she also edited the rutledge handbook on gender war and the u.s. military and is co-editor along with richard fogerty of the book series "studies in war, society and the military." she is currently co-editing a book co-managing sex in the u.s. military and a new book titled "drafting women," so i introduce you to you, kara vuic. >> hi, good morning. thanks for coming. i really appreciate you being here. it's an honor to be at the fdr library. it's an amazing, beautiful place. i'm really happy to be here. i want to say a few words before i get started talking about the book about benjamin schmidt. i have a position at tcu that's named in memory of a former tcu student who had a really good time at school, but might not have seen the interior of a classroom as often as he might have. that's the way his mother said it to me. but he had a really good time. and after about a year and a half, he surprised his parents and joined the marine corps. came home one day and told them he joined the marine corps and he went to camp pendleton and trained as a scout sniper. he deployed to afghanistan once, came home and his unit got orders to deploy again. and he said that the unit needed to someone to go with them who had been there before. despite his reservations about the war and despite the fact he did not have orders, he went again a second time. on that second tour he was killed in a horrific friendly-fire accident. so, his father created my position in his memory. he had said that he wanted to come home, finish his history degree and become a history professor. and so i have the honor of teaching war, conflict and society at tcu in the name of a student who really wanted to do that. and his dad said that he sponsored -- he sponsors all kinds of events in our program and he said he does that because he knows the cost of war on society and he wants other people to think about that. and so i think here at the fdr library, it's a wonderful opportunity to really think about the cost of war and so that's what i want to try to do today in talking about three american women who went to war with the red cross. so, i'll talk about these three women. the book at large is about the ways that the u.s. military has employed women as entertainment for wartime soldiers. part of that involves world war ii, the biggest chunk of that book is about world war i icht and so that's what we'll talk about today. so, let's get started. betty jane thomas grew up in tacoma, washington, in the shadow of world war i. she was born in 1915, just two years before the united states joined the war. so, she grew up hearing stories about the big battles and she was especially fascinated by the stories of the nurses who had worked on the western front. as a child, she and her brother would put on tin soldier hats and pretend to be soldiers and play soldier games. one day one of her cousins pointed out to her, and i think he meant it to be very helpful and comforting to her, he said, you know if there's another war, you won't have to go because you're a girl. but betty jane said, if there's another girl, i'm not going to be left hyped. she had always been filled with wanderlust. she wrote in a book later she always felt the world moved more slowly in tacoma, washington, than it did in other places and she really wanted to go out and see the world. so, after high school when many of her friends were getting married, she wanted to do something different. even the great depression couldn't stop her plans. she used winnings from an old gold cigarettes puzzle contest. maybe some of you remember old gold cigarettes. first time i read that, i'm like, i have no idea what these even are. but she won a puzzle contest and she used that money to fund college. in 1939 she graduated with a degree in psychology from the university of washington in seattle. but when she graduated, she didn't have a job. so she and a friend moved to san francisco, where apparently the world moved faster than it did in tacoma. she wrote that she and her friend became real city girls and they were proud at ho cosmopolitan they were becoming. what her life would involve after the united states entered the second world war. after the attack at pearl harbor on december 7, 1941, she moved back home to tacoma to be near her family and she took a job working for a construction firm, working at what she called a dull typewriter. she thought the job was very boring. remember, she had said, if there was another war, she wasn't going to tb left behind. and so soon she began what she called a quest to get overseas. she looked into the military, which by then was recruiting women for the women services, but she found out that even though women's army corps, which was the only branch which would send women abroad at the time, they could not guarantee an assignment overseas. most women did not serve overseas so they couldn't guarantee her that and that's what she really wanted. she figured that even if she did join and did get overseas with the women's army corps, she figured it would probably be behind a typewriter, way behind the lines. that was not her idea of being in the thick of things. so she kept looking and one day she read an article in the local paper about a woman who was working overseas with the red cross. she thought, that's it, i've found the right position and that was her way to go to the war. and over the course of world war ii, the red cross sent about 6,000 women overseas to bring a bit of home to gis. some of those women, most of them, in fact, operated service clubs, which were like small recreation clubs on post or in nearby cities and towns where american military bases were. and in all of these recreation centers, you could find coffee and doughnuts, books and magazines, newspapers, the latest music, but most importantly, young women from home. other women like betty jane drove clubmobiles. we'll talk about what those are in a second. but they drove club mobiles across all of the theaters from europe to the pacific, to china, india, north africa, all over the world. and of