Politics & Power Quote by James A. Michener

A sly demographic punchline disguised as reportage: Michener frames the scene as a military “encirclement,” but swaps bullets for bodies. “Completely surrounded” is the language of siege warfare, and it instantly makes the nurses both vulnerable and oddly powerful, the focal point of an overwhelming male gaze. The number-drop does the heavy lifting. “Two dozen” is quaint, almost domestic; “100,000” is industrial. The mismatch isn’t just arithmetic, it’s a cultural snapshot of wartime mobility, gender imbalance, and the way women in uniform were treated as public property the moment they stepped into a male-saturated ecosystem.

The phrase “unattached American men” is doing careful, slightly cynical work. It’s not “soldiers,” not “servicemen,” not “young men.” “Unattached” reduces them to availability, libido, and social volatility, hinting at the romantic free-for-all that blooms in the shadow of war. It also keeps the nurses’ professional identity intact while quietly acknowledging how quickly that identity gets eclipsed by their scarcity as women. In a single clause, their competence is set against the ambient expectation that they should also serve as morale, fantasy, or potential partners.

Michener’s intent feels less like cruelty than calibration: he’s capturing how institutions talk about women when men are the default unit of history. The joke lands because it’s true enough to sting, and because the line exposes the wartime contradiction: women enlisted to do critical work, then got drafted into a social role they never agreed to play.