The riveting memoir of one operating room nurse’s tour of duty in Vietnam between 1967 and 1968. Conflicts abound between the author’s sense of loyalty and his gut feeling that the war has somehow become a meaningless waste of life and limb. Words become pictures as he describes all aspects of simply surviving in the thick of a miserable tropical environment, the horrors of treating young combatants with mutilating injuries, and the reactions of his fellow nurses and himself to the constant pain and death. Readers will become totally immersed in this nurse’s world as they watch as a soldier’s face and chest are “pelted with shrapnel and blackened from the explosion,” hear the “unmistakable whoooomph of outgoing artillery,” and smell the nauseating operating room air with its “humid mixture of grit, grime, gunpowder and blood.” Unquestionably, readers will come to understand why such tasks as going through the wallet of a dying GI to help in identifying him truly troubled the author, and perhaps, just perhaps, why trying to forget the names and faces of these young gladiators aided in relieving some of the sense of loss when these young men died. Or did it? Photographs enhance the text.
John Kildea
2006, 5½x8½, paper, 118 pp.
ISBN: 9780788441424
101-K4142