those women who drove clubmobiles, some of them, like betty jane, drove those clubmobiles in the wake of the allied invasion of normandy 75 years ago and drove those through france and into germany. so, today the three women i'll talk about were three of the women who drove clubmobiles in the wake of the allied invasion. but first, what in the world are they doing there? right? why in the world is the red cross sending women to drive converted trucks and jeeps to serve doughnuts to gis in a war zone, right? what could go wrong? why are they there in the first place? to understand that, we have to actually back up to world war i. today when someone says that their son, their daughter has joined the military, we think of that as an honorable thing. we think of the military as an honorable institution. this is a way you become an adult. you serve your country. before world war i, most americans didn't necessarily think that about military service. officers were one thing. officers typically came from the middle and upper classes, but enlisted personnel were generally thought of by the american public as kind of hard scrabble men, they did dirty work, they were out on the western frontier, they were in texas, they were fighting native americans, they were chasing poncho villa, and all sorts of reports were coming back from military posts, particularly in texas, of all of the vices that would sort of find their ways to military posts. so most americans thought, you know, whatever happens on the military post in ft. hood, happens in -- you know, there and we'll just not think about it. those are not my sons who were down there anyway, i'm just not going to worry about it. besides, they're doing dangerous work and so they should probably have a little disrepresentable fun. that was the thought. however, on the even of world war i, when the united states enstated the selective service, now all of a sudden, that's your son who might be drafted and sent to that military base and who might have to deal with all of these things that are popping up around military bases. most americans feared military service would take their sons, introduce them to prostitution and alcohol, and on top of that, we're going to send them to france, which as everybody knew in 1917 was just this land of debouchery and evil so all kinds of bad things were converging in the same moment. on top of that, most americans were skeptical of the draft. the draft before world war i had been the draft in the civil war. the union and confederacy had drafted. neither of which went very well. the public was very anti-draft. as part of the government's way of convincing the public to get behind the war effort, to get behind the draft, part of that was to say military service is going to make your son a maeb man. we're going to take him, make him a better citizen, he's going to come back from his service and be a better contributing member of society because of the experiences he's had. to do that, part of what the military did was establish educational programs, literacy programs, religious services, recreation center, all kinds of programs, but key to all of it was women. and so during world war i, the ymca and salvation army sent about 3,500 women to france where they opened recreation huts and canteens, they served refreshments and danced countless dances with lonely doughboys. officials called these huts a home away from home. that's a phrase that gets used in all the wars throughout the 20th century. the women are to distract the men away from the vices that are waiting for them. in this rendition, i love the use of passive verbs. these men are always lured away by women. they're always distracted by these vices. the men are never actually seeking them out. they're always boys. they're always the victim. always the victim, right? which is just hilarious to me. they're men when we need them to be men, but they're boys and innocent victims when it involves vices. so officials use what are called the right kind of women to distract these boys from all of these problems. all these ymca women, salvation army women, were to remunicipal bond them of their mothers, sisters and sweethearts all at the same time, which you might imagine gets a little complicated, right? they're so symbolize a supportive home front, like we're here with you, we're here to help you back. one official said, and i love this quote, he said, men must be funnished with healthful amusement or they will turn to the first petticoat they see. i don't have to explain what a petticoat is like i do to my students. they're googling on their phone. now, this seems very optimistic. we're going to send girls and it will all be fine, just trust us, right? remember, this is the progressive era, and so everybody was optimistic about everything, right? if there's a problem, we can fix it. and in world war i the problem of vice for the american military, and i'll say it's a very serious problem when you add disease to the equation, right, 30% of the aef had some sort of disease-related device, and that's a serious medical problem. you can't fight a war with soldiers laid up in the hospital. so, it is a serious problem, but this is a very optimistic solution. and it doesn't exactly bear out the way the military thought it might. it doesn't exactly have the right kind -- the consequences that the military thought, right? the boys were still lured away and they still got into trouble. nonetheless, when the united states started mobile idzing for mother war a couple decades later, military officials took it for granted that civilian organizations would continue to provide women to do the same kind of work. and world war ii, they're a bit more pragmatic. they don't just think we're going to send these girls and none of these boys are going to get into trouble. they kind of -- world war i convinced them that wasn't going to happen. nonetheless, they continued to insist it was essential to the war effort. part of that actually involved fdr himself. he was instrumental in creating the uso and part of the