CHARGE(What is the author trying to say?): There were women in Vietnam.
Army nurses were stationed in Vietnam during the war. They found themselves in city hospitals and MASH units. A few suffered physical wounds, but almost all emerged with psychological wounds. The soundtrack of Vietnam, which Hannah so thoroughly describes, was the soundtrack of my childhood. Raised on Air Force bases, mostly in California, I went to sleep to the continuous sound of transport planes taking our soldiers to the battlefields. We all knew someone whose father had been or was about to be deployed to Vietnam. Hannah’s book is an eloquent portrayal of the cost of war. The cost isn’t measured in dollars and cents or in statistics recounting dead and wounded. The cost of war is borne by survivors, their families, and the families of the fallen. This is an extraordinary look at how that cost is extracted.
VERDICT (Was the author successful?): Guilty, as charged.
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