page on the Internet. If you go to Alta Vista and search for any website with the words women and Vietnam, the result will be, as of this month, approximately 60,000 hits. That is, Alta Vista found 60,000 pages with the words "women" and "Vietnam." Before you get excited, unfortunately there are a lot of reasons this word combination would appear that have nothing to do with the topic you are searching. From my research online, I estimate there are fewer than 200 useful pages among these 60,000. You can use tricks such as searching using the word "near," rather than the word "and." "Near" looks for the two words within ten words of each other. "Women near Vietnam" gives you 5,000 pages, which is still not very helpful. If you review two pages a minute, it would take over 40 hours.

It takes patience and persistence to find these 200 pages. By searching on different word combinations and date ranges and doing searches over the past three and a half years, I have found maybe half of what is out there. This is not including online databases. There are websites with databases, mostly newspapers with archives which charge a small fee per article, but I have done little research through them.

I’ve tried to bring a little bit of order to this chaos and make the information more useful with my own website which describes the pages I found and takes you to them. You might be interested in some background on why I did this.

I became interested in Vietnam after seeing a play in January, 1993 based on the book "Shrapnel in the Heart." You are probably familiar with this book by Laura Palmer. It is a collection of poems and letters left at the Wall and interviews with the family and friends who left them. Before seeing the play I hadn’t read anything about Vietnam since the war. I fell into that category of people that Tim O’Brien describes as saying "The war is over, over, over." My afternoon at the theater made me want to make amends for not noticing, not listening, and I suppose most of all for not caring anymore after the war about the people we sent and their families.

The most moving part of the play for me was the poetry of a nurse called "Dusty." She was a real person who was cut off from anyone she could talk to about Vietnam. At the time I saw this play, I subscribed to the Prodigy online service. I was accustomed to going online to find out information and get answers to my questions, whatever the subject. People also used Prodigy to find a sympathetic listener. As I left the theater I thought, "It’s too bad this women doesn’t have a computer, because then she could talk to other women vets."

There was, and is, an online discussion on Prodigy about Vietnam. I wanted to learn about the war and I wanted to hear about it from the participants, so I started to hang out online, just listening. In Internet-speak, I was lurking.

On Prodigy, I found out which books the veterans thought told true war stories and started checking them out of the library. One of the first people I met online was a Gulf War veteran and army artillery officer, Brian McNerney, who some of you may know. He has delivered papers at the last three conferences on Tim O’Brien. Brian is now with the Third Infantry Division at Fort Stewart, as part of our Rapid Deployment Force. He would be here today if it were not for Saddam Hussein, as that situation continues to demand a military state of readiness. Brian and I began an online discussion in 1993 about Tim O’Brien, which is still going on.

Prodigy was a good place to learn about the war, but only male veterans. If there were women on Prodigy who served, they were keeping silent. This disappointed me. I had logged on particularly to hear the women who served. Before I saw the play, I hadn’t realized there were women veterans. And even after seeing the play, it was awhile before I discovered they were not all nurses.

In 1994, eighteen months after I saw the play, I finally met a woman veteran online. It was Dusty, the nurse in the play. We began a correspondence that has been very educational to me. I learned right away from her that not only nurses served. I’m still learning.

1995 was the year the Internet became mainstream. Prodigy and America Online added Internet access. This was a new information source and right away I found vietvet.org, Bill McBride’s pioneering website about Vietnam veterans. He has a terrific section on women. There are first person accounts by army personnel , an Air Force nurse, a civil servant, and Red Cross workers. This is what the Internet should be all about, publishing information that might never be made available by the people who publish books and magazines. Unfortunately, at that time I couldn’t find much beyond Bill McBride’s pages.

The more people used the Internet, the more they saw it as a medium for their message and I am no exception. In January 1996, I learned how to create web pages and became the webmaster where I work. My work is fun, but creativity is only given so much license at a federal agency. I wanted to do a personal website and as some fans had created fan websites for their favorite authors, I did one on Tim O’Brien. Having done that, I thought why limit myself to well known authors? Dusty had e-mailed me copies of her poems at my insistence, and I thought her work should have a wider audience. So I created a website for her and then asked permission. She admitted later she wanted to say no, but didn’t have the heart after I had done the work.

It was this poetry website that brought me into contact for the first time with other women who served in Vietnam. When they signed her guest book, I kept their e-mail addresses, to send them a notice whenever I added poems to the website. And as I surfed the net researching what little I could find on incountry women, I would add any e-mail addresses I found to my list. I’ve spammed my share of people!

One of my misapprehensions about cyberspace was that it would be easy for these women to find each other online. However, the same factors that conspire to keep them isolated, the small number who served and their general unwillingness to discuss their service with casual acquaintances, also worked online to keep them apart. There was no easy way for them to find each other.

At the end of 1996, I decided to drop the Prodigy service, and so had to find somewhere else that Dusty and I could keep our discussion going with other participants. There were e-mail discussion groups on the Internet, on every conceivable subject, including Vietnam, but I could find none about women who were in Vietnam. So I decided to start one. I had my nucleus of e-mail addresses of women who might want to participate. I had a website where I could publicize the discussion and I had the expertise to learn the software and provide technical support to a group of users.