rationale for the uso was that military men had to have civilian influences. the public in world war ii was very concerned about long-term deployments. remember, nobody knew how long the deployment was going to be in world war ii. so, there was a lot of public concern about very long deployments and what kind of effect that would have on men who are away from home, away from civilian influences, and away from women. and that was a very real concern for military officials is, what are we going to do with all these men who have been around only men for who knows how long, how are they going to come back home and reintegrate into society? so, the red cross picked up where the ymca and the salvation army had left off and they establish about 1,000 clubs for gis in all of the theaters. they created about 319 clubmobiles to drive around and provide this amusement. and the uso provided abroad at least recreation in the form of live entertainment. that's a tradition that continues even today. so the civilian women who are to go to war are in some ways still echoing that of world war i. they're to provide the men an image of something to fight for. they're to bolster their sense of manhood, but not too much. we'll get into that as well. and they're to maintain a sense of normal domestic relationships so that the men could reintegrate into civilian society at the war's end. so, there's a little bit of optimism. the women are still to distract the boys from trouble. they call it trouble with like air quotes, trouble. there's still a bit of that optimism, but it's a bit more pragmatic by world war ii. betty jane, the woman we began with, is an adventurous young women in her mid to late 20s with an almost desperate desire to serve overseas. she's exactly what the red cross is looking for. she's healthy, college educated, independent, vibrant, she's very excited, very much wanting to do this kind of work. as the organization described it, the typical red cross woman was 28 years old, she was a blue-eyed brunette of average height and build, who spoke some french, played a little piano and taught school before the war. that's their kind of composite red cross woman. i think it is actually pretty accurate in terms of what they were looking for in terms of physical appearance but also practical real world kind of experiences. the vast majority of them were single. you could be married but you could not serve if you had children. and they were overwhelmingly white. the red cross professed on the face of it that they were not going to segregate their clubs. they were not going to segregate their staff based on race, but it absolutely did in all sorts of ways. now, betty jane was also an ideal candidate because she was attractive and not too attractive. i wish i could show you a picture because this would -- pictures of the women who did this would help you see as well what they're looking for. they wanted young women who would be able to remind the gis of women from home, especially their sweethearts and their wives. they had really given up on men representing momma, which was ideal in world war i. so, they want women who will serve as america's sweetheart. serve as the kind of woman the men would be willing to fight for. and it didn't seek out women only because they were attractive. right, if you were too attractive, some red cross officials thought that was going to be a problem for these women. they didn't want women who were too glamorous. they wanted women who were pretty but not seductive. beautiful but not lewd. that is in the eye of the beholder and a very vague ideal, but it's one the organization took very seriously. and in interviews with applicants, the interviewer would comment on the woman's physical appearance and how that might play into her work. so, it needed women who could symbolize the girl next door, but it also needed women who would not be overwhelmed by all of the attention they're surely going to receive. you're going to send women a couple women at a time into groups of hundreds and at times thousands of men. so, of course, they're going to have lots and lots of eyes on them. and the red cross needs women who can withstand that. who will have the right sense of how to put all of that in perspective. one official said that the women needed to be able to appeal to the men, but also to resist the temptations of being courted and pursued nightly by thousands of eager sex-starved men. and in many ways, that's the crux of the whole world. serving doughnuts and jitter bugging with war-weary gis on the surface, to ask women what they always had done in wartime, they are to boost morale, symbolize the home front, there to provide a semblance of domestic relationships in what was mostly a male military. that image is very comfortable to the american public. stories of wholesome girls from home chatting with soldiers projected a reassuring if not entirely accurate message for families at home that their boys, boys, were not out gallivanting with foreign women or prostitutes. it's very much a mom and apple pie kind much image. this is the wholesome image of what american boys do in war that they want. apple pie, chocolate, all of that. and it fits sort of contemporary notions of conventional womanhood. this is the ideal woman. at the same time, clubmobile worked for women like betty jane takes them far beyond the conventional limitations of women's wartime work or even proper ideas of proper womanhood. the daily rigors of the work proved one challenge. women managed expansive supply networks, they drove trucks and jeeps across war zones and they endured the harsh living conditions of remote theaters. and as clubmobile work called on women to walk a fine line between demure reminders of women from home and blatant sexual appeal, they also endured terrible personal loss. so the image projected a very conventional comforting notion of womanhood. the reality pushed that and challenged that in many ways. so life as a clubmobile girl was rough. men on bases anywhere from england to okinawa could find a red cross