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Title: Home Before Morning: The Story of an Army Nurse in Vietnam by Lynda Van Devanter ISBN: 1-55849-298-4 Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press Pub. Date: 01 April, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $20.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.55 (22 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Unexplainable
Comment: I read this book close to 10 years ago in a college history class. It was on a list of choices and I picked it because it was the only book about the experience of a woman in wartime. I'm glad I did, because the book still ranks in my mind as one of the most interesting points of view of the Vietnam experience in print. There are hundreds--maybe thousands--of books about the memories and heroic deeds of the male soldiers in various wars, but what about the women who had to put them back together, nurse them back to health, and often send them back to the front to be wounded again? Since reading Home Before Morning I actively seek out the stories of the doctors, nurses and other "support" personnel involved in military actions.
I read so many books that I often don't remember the names of authors or even the titles of the books, but this one has stayed with me. That is a testament to the writing ability of Van Devanter and the emotional pull of her story. I'd recommend this book to anyone considering a career in the military, medical field, or anyone interested in women's history. Heroes come in all shapes and sizes.
Rating: 5
Summary: A Woman's Realistic View of Vietnam & its Aftermath
Comment: Home Before Morning Is one of the most amazing books I have ever read. I bought the book when it was originally published back in 1983. At the time I was a young O.R. nurse and I was fascinated by the idea of nurses in Vietnam. Oh, if only I had been old enough to volunteer the way Lynda VanDevanter did. She quickly dashed the stars from my eyes with her descriptions of life in Pleiku. And if the horror of Vietnam wasn't bad enough, what she (and so many other returning vets) endured when she returned to the U.S. makes me ashamed, even today. That she emerged from the years of PTSD to help other women veterans is a testament to her courage and strength of character. My copy of Home Before Morning remains on my bookshelf, and always will. It has been passed around to many friends and co-workers. I think it should be required reading in every high school American History class.
Rating: 5
Summary: In spite of what some have said, this is the way it was
Comment: After reading a number of unnecessarily harsh and, from my point of view, patently untrue "reviews" that disparage this book and its author, I feel obliged to weigh in. I am a Viet Nam nurse vet; when I first read this book several years ago, I was amazed by its honesty and heartened that a sister-in-arms had been brave enough to tell it like it was. I cannot speak to the precise details in Van Devanter's fine and harrowing account of her life before, during and after Viet Nam, but I can say that her experiences during her service ring entirely true to me. I have heard her reputation slandered before, and have wondered why the denegration was so vehement and so personal. Do those who defend their greatly-amended version of our reputation as Viet Nam nurses by tearing down this excellent book feel that we must, for some reason, be portrayed as angels to the world at large? Such a picture would be as false as denouncing us as [prostitute]. We were human beings, with all the fine and base characteristics that entailed. We were young women--most of us still in that amorphous hormonal classification of "late adolescence." We lived on adrenalin and bad food, experienced heartbreak daily, dealt with entirely too many males, and did a mind-boggling body of work to the best of our abilities in spite of the pain, frustration, sexism and distraction. "Home Before Morning" is the grandmother of female Viet Nam accounts, an important piece of literature, a first-of-its-kind window on the Viet Nam war. It is well-written and evocative, and its author--who certainly must now have earned the peace she found so elusive in this life--deserves our profound respect for publishing it at a time when she must have realized it would draw criticism from those who find such raw truths threatening.
As a writer of fiction that draws on my experiences in Viet Nam, I owe Lynda Van Devanter a great debt. The first among us, she whacked through the jungle of criticism, took the heat, and secured the road for the acceptance of a woman's unique view of what is, by nature, a testosterone-charged world. She deserves a medal, posthumous though it would now be, for grace under fire.
Susan O'Neill, Army nurse-vet and author: Don't Mean Nothing: Short Stories of Viet Nam.
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Title: A Piece of My Heart: The Stories of 26 American Women Who Served in Vietnam by Keith Walker ISBN: 089141617X Publisher: Presidio Press Pub. Date: 01 January, 1997 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: Women at War: The Story of Fifty Military Nurses Who Served in Vietnam (Studies in Health, Illness, & Caregiving) by Elizabeth Norman ISBN: 0812213173 Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press Pub. Date: 01 November, 1990 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Don't Mean Nothing: Short Stories of Vietnam by Susan O'Neill ISBN: 0345446089 Publisher: Ballantine Books Pub. Date: 30 October, 2001 List Price(USD): $22.00 |
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Title: America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975 with Poster by George C Herring ISBN: 0072536187 Publisher: McGraw-Hill Humanities/Social Sciences/Languages Pub. Date: 15 November, 2001 List Price(USD): $44.05 |
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Title: We Band of Angels: The Untold Story of American Nurses Trapped on Bataan by the Japanese by Elizabeth M. Norman ISBN: 0671787187 Publisher: Atria Books Pub. Date: 01 May, 2000 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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