“George was from Brooklyn. He was tall with curly hair and sparkly eyes and a big ugly wound running from his shoulders, down his back to his coccyx. He was healing. He was afraid of being returned to combat. I was afraid of that too. Because his wounds were not considered too severe, he had to go back to the war. He had asked me what kind of wounds got to go home. He was afraid of being wounded again. Off he went and although I quickly put him out of my mind, his pleading eyes haunted me. Three weeks later George came back to our hospital, this time with no arms. His eyes were dead. “Will these wounds keep me from fighting again?” After seeing him, I left the hospital and went outside and threw up in the red mud. I didn’t remember any more names after that.”
From “Another Kind of War Story: Army Nurses Look Back to Vietnam ”
From the rear cover: “This is a book about war written by nurses. It is a book of anger and sadness and of the lessons learned, the lives lost and the need to move on. It is a collection of memories and stories, of thoughts and feelings. It is about good and bad times, then and now, about fantasy and reality, backflashes and nightmares and about the healing process of telling and remembering. It is a powerful view into a jarring and disconnected war. The themes of wounds and healing, of buried feelings and well-defended postures are held together by this book. It is a story of good soldiers in a bad war, young women who grew old in Vietnam, of women who have reclaimed their memories and themselves.”