club, but men on the move are too far away from a base camp also needed a brief reprieve from the war as well. that's why the red cross established the clubmobile program. it gutted london buses. my favorite are the double-decker london buses that it gutted. also 2 1/2 ton military trucks and jeeps and instilled doughnut machines and coffee machines on this them. they would make them so that the windows would open up and you could serve coffee and doughnuts out the side. and so some of the big buses they put bunks in the back so women who operated these clubmobiles could stay on the clubmobile if needed. the men could hear the clubmobiles coming because the women carried fponographs and records from home, carried newspapers and magazines. most of the time the women drove the clubmobiles themselves. they took great pride in doing so. they had to learn how to drive these trucks, these jeeps, these buses and they had to learn how to drive them in all kinds of traffic, how to drive them in military convoys, how to drive them with trailers attached and they also had to learn how to take care of them. they had to learn how to do basic jun repair, how to change tires, how to change oil, how to take care of all of that themselves. they practiced all of these skills in an obstacle course in england that was located near wimbledon and they would drive these things up steep hills. there were tank traps. for the women who drove them, like betty jane, this was very much a point of pride. they had to do this. they had mastered these skills. and as betty jane said, they symbolized her usefulness and independence. this fit her notion of independence and sort of wanting to do her part for the war effort. daily life on the clubmobile circuit was no picnic either, even for accomplished athlete like our second woman, gretchen skyler. gretchen was the daughter of a world war i colonel and excelled at nine sports, nine, while a student at boston university and then was a member of the first u.s. women's lacrosse team. she joined the red cross in january 1943 and then worked on clubmobiles in england for the next year. but even for her, the life was rough. she described her typical day as getting up at 5:30 in the morning to knead by hand 120 pounds of flour and then cooking and stacking doughnuts, serving them at a camp, coming back to post by 5:00 to clean the truck, clean the equipment, dinner at 6:30 and then to bed. and she wrote that she went to bed with the birds but that the life agreed with her. apparently the red cross thought she did a pretty good job because it appointed her as supervisor of a clubmobile group that loaded clubmobiles onto ships and then sailed them across the english channel and unloaded them and she actually drove her clubmobile up utah beach on july 16th, about 5 1/2 weeks after the allied invasion. she drove a jeep with supplies across the theater kind of going from place to place, clubmobile to clubmobile, making sure everybody had the right supplies, coordinating schedules with the military. and all of the women endured the trying conditions of life on the move. she slept in tents, they ate field rations, they bathed in their helmets, they dug their own latrines. for women who had been enlisted to serve as reminders of the femininity of american women, clubmobile life contradicted that. most red cross women worked in clubs where they wore a suit, a skirt and a jacket, a hat, gloves, but clubmobile women wore what the red cross called a battle dress uniform of trousers and bomber jackets or coveralls. remember, how odd it was to see an american woman in pants in 1944. she wrote -- gretchen wrote she had never been more dirty, more tired and yet more happy. for women like gretchen and betty jane, they wouldn't have had it any other way. living in the field, wearing the uniform, all of that symbolized their common experiences with gis. gretchen told her family, she said, this is the nearest anyone could ever be and still not be a gi. of course the women are not supposed to be gis. the american public still didn't know what it thought of women who were in the military. but gretchen's experiences tell us that the work demanded far more than they merely be a pretty face. and even that work was difficult. our third woman, elizabeth richardson, was two days shy of her 26th birthday on the day -- on d-day. she was midway through her training at american university to be a club mobile woman as the allies invaded normandy. she graduated her training and sailed and was assigned initially to england. she was a native of a little small town in northern indiana and attended the all-girls downer college in milwaukee. she was an english and art major and after college got a degree -- or got a job for milwaukee department store drawing advertisements. she and her roommates in the evenings volunteered at uso dances at the nearby uso club, but like betty jane, she said, that wasn't enough for me. she wanted to do something more for the war effort. she also discovered that the military couldn't guarantee her an assignment overseas and so she, too, joined the red cross. now, while in training, elizabeth and her colleagues learned military organization. they learned how to recognize rank. they studied sports so that they could talk to gis about their favorite teams. and they learned to break the ice. and this kind of work was very difficult for elizabeth and her colleagues because all of their lives they had been told that good girls don't make the first moves. they don't talk to strange men. they certainly don't ask them to dance. they certainly don't flirt with them. flirt but not flirt, right? and so that kind of work proved pretty difficult for women. it also was very difficult to be the men's surrogate sweetheart. elizabeth was assigned to lester england where the 82nd airborne had their base camp. after the 82nd had been in france, they were sent back for a brief reprieve before being sent back to france again. while there, elizabeth learned how difficult it was to kind of work with them and develop these friendships