Scope and Contents

World Report and Serving in Silence , Colonel Margarethe Cammermeyer's autobiography, document her struggle against the U.S. Government's official policy of banning homosexuals from military service.

Biographical / Historical

Margarethe Cammermeyer was born in Oslo, Norway in 1942. She immigrated to the United States in 1950 and earned a B.S. in Nursing from the University of Maryland in 1963, where she participated in the Army Student Nurse program. Cammermeyer attended Officers' Basic Course Training at Fort Sam Houston, TX and was posted to Fort Benning, Georgia; Nuremburg, West Germany; and Fort Lee, Virginia. She arrived in Vietnam in February 1967 and was assigned to the POW and Neurosurgery wards at the 24th Evac Hospital, Long Binh. In 1968, she was posted to Fort Lewis, Washington. Cammermeyer entered the Army Reserve in 1972 while working at Veterans' Administration hospitals in Washington and California. After earning a PhD in Nursing in 1991, she retired from the Army Reserve as a Colonel in 1996. Cammermeyer is the author of Serving in Silence (1994), and she remains active as a consultant and lecturer. (All information above was found on the Vietnam Arhive Oral History website).