Edition:
First Edition [Stated], First Printing [Stated]
Publisher:
Beaufort Books, Inc
Published:
1983
Language:
English
Alibris ID:
18061791682
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Seller's Description:
Very good in Very good jacket. 320 pages. Glossary. DJ is in a plastic sleeve. Minor edge soiling. Dedicated to Lieutenant Sharon A. Lane, the only female combat fatality to hostile fire in the Vietnam War. Derived from a Kirkus review: In June 1969, Lynda Van Devanter, a 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; 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 and army training 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, 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. From a Washington Post obituary of the author found on-line: Nurse Lynda Van Devanter Buckley Dies By Graeme Zielinski, November 21, 2002. Lynda Van Devanter Buckley, 55, an advocate for women veterans whose influential 1983 memoir of her time as a surgical nurse near the Cambodian border, "Home Before Morning, " painted a stark picture of the horrors of the Vietnam War and its psychological aftermath. Mrs. Buckley had systemic collagen vascular disease, which she attributed to her exposure in Vietnam to a combination of chemical agents and pesticides. She served in Vietnam in 1969 and 1970 in a surgical hospital in Pleiku. One of her letters home was included in a 1988 HBO documentary. In it, she described a Christmas Eve of amputations and death for wounded GI's. "This is now the seventh month of death, destruction and misery. I'm tired of going to sleep listening to outgoing and incoming rockets, mortars and artillery. I'm sick of facing, every day, a new bunch of children ripped to pieces, " she wrote. Her book, written with Christopher Morgan, was the first widely published account of the war by a woman veteran and among the first to deal with the incidence of post-traumatic stress disorder, from which she suffered. By her account, she developed a drinking problem and failed at a marriage and nursing jobs in California as she struggled with flashbacks and anxiety. Returning to the Washington area in the late 1970s, she finally found a counselor who diagnosed her with post-traumatic stress disorder and she began to heal, in part by writing the memoir. It was a commercial success and still is used as a teaching tool about Vietnam, but it initially attracted fierce criticism from some veterans, including nurses she served with, who claimed Mrs. Buckley was embroidering the experience for profit and to burnish her antiwar stance. But still others supported the account. One, a former Army nurse, Lynn Calmes Kohl, told The Post that, "actually, what Lynda wrote was mild." The book was inspiration for the television drama series "China Beach, " which ran from 1988 to 1991. Mrs. Buckley became first executive director of the Vietnam Veterans of America Women's Project in 1979 and retired in 1984. She continued to write articles, edit volumes of poetry, conduct seminars and give speeches after she retired.
