Last week I revealed the cover of my new book!   

Close Up on War: The Story of Pioneering Photojournalist Catherine Leroy in Vietnam is scheduled for release in early 2021. But it is available now for pre-order.

​Catherine Leroy spent most of her time in Vietnam in the field with U.S. troops. She rarely saw American women, even female journalists who were there at the same time.
 
Plenty  of military and civilian women went to Vietnam War during the war,  but their service and sacrifice was not always appreciated.​

​More than 6,000 military nurses, most of them female, served during the war. Eight women died.

I first learned of former army nurse Diane Carlson Evans when she wrote the forward for my book Pure Grit: How US Military Nurses Survived Battle and Prison Camp in the Pacific. She was instrumental the fight to get a Vietnam Veteran's Memorial constructed in Washington DC.
 
Diane had been born and raised on a dairy farm in rural Minnesota and moved to the city to attend nursing school in Minneapolis, after which she joined the Army Nurse Corps. She arrived in Vietnam in 1968, when she was twenty-two. The blast of heat and the smell of jet fuel hit me first, then the sight of GIs with MI6s and bandoliers of ammunition slung across their strapping chests. ​

Diane knew that her parents would be watching the war unfold on the nightly news. The saw the body bags, helicopters crashing into the jungle, napalm burning villages and civilians running from the flames.

But what they did not see were the nurses in helmets and flak jackets running to the hospitals and treating the men whose torsos and limbs had been ripped open by high-velocity weapons.
 
They did not hear the sound of mortar thuds and rockets piercing our billets and hospital roofs and walls or see us throwing mattresses on top of the patients to protect them from shrapnel.
 
They did not see us hanging blood bags, suctioning tracheotomies, and frantically evacuating patients from the hospital to allow more room for mass casualties.

In Vietnam, I was overwhelmed by the hundreds of our young soldiers, Vietnamese and Montagnard civilians who had been blown apart by heinous weapons of war.
 
I hadn’t realized how much loving the soldiers would make me hate the war. I wanted to know what they were dying for.
 
Two decades after her year-long tour, Diane  founded the Vietnam Nurses Memorial Project, later expanded to include all American women of the Vietnam War. She had no idea it would take seven years of testimony before three federal commissions and two congressional bills to gain permission for a memorial to honor the women she had served with in Vietnam.
 
One man represents the kind of attitude Diane and her fellow veterans encountered. Carter Brown led the federal Commission on Fine Arts, which they hoped to get on their side. But when the group approached him for support, he demurred. Brown said if the committee considered installing a statue honoring women, "then they might find themselves having to consider doing one for the dogs who served."

The 15-foot bronze, designed by sculptor Glenna Goodacre, helps serve the mission of the Vietnam Women’s Memorial Project Foundation, including to promote healing of the 11,000  women, including nurses, other military women and civilians who served.
 
The sculpture also helps educate the public about women's roles in the conflict and helps facilitate research into the after affects of their wartime experiences.
Sources
https://vvmf.wordpress.com/2013/03/20/women-in-wartime-a-nurse-remembers/
https://www.startribune.com/women-in-wartime/130437313/ 
Vietnam Women's Memorial: History of the Vietnam Women's Memorial
Foreword, Diane Carlson Evans, Pure Grit: How American WWII Nurses Survived Battle and Prison Camp in the Pacific 

This past week marked the anniversary of one of the most crucial moments in American civil rights history. February 7, 1942, African Americans launched the Double V Campaign.
 
It started with one man's question. "Should I sacrifice my life to live half American?"
 
And it burgeoned into a force for equal employment opportunity for blacks during World War II, and laid a foundation for the civil rights marches in the 1960s.

​Not Dovey Johnson, who'd grown up in Charlotte, North Carolina. When she tried to apply for the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps, nobody in Charlotte would give her an application.
 
She moved to Washington DC to get her hands on an application. After completed the segregated training, Dovey became one of the first black women commissioned an US Army Officer.
 
Was it coincidence Lieutenant Dovey Johnson was assigned to recruiting duties in Georgia, and North and South Carolina? Maybe, maybe not. But they sent one very determined woman south of the Mason-Dixon line.
 
Dovey feared the small gains black women had made in becoming officers in the army would be lost, unless more black women volunteered.

