HOME BEFORE MORNING: The Story of an Army Nurse in Vietnam

by Lynda with Christopher Morgan Van Devanter ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 4, 1983

In June 1969, Lynda Van Devanter, a sheltered, patriotic nurse fresh out of school, arrived in Vietnam for a year's tour of duty. It quite simply changed her into a different person. Some of her experiences will be known to readers (from newspaper and magazine articles, as well as sections of Al Santoli's Everything We Had); but this is the entire, heartbreaking story--through the decade or so it took her to begin coming to grips with the experience. Van Devanter came from a family in which it was right for a daughter to become a nurse and then marry. Life through nursing school (at a small Catholic hospital) and army training (with a faithful best friend) was mostly a lark. The threat of danger in Vietnam was remote (""They always keep nurses in sale areas,"" had been the recruiter's line). . . until, in Vietnam, reality hit fast: Van Devanter's plane was fired on when it landed in Saigon; and after three days of adjustment, she was assigned to the 71st Evacuation Hospital, ""a MASH-type facility"" near the embattled Cambodian border. There, the casualties (""Dead bodies in Glad bags were lined up. . . . A blond infantry lieutenant begged me to give him enough morphine to kill him. . . .""), the personal danger, the fatigue, the heat, rain, and mud, the harassment of officers enforcing petty regulations, and above all the meaningless of American involvement rapidly put an end to Van Devanter's blind patriotism, her innocence, and her youth. After the interminable year, she returned to a family and friends who didn't understand what had happened to her and to years of nightmares and disorientation which ruined a marriage, caused drug and alcohol problems, and are only now beginning to abate. ""Vietnam robbed thousands of us of a future."" Van Devanter brings us face to face with the toll that undeclared war took on its combatants.

Pub Date: April 4, 1983

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Beaufort

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1983

Categories: NONFICTION