A Piece of My Heart

January 1, 1985
Some 15,000 American women served in Vietnam during the war. As one of them remarks in this collection of extended monologues, "The war really did a number on all of us, the women as well as the men.'' Despite sexual harassment, ambiguous feelings about the Vietnamese and traumatic combat-zone experiences, the women whose voices are heard here recall their wartime service in a generally positive light. Most of them were military nurses and WACs, but there are also Red Cross and USO volunteers, as well as a civilian flight attendant and a radio personality named Chris Noel, whose voice was familiar to thousands of homesick GIs. No great revelations or insights here; despite the book's twist of focusing on servicewomen, it's all rather predictable. Photos.

February 1, 1986
Post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD, is a term that appears often in this collection of interviews of women who served for one agency or another in Vietnam. Other terms recur, too: DEROS, hooches, IVs, the "Pandora's Box" that some of the women fear will be opened if they recall all they went through. Walker estimates that more than 15,000 women served in Vietnam, the majority of them military nurses and volunteers for the Red Cross, the USO, etc. The lesson from their words is that even the most casual contact with war has a devastating effect. There have been many oral histories of the war; some are more poignant, most certainly more graphically sanguinary, but none is more informative or evocative of the era. For women's studies, medical, and Vietnam War collections. Mel D. Lane, Sacramento, Cal.