Wonderful World of Academia: Once More With Feeling.
So. It's that time of semester again. (taking off a month from work to write at least one twenty pages paper, better two, I mean.)
This semester's first try: a paper about military women in the Vietnam War going by the (tentative) title of So Women Weren’t There: Female Soldiers in the Vietnam War - In-Country and Back in the World. and well, the funny thing is, I still don't have a supervisor because I'm horrible at writing e-mails and no, this isn't actually funny but it's a better word than idiotic. Anyway, I'm at least done with the introduction (yes, I know that I'm supposed to write that at the end but I always found that concept idiotic. How in God's name am I supposed to write a paper if I decided what to write about after I'm done with the rest?) and I decided that my research question is "whether and how their service and coming home differed from their male counterparts’ and what being a female Vietnam War veteran in the USA meant, if such a thing even existed officially" (hint: for a very long time, it didn't).
And now that I'm onto my main part (first chapter title: "A ragtag band of wimps and washerwomen”? Military Women in the US Armed Forces of the 1960s and 1970s), I realized how stupid it is to decide to write about something you already have read three deciding books about (in my case: Dixon Vuic, Kara: officer, nurse, woman. The Army Nurse Corps in the Vietnam War, Norman, Elizabeth: Women at War. The Story of Fifty Military Nurses Who Served in Vietnam, Van Devanter, Lynda: Home Before Morning. The Story of an Army Nurse in Vietnam and a couple of passages on China Beach in Tasker, Yvonne: Soldiers‘ Stories: Military Women in Cinema and Television Since World War II).
You have all this knowledge in your head and theoretically, you could just write it down and be done with the thing in two, maybe three days... if there wasn't the minor issue of needing to provide spotless citation and me never having written a historical paper before (apparently, historians love their footnotes. Historians put everything in footnotes. Like, sometimes, their fucking footnotes are longer than the actual text on a page. All that footnotes stuff is making me really angry at historians. Apologies to all the historians I know, of course.). I know all that stuff but I have to leafing through all those books to find proof for any minor thing I'm writing so as not to appear a fraud and that is making me so fucking angry that I haven't done anything besides procrastinating all day, even though I still need to write at least four pages today if I want to keep to my plan.
Anyway, what I currently need are scientific articles about post-war mental and physical health of female Vietnam War veterans, possibly compared to male Vietnam war veterans (I made a post at article_request for that a couple days ago that is still valid) and literature dealing with physical and mental health issues of male Vietnam War veterans. Since there's tons of that (as opposed to female Vietnam War veterans, because, you know, for a long time, women and veteran were oxymorons in the US Armed Forces...) and I need only one or two books about it (it is only a 20 pages, after all), are there any that you can recommend? They need to be in English, easy to read, well structured and easy to access for non-psychology majors (also, let's not go with the usual suspects such as Tim O'Brien and that guy who wrote Dispatches whose name I can never remember because I'm just about done with all that "It was so hard for us guys, like no one had it harder than us and if you think you had it harder for us, you're wrong" crap). Anyone has any idea?
This semester's first try: a paper about military women in the Vietnam War going by the (tentative) title of So Women Weren’t There: Female Soldiers in the Vietnam War - In-Country and Back in the World. and well, the funny thing is, I still don't have a supervisor because I'm horrible at writing e-mails and no, this isn't actually funny but it's a better word than idiotic. Anyway, I'm at least done with the introduction (yes, I know that I'm supposed to write that at the end but I always found that concept idiotic. How in God's name am I supposed to write a paper if I decided what to write about after I'm done with the rest?) and I decided that my research question is "whether and how their service and coming home differed from their male counterparts’ and what being a female Vietnam War veteran in the USA meant, if such a thing even existed officially" (hint: for a very long time, it didn't).
And now that I'm onto my main part (first chapter title: "A ragtag band of wimps and washerwomen”? Military Women in the US Armed Forces of the 1960s and 1970s), I realized how stupid it is to decide to write about something you already have read three deciding books about (in my case: Dixon Vuic, Kara: officer, nurse, woman. The Army Nurse Corps in the Vietnam War, Norman, Elizabeth: Women at War. The Story of Fifty Military Nurses Who Served in Vietnam, Van Devanter, Lynda: Home Before Morning. The Story of an Army Nurse in Vietnam and a couple of passages on China Beach in Tasker, Yvonne: Soldiers‘ Stories: Military Women in Cinema and Television Since World War II).
You have all this knowledge in your head and theoretically, you could just write it down and be done with the thing in two, maybe three days... if there wasn't the minor issue of needing to provide spotless citation and me never having written a historical paper before (apparently, historians love their footnotes. Historians put everything in footnotes. Like, sometimes, their fucking footnotes are longer than the actual text on a page. All that footnotes stuff is making me really angry at historians. Apologies to all the historians I know, of course.). I know all that stuff but I have to leafing through all those books to find proof for any minor thing I'm writing so as not to appear a fraud and that is making me so fucking angry that I haven't done anything besides procrastinating all day, even though I still need to write at least four pages today if I want to keep to my plan.
Anyway, what I currently need are scientific articles about post-war mental and physical health of female Vietnam War veterans, possibly compared to male Vietnam war veterans (I made a post at article_request for that a couple days ago that is still valid) and literature dealing with physical and mental health issues of male Vietnam War veterans. Since there's tons of that (as opposed to female Vietnam War veterans, because, you know, for a long time, women and veteran were oxymorons in the US Armed Forces...) and I need only one or two books about it (it is only a 20 pages, after all), are there any that you can recommend? They need to be in English, easy to read, well structured and easy to access for non-psychology majors (also, let's not go with the usual suspects such as Tim O'Brien and that guy who wrote Dispatches whose name I can never remember because I'm just about done with all that "It was so hard for us guys, like no one had it harder than us and if you think you had it harder for us, you're wrong" crap). Anyone has any idea?