and essentially to be a grief counselor. they were called in to help these men process what they had just gone through. she wrote home to her parents that it was tough to see what combat had done to these men. and she and her colleagues were not trained for this work. they were not grief counselors. their training taught them more how to play bridge than how to be a grief counselor, but that was her work. she was a sight for their sore eyes. that was exactly what the red cross had intended. to put it very simply, men did not come to clubmobiles for coffee and doughnuts. they came for the women. and elizabeth had the right kind of head about that. she wrote home that she was just a victim of circumstances and nonfraternization. she knew she was a rarity in their world, but no matter how exhausting all of this attention became, she could never say, i just need some time alone. on a goods day, her work involved sort of men asking her to dance, men wanting to talk to her, making go-go eyes at her, all day long, every single day. and she can never say, i've had it, i'm done with men, you guys go away, i'm tired. she cannot say that. she can't say that at all. she would have been sent home if she did. now, no matter how much they try to keep their distance, though, sometimes the women develop friendships with the men and sometimes a little more than friendship. elizabeth grew close to a nice 2nd lieutenant from the 82nd named larry from yonkers and she wrote in a letter that under happier circumstances and better years, i can imagine nothing better than burning the toast for him. she found out, however, not long before, she was sent to france that he had been missing since the battle of the bulge. a reversal of the more common war story, larry ended up surviving the war but elizabeth did not. it was against red cross regulations, but many women often hitched rides in planes when they needed to travel to meetings. on the morning of july 25, 1945, elizabeth got in a two-seater plane en route to paris where she had a meeting and it crashed shortly after takeoff. her coworkers organized a funeral for her and she was initially buried in a military cemetery near evrow, france, and three years ago her parents made the agonizing decision to leave her remains in normandy with the men she served. she's one of four women buried at the normandy american cemetery. she's one of 72 red cross women who died in world war ii. the clubmobile women might not be the first women we think of when we think of world war ii. probably if i had asked you at the beginning you might have said rosie the riveter or nurses, but maybe we should think of them more often. the program continued into korea and vietnam, where single college girls again served coffee and doughnuts. if there are any vietnam or korean vets in the room, they might remember the doughnut dollies. this is that program. that program ended after the vietnam war as the military began using more women and more families. and so these kinds of programs have gone away. for all sorts of reasons that i'd be happy to talk to you about later, i think it's not a bad thing those programs came to an end. i think they situated women as -- in all sorts of complicated and at times dangerous positions, but i think we have lost something as well. i think betty jane, gretchen and elizabeth all tell us something important about what it means to offer a warm smile or sympathetic here, about reminding those who serve on our behalf that they are appreciated and remembered. so, thank you. and i will be happy to answer your questions. [ applause ] and i think they want you to go to the microphone. yeah. >> simple question. are we on? simple question. typically, how close to the front lines did the clubmobiles operate? >> not all that close, right? not close enough that the military was uncomfortable. in world war i the rule was, you couldn't advance farther not that brigade headquarters. and in world war ii, it's not quite so specific. you know, they're traveling around and around, so they're never getting close enough where they are immediately in danger. but in a war zone, things happen, right? gretchen's unit be, for example, was following the troops into bastion when the german counteroffensive began and they got trapped for a while. she was actually given a bronze star from harry truman because her clubmobile group put all the mail onto the clubmobile. the germans were trying to get the mail and burn it as a morale-boosting endeavor and they put all the mail on the trucks and evacuated it. so, they're not supposed to be in danger, but sometimes danger happens. 72 red cross women died, yeah. several uso women died as well, a plane accident, those kind of things. >> john, retired from university of pittsburgh. just a comment. you talked about sexually transmitted diseases in world war i. and back then the americans were the only ones that refused to give condoms to the troops. and the british were doing it and they couldn't believe the americans wouldn't do it. and then during world war ii, they were done, they were given condoms. my father actually served in panama as a military policeman. and his job was to make sure that servicemen paid prostitutes in a base operated brothel that serviced soldiers. he had to make sure they paid or get after them if they didn't. things really changed in war in that way. >> someone said if president wilson had found out sort of the shenanigans -- the french offered them brothels. someone said, if wilson finds out about it, he'll stop the war. but by world war ii, soldiers got condemns delivered to them per month courtesy of the u.s. taxpayers. they were pragmatic about it but penicillin cures everything. another thing we can talk about later. sorry. >> the women who participated, the three women, one is deceased, that you talk about, when they came home, home meaning the united states in this case, do they talk about it? did they get any remuneration from the government, from their communities? what happened to them? >> yeah, that's a great question. so, the