Home Before Morning : The Story of an Army Nurse in Vietnam
author: Lynda Van Devanter
name: Paul
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1983
rating: 4
read at: 2011/09/08
date added: 2011/09/08
shelves: history, non-fiction, memoir
review:
My wife has been pestering me to pick up Lynda Van Devanter‘s memoir of serving as a nurse in the Vietnam War for years. The thing is, I don’t really like memoirs all that much. Too often they spend a third or more of the book going over the kinds of “start at the beginning” backstories which don’t really add as much to the framing of the meat as the authors think. This is especially true of stories where either childhoods were especially harsh and difficult (nearly always highlighted in tales of survival as the place the narrator learned how to never give up) or were more or less idyllic (usually setting up a grand disappointment or disenfranchisement later). It’s rarely as simple as these narrative devices let on and they just sort of bore me, especially since I usually only care about the hook of a memoir, something the author can describe that I’ve not heard about before. I’ve heard plenty of stories of happy and sad childhoods. Spare me.
Home Before Morning isn’t exempt from this memoir-itis, relying on the idyllic childhood context to contrast the horrors of war and show how the oppressive futility of trying to piece dying soldiers back together shattered her once peaceful little existence. Whatever else you may say about the meat of the book and the skillfulness of its crafting, the basic premise is hardly novel. That doesn’t make it bad, I suppose, it just makes it familiar. I guess it’s difficult to look at a book about a naive Catholic nursing student volunteering for a tour of duty from my lofty 21st century ivory tower, decorated as it is with all the dissecting literature, film and coursework of the past forty years and not say, “Well, jeez. What did you expect, lady?”
Still, Van Devanter managed to make a slow but effective incision in my post-irony viewpoint and drag me back to a time when patriotism wasn’t just a jest adopted by people to serve a political purpose, when ideals weren’t viewed with cynicism and suspicion wrought from too many disappointing years under questionable leadership. Home Before Morning shows, in a way, the birth of all that, chronicling at its best moments the death not of an individual’s innocence, but of a nation’s.
Some of Home Before Morning doesn’t completely work. The last third of the book is devoted to Van Devanter’s return to the States, chronicling her disenchantment with what she (and other vets) termed “The World.” The World was unhappy with the war and for the most part shamefully took it out on the soldiers who, as Van Devanter points out, largely were as opposed to it as those who hadn’t gone into the service. Some of this section is powerful, riveting and insightful but parts of it drag a bit as she describes Post Traumatic Stress Disorder faithfully but without near as much passion and impact as her tales from the one year in the 71st Evac. The choices of what to skim past (her marriage) and what to bog down in detail (her stint as a dialysis nurse) and mostly what to try to weave as a narrative thread aren’t always the best. A key example for this is the recurring theme of the question that continues to plague her throughout the war and the aftermath: Why? For as often as Van Devanter asks the question, she never makes any serious attempt to answer it, even when some thoughtful introspection about it would be deeply appropriate like in the epilogue where she describes her return to Vietnam in 1982.
A couple of places where Home Before Morning really shines is in its depiction of the horrors of war through the lens not of the hyper-masculine killing machines in the infantry units (I’m thinking of works like Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket), but through the eyes of the sort of ironically necessary medical personnel who have to be on hand to try and undo the work of the warring soldiers on both sides. For some reason the idea that the trauma of war would seep into the lives of medics never really occurred to me, as if treating wounded soldiers was no more traumatic for hospital staff than the doctors and nurses working in a Stateside facility in a particularly violent neighborhood. I’m grateful to the book for giving me a different perspective, one that extends to all emergency medical personnel.
One thing I wish Home Before Morning had was a follow-up; the book’s narrative stops in 1982 and I had to go online to find that she eventually re-married, had a daughter and passed away in 2002 and spent a lot of the years between the publication of the book and her death serving as a spokesperson for women veterans and that this book was in part the inspiration for the television series China Beach. Obviously that’s not the kind of thing that would appear in this book, but I was interested enough in the tale, and in Van Devanter herself, to want more when it was over. I guess that says something in itself.