Home before Morning: The Story of an Army Nurse in Vietnam

Back in the 60's as a young girl, all of us wore POW bracelets, not really sure what was going on in the Vietnam war.This novel will give you a birds eye view of just how terribly devastating it was.As a nurse, myself it is a hard, emotional, intense read that made me stop at times to think and wonder how this nurse could continue to work in Vietnam. Would it ever be over?Yet, we soon realize the fallout continued not just for Lynda, but for all of those who served and it's never over!Very sad, but real journey.

That's the question Lynda Van Devanter asks over and over in the course of this memoir, the centerpiece of which is her year (June 1969 to June 1970) as a surgical nurse in Vietnam, principally at the 71st Evacuation Hospital, Pleiku. She went to Vietnam a relatively carefree, healthy twenty-two-year-old. She returned damaged on the inside, both psychologically and physically. She died in 2002 at age fifty-five from an autoimmune, collagen-vascular disorder caused by exposure to toxic chemicals in Vietnam. Yet one more casualty of America's adventure in Vietnam. And for what?Outside the personal realm of family and friends, Van Devanter had three notable accomplishments in her life about which she could be proud. The first consists of her work as an extremely dedicated nurse, both in Vietnam (where in addition to American soldiers her patients also included Vietnamese soldiers and citizens) and back home in the U.S. over a two-decade nursing career. For some of those patients she was the person most responsible for saving their life. Her second notable achievement was as National Women's Director of the Vietnam Veterans of America, where she was instrumental in raising recognition of the contributions of women Vietnam veterans and in securing benefits for them. Third, there is HOME BEFORE MORNING, which deserves a place in any collection of Vietnam memoirs, especially because it is from a relatively unknown and unappreciated perspective.Van Devanter went to war as a gung-ho believer in the United States and its war in Vietnam. Disillusionment came gradually, but it had enveloped her midway through her year in-country. It was due largely to repeated encounters with devastating, gruesome wounds, some of which are horrifically detailed in the book. The hardest to deal with were the crispy critters - those charred by napalm, surely one of humankind's most insidious inventions. One can easily understand a surgeon muttering, after operating non-stop amidst blood and moans and screams for forty-eight hours, "I'd like to have Richard Nixon here for one week." Compounding the surreal hellishness of Van Devanter's year in Nam was the bureaucratic ineptitude, stupidity, and callousness so pervasive in the U.S. military.HOME BEFORE MORNING was first published in 1983, qualifying it, to quote another reviewer, as "the grandmother of female Viet Nam accounts". This 2001 edition from the University of Massachusetts Press includes an eight-page afterword by Van Devanter, written shortly before she died. The book is very easy to read, although the writing is somewhat slick and conventional, often using rather stock formulations (e.g., "I'd be lying if I said there aren't still difficult times"). Much of the dialogue obviously was reconstructed or re-imagined, and there are internal indications that some of the events themselves may to some extent have been fabricated. I see that several other reviews or the comments to them claim that some of the incidents in the book are either exaggerated or happened to someone else. Still, I tend to believe that on the whole HOME BEFORE MORNING is a realistic portrayal of a surgical nurse in a field hospital in Vietnam, and as such it is worth reading.

When my oldest daughter was in nursing school, she had to read this book. She passed it on to me because the Viet Nam war was my generation, although I was never in the military. I vividly recall reading it in bed, only being able to read maybe ten pages at a time because of what she describes. I sometimes cried. That time, circa 2000, was also after I spent time some years sharing a house with a man who was there and returned with PTSD, although neither of us understood this so many years ago.I have a good friend, half my age, who is getting a Masters in Social Work. He will be interning at a VA hospital in a couple of weeks, he's also in the AF Reserves. We were having coffee last week and I mentioned this book, saying it should be required reading for anyone dealing with patients in the VA system. I found my eyes getting wet recalling what I read almost 20 years ago!The author not only lived the horrors that she did, but she was instrumental in getting the VA to recognize that the nurses, too, were susceptible to PTSD.Stan, my man. You died too young. I love you. I'd love to have a conversation with the author.

I was a 1LT MAT team commander in Pleiku Province, almost exactly in the same time frame as Lynda. I lived and operated with the RF and PF forces, mostly Montagnards. I probably had time to get out of 'the field' only six to eight times, and would look Lynda up to visit by the pool, always leaving before dusk to return to my military location, whether it be my home compound of Le Trung or in a Montagnard village somewhere. She was a bright light in that year, and I always looked forward to seeing her, we seemed to have a lot in common. Though I knew the medical staff saw horrific things, I never knew what she was going through or what it later did to her. We had discussed getting together when we returned home, but I was hurt near the end of my tour and soon sent home, and her unit was moved somewhere to the coast, but as I was in the field, I never found out where. I wonder if our lives would have been drastically different if we had. She was a beautiful nurse, and I found her book educational to say the least, and of course, depressing, which should come as no surprise when you know what these fine people had to deal with. Thank you, Lynda. You are in my new book, PAWNS OF PLEIKU. May you rest in peace.

Great book the best in his genre. A must read

I was mesmerized by this book when it first came out and read it overnight. As an emergency room nurse in a treacherous location for horrific accidents, I found myself identifying with her absorbing decriptions what she dealt with and tried to survive. It is one of a handful of books that have reread and now that kindle has published it I can read it again without disturbing my hardcopy. It's about a nurse facing the Vietnam war and you need to read it.

It was a book, I read it.

Gave the book as a gift .I think it will be enjoyed