red cross women were paid. they got about $150 per month. the red cross carried the mandatory life insurance policy for people who go to war. the uso women were paid as well, but when they came home, they're not veterans. they weren't in the military. i mean, american women who were in the military weren't veterans in the full sense either. they weren't veterans in that sense. and i think there's some sort of -- at the time there's a public recognition that what they had done was important, but for most of them, they just go back to normal life. and the problem for me as a researcher has been that in trying to find the women's accounts of their life, their diary, their letters, they all end with the war. they go back home and have a normal life, get married, have kids, do whatever it is they do, and they're not continuing to keep that record of their life. so it's been really frustrating for me that a lot of them are lost at the end of the war, especially women who change their names when they get married. it's hard to find them i do know betty jane, who i started with, ended up getting a ph.d. if philosophy from johns hopkins and she taught philosophy in college. a lot of the women went on and did really incredible things but for most of them, they just blend back into american society and go on with their lives. later they think back on it as being this incredible experience and sort of shaped their outlook on the world. and they even talk about some of them that this is what paved the way for women's rights later. that they were doing these incredible things and that's what later generations of women built upon. >> thinking about the women's flying corps, they gave up everything because they wanted to fly. >> yeah. >> and they got so little out of it. if they died in combat or flying the planes overseas, they got nothing to bury them. they had -- the families had to pay to bring them back. >> yeah. >> i mean, it was just -- they -- they did everything. you know, they flew the planes over, they -- and so many of them died. and they were treated terrible. >> yeah. i think world war ii tells us two things, i think, in terms of women and service to and in the military is that women have always wanted to serve, and they have done so even without recognition, but also that this is a time period in which the american public is really trying to wrap their heads around what it means to have women in uniform. and the wasps you mentioned, it really showed the public -- you could be behind a typewriter but flying planes is another thing entirely. there were sort of baby steps toward that. >> thank you very much. that was really interesting. i had no idea. to what extent were the women subjected to sexual violence? and when it happened, did the military treat it criminally? did they sort of brush it off into a boys will be boys kind of category? >> yes, the latter. that has also been something that's been really frustrating for me in terms of researching, trying to find -- mean, if you think about it, in 1940 -- in the 1940s, the american public didn't even have sexual harassment in the lingo. it wasn't even a part of the english language. that's a phrase that comes up in the '70s. so looking for what everybody must know happens, military is a millions, of course these things happen, it's been really difficult to find examples of women who openly talk about it. it's easier to find an example of a woman who says, i heard that this happened or to write home to her parents to say, you might hear that awful things happen, but they're not happening here. but it's also interesting that they talk about what we would consider harassment in very direct ways at times. one woman, for example, wrote in her letter home to her parents about being asked by a port commander to sail on a ship to the isle of wright, to take the red cross girls, go on this little ship and he wanted to talk about red cross business. and in her letter home she's like, well, we had cucumber swand witches, they weren't very good, but we all ate them, yadda, yadda, yadda. in her diary she writes, i didn't tell mom and dad but it's explicit, he's a little too handcy, gets a little too close for comfort. that's been great for me as an historian to look at the different ways in which women explain their work. in private they would be more apt to talk about what we would consider harassment. to the public, to mom and dad, you might not say the same thing. but, yes, it happened. there are cases -- one woman was actually punched in the face by a captain and the red cross refused to do anything because they said it wasn't the right time. some red cross officials got really, really annoyed with things like that. so pointing to a document, to answer your question, that's hard. but we can kind of get at it in other ways. >> thank you. >> yeah. >> hi, good morning. and thank you very much. my question is really about research on the other end, from the soldiers. were you able to find any letters of reminisces from soldiers about the women's impact? >> it's kind of mibsed. you see some soldiers talk about these women came and it was a breath of fresh air. it was a break from the war. even high-ranking officials, patent generals who would say to the women, i'm so glad you're here. i initially didn't think you had any business in the war zone, but i can see you're having a good effect. on the other hand you see men who talk about these women have no business being here. it's putting them in danger. or that they just don't think good girls should be in war, right? and some of them are very explicit that women have a place in war, but not all women. it's just across the board, the response. >> thank you very much. >> great question. >> i think you said it, but i missed it. when did the red cross stop serving? >> right after the vietnam war. >> right. because i was a wac medic and we still had them in germany. but we also in our c-rations got condoms and cigarettes. >> anybody want the last word? all right. thank you. 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