The InCountry women discussion began in December 1996 with about a dozen participants. My intent was to provide a comfortable environment for women to discuss their service with each other and anyone who was interested. The list has one rule. You must be civil. No topic is out of bounds, but it is not a free speech zone. I think this has worked well. The participants like the non-threatening atmosphere and the members go out of there way to welcome everyone, even the guys who show up. We have over eighty members, representing most occupations that women filled in Vietnam. I don’t run it by myself. It is a triumvirate. Ann Kelsey, who is giving the next panel, and Dusty, who is not here, share the duties with me. Everyone on this morning’s panels I met online.

The list has academics on it and they are made to feel welcome. What is said on the list must stay on the list, unless an individual gives permission otherwise. These rules promote candid conversation and if nothing else, a researcher will get much background and learn what sources are available. The InCountry women are experts at their literature. It is seldom that a book or article is mentioned that someone hasn’t already read or been the source for.

The biggest surprise for me is how helpful the list has been to the women who were InCountry. I started it so I could learn, but it as also been of service to them. It is a safety valve as well as a safe place and it is gratifying to see someone discover their feelings are not unique and that they don’t have to provide a long explanation. The people listening just get it.

About a year ago as I was searching for information online, and making notes of where everything was for future reference, I thought it might be useful to make this information more accessible by putting my notes online. So I created a new website, "Women in Vietnam." It is averaging about 900 visitors a month, not many in Internet terms, but respectable for a topic, which sadly, is of limited interest to most.

The main purpose of this website is to bring together links to other online resources. For the novices here let me explain that if an area of text is underlined in blue, you can click on it to go to a new page. The underlined area is called a link.

At the top of the page is a link to an announcements page, where I put events like this one, veteran’s gatherings for women, and requests from researchers. Next is a rant about Yahoo not putting my website on their index. Feel free to drop by and send them a complaint.

Next on my page is a link to vietvet.org which I described earlier as having essays from a number of women. I designed the page keeping in mind what my misconceptions about women in Vietnam were. So I don’t start off with information about the largest category of women, military nurses. I divide the occupations into categories, beginning with Special Services Department of Defense. Other than vietvet.org, I have found only one short newspaper interview with a woman in Special Services.

I give a short description of what I am linking to and mention the name of the person interviewed, where applicable. Everything on a website, unless it is in a database, or is restricted by a password or by special text, is eventually indexed. Webbots crawl all the pages of all the world’s websites, collecting every word, including names and report back to a search engine with their data. I promised nothing technical, but I couldn’t resist.

If someone searches on the name of a friend or their own name, they just might find it on this website. For the same reason, I have a list of unit names. If a Donut Dolly searches "Copter Corner," I have it listed along with all the other colorful names for Red Cross recreation areas. I got mail from a person who said my page is the only website that mentions their Evac, so I have plans to expand that list. There is a guest book where I encourage visitors to leave a message if they are looking for someone as again the name will end up indexed eventually. The website and guest book are small, but at least a half dozen people have been reunited through it. Women have also found their missing friends through the discussion list.

To continue. Other military is next category-meaning "military except nurses" and I link there to a Spec. 5 with her own website.

Correspondents -a woman has a website who worked as a stringer for a press service. She was a military dependent who was raising three young children in Saigon — well worth reading about.

Civilian nurses - there is an interview with a woman who helped with Operation Babylift.

Entertainers - there is an interview with Chris Noel.

Red Cross Workers -there are only a couple of links here, unfortunately. At some point I would like to do a page on the Red Cross.

It gives you an idea of the paucity of information when I say each category has one link, but in the aggregate you can learn quite a bit from these websites.

Military Nurses - there are about ten links for military nurses. You see how I have put these in an order to confound people’s expectations. I expect students to use this website as a reference. If they come with the idea that they will do a paper on nurses, and they don’t know other women served, they get a short course as they page down to find Army Nurse Corps. I didn’t want them to stop with nurses and I hope they will realize there were also Air Force and Navy nurses in Vietnam.

The most complete information you will find online is bibliographies. I do one for military nurses and I link to four other bibliographies and they are comprehensive.

You will find links to a list of the women who died in Vietnam, civilian and military, as well as where to find the women on the Wall. I have included other miscellaneous links, such as sculptor Glenna Goodacres’s website where she discusses who the figures represent on the Vietnam Women’s Memorial. I interviewed a woman recently who was a civilian employee of the Air Force in Saigon. When I asked her if she had gone to the dedication of the statue, she said it was for the nurses. I intend to send her a printout of Goodacre’s website because she didn’t quite believe me.

All in all there is not a lot of information online, but I believe I have found most of it. There is more material I need to link to, but I only do updates about every six months. This is only one of a series of pages I do, not all Vietnam related, and it is tedious winnowing the 60,000 links to find which are pertinent.

As you can tell from the description, I am just making other people’s material easier to find. I hope at some point to provide some original material, but have so far been unsuccessful in persuading women to provide it.

My next project is a website for the book "Shrapnel in the Heart." I am working with the author, Laura Palmer, and some of the people who she interviewed. We hope that it will be something special online because it is a very special book. Look for it at www.illyria.com on Memorial Day.

Women in Vietnam	Many Women Served	Red Cross
Military Nurses	Military Women	Get Back in Touch
Bibliographies	In Memoriam	Free Monthly Newsletter
Videos/Stuff to Buy	Locater Service/Remarks	Health Stuff
Photo Tours	Books	Help for Students

Other Important Websites:
The Truth About Caroline ~ a  really good Young Adult book by my niece, Stacey M. Lane Grosh
Remember Oklahoma City ~  The Civil Service and Military will NEVER forget!

Search WWW Search Illyria Search Spencer Group Search Vietnam Veterans

Page last updated June 22, 2006