“That, I determined, would not happen—not on my watch, no matter how tough a sell I had on my hands in pitching a Jim Crow WAAC in the Deep South.” 
​
“Was that opportunity precisely, mathematically, documentable equal to that of whites? probably not. But the WAAC offered a chance I believed would never come again in quite the same way: the chance to advance, to train for careers, to build the kind of future we women wanted for our children, to stand behind the men who were fighting in Europe and North Africa and the Pacific. That mattered most of all. Our boys were dying for freedom, I pointed out in every speech I made. What was segregation compared to that?”

Across the country, many blacks did not share Dovey's enthusiasm. Popular V for victory signs had popped up to cheer the fight against race prejudice, aggression and tyranny in Europe and Asia.   
 
One black man, James G. Thompson, wrote a letter to a prominent black newspaper,
The Pittsburgh Courier.
 
Thompson wrote in part: Being an American of dark complexion and some 26 years, these questions flash through my mind: “Should I sacrifice my life to live half American?”  
 
“Will things be better in the next generation for the peace to follow?”   
“Will Colored Americans suffer still the indignities that have been so heaped upon them in the past?”
 
These and other questions need answering: I want to know and I believe every colored American who is thinking, wants to know.
 
Thompson went on to suggest doubling the V for Victory.
 
The first V for victory over our enemies from without, the second V for victory over our enemies from within.  For surely those who perpetuate these ugly prejudices here are seeking to destroy our democratic form of government just as surely as the Axis forces.

The Pittsburgh Courier had swiftly drawn the connection in 1939, between treatment of blacks in the US and Nazi Germany’s treatment of Jews.
 
President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked the Courier to tone down its rhetoric about racial discrimination. And the paper did let up. Until the US joined the war, and huge numbers of blacks were drafted for service.
 
The newspaper asked readers what they thought about this Double V. Hundreds of telegrams and letters inundated the newspaper's office voicing agreement.
 
The Courier established the Double V Campaign as "the true battle cry of colored America....the Double "V" war cry–[signifies] victory over...our enslavers at home and those abroad who would enslave us. WE HAVE A STAKE IN THIS FIGHT....WE ARE AMERICANS TOO!"

​By the summer 200-thousand black people had joined the Double V Campaign, each paying a nickel to the Courier, which continued to promote the slogan, dedicating close to 15% of its newspaper to the subject each week. 
 
Newspaper Historian Patrick Washburn describes the fervor. "You had women walking around with Double V's on their dresses. You had a new hairstyle called the Doubler where black women would weave two—;two V's in their hair. You had Double V baseball games, Double V flag waving ceremonies, Double V gardens. I mean it's just Double V this, Double V [that]....There was even a Double V song." 
 
But no amount of Double V's guaranteed progress against racism in America and skepticism ran deep. Civil Rights activists A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin knew that now, when the country was in crisis and needed them, it was time to demand equality.
 
They organized a massive March on Washington to pressure President Roosevelt.  The president had promised the US would become the “arsenal of democracy."  American industry and manufacturing would have to gear up as never before.
 
Randolph and Rustin organized tens of thousands of blacks to march on the capital demanding equal opportunity to the millions of high-paying jobs that would result.
 
Such a display of America's racial injustice would be embarrassing on the world stage. 
President Roosevelt asked Randolph to call off the demonstration promising an executive order to increase job opportunity for blacks. 
 
In June, 1941, Executive Order 8802 banned discrimination in defense industries and government and created the Fair Employment Practices Committee for enforcement. 

Luedell Mitchell and Lavada Cherry helping build an airplane in the El Segundo Plant of the Douglas Aircraft Company (Library of Congress)
Executive Order 8802 was the first time since Reconstruction that the federal government explicitly protected equal rights for African Americans. Though enforcement was not ideal, civil rights activists now had a tool in their "arsenal for democracy."
 
Despite the Double V campaign, segregation and racial injustice continued after the war. But it helped lay the foundation for 1960's protest marches in the fight for the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
 
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Sources
The Double V Campaign (1942-1945) (blackpast.org) 
First Person Oral Histories - Ray Elliot (mass.edu)
Executive Order 8802 - Teaching American History
http://explorepahistory.com/kora/files/1/2/1-2-F3C-25-ExplorePAHistory-a0k1v1-a_349.jpg