Another Awakening

In mid-1995 my sister and her family moved to Colorado, just north of Colorado Springs. Later that year I visited for a week and fell in love with the state and moved here less than 60 days later. For the first year I felt I was constantly on vacation and couldn't get over the fact I didn't have to go back to L.A. except to visit.

(Note: I still visit several times a year as my 91 year young mother is still there as well as the rest of my family, including sis and family who lasted through 5 years of dry summers and arctic winters before going back to California)

I have always been a reader and collector of books of interest. My current library includes a couple hundred volumes of pre-1900 literature, about 100 books on shipwrecks and maritime history, a bunch on California and Journalism history, several hundred on self-help and new age philosophy and spirituality, lots and lots of fiction and about a hundred and fifty about Vietnam and the war.

After reading many of the books about the war I began to develop a play about 1965...a subject for another blog post...and wanted to flesh out a female character. I'm no stranger to the fact of women in the military. My mother was a WAVE during WWII although she never got closer to the front than Pearl Harbor well after the attack. Coincidental that her birthday happens to be Dec. 7th?

Somehow I was put in touch with JoLynne, a nurse who served in Vietnam and spent several hours worth of Q&A. Among the things I learned from her:

...MASH hardly depicted the reality of their daily carnage quotient.

...her previous training as a nurse barely prepared her for her tour in country

...her experience under fire and under intense pressure had no value to hospital administrators upon her return

...there were approximately 20,000 women in total, in capacities as varied as medical staff, entertainers, aid workers and charities, and flight attendants who spent time in Vietnam through the course of the war.

She introduced me to a remarkable book entitled A Piece of my Heart, a compilation of essays from about 35 women who served, about the female experience in Vietnam. It'll break your heart. And I recommend it unreservedly.

The most memorable essay (at least for me) was by a nurse who met and eventually married a LRRP. Long Range Reconnaissance Patrols were the ones that crawled along the jungle floor in advance of their platoon through all the muck, rotting vegetation and Agent Orange on a daily basis. According to her, the Agent Orange had little, if any, effect on them, but their child was visited by plagues of tumors and other infirmities while very young. I still read every day on my Face book page about another veteran being ravaged by A.O. more than 40 years later.

Spirituality and compassion rear their heads in the next installment.