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INTRODUCTION
 
I had been involved with the Vietnam veterans community for several months, working on a photo essay about them, but had yet to locate a woman who was in Vietnam during the war. Then in February 1983, I was introduced to Rose Sandecki, director of the Veterans Outreach Center in Concord, California, and arranged an interview with her. For an hour and a half Rose told me of things I couldn’t have imagined: how close to the war women actually were, the details of her daily routine as an emergency room nurse in Cu Chi and Da Nang, how deeply the experience had affected her life.
 
Then she told me of her efforts to locate other women across the country who might be experiencing the problems that she and a dozen of her peers in the Bay Area discovered they shared. They all had experienced difficulty in readjusting to life even after being back from Vietnam for as many as fourteen years.
 
I was stunned by what Rose told me, yet there was something beyond that, something in her eyes, an intangible, haunting presence that really drew me in—that interview was to determine what I would be doing for the following two years and would lead to the making of this book.
 
Rose asked me why I was interested in Vietnam veterans. I wasn’t really sure myself, but in my explanation I remember speaking of a need to examine my own feelings about the war and maybe reconcile the conflicting emotions that I still carried with me. During the war I was teaching college in the San Francisco area and was constantly aware of the students’ dilemma in dealing with Vietnam. The young men were facing the draft, and because I had been drafted and sent to Korea when I was their age, I had definite opinions on that subject. I was strongly against our involvement and in sympathy with the people in the antiwar movement, but having been a soldier, I couldn’t abandon the people who were going over there. Their lives were on the line, whether or not our government was right in sending them there. I guess you could say, to use a contemporary phrase, I was able to separate the warriors from the war.
 
Twelve years later I found myself wondering about these people, wanting to hear their stories firsthand. What had it really been like for them in Vietnam? How were they doing today?
Immediately after meeting Rose, I shifted all my efforts into research on women who were in Vietnam. I learned that before 1982 the official estimates had varied from five thousand to fifty-five thousand women in-country, an inconsistency that seemed absurd. The fluctuating figures were due, in part, to the integration of the service records during those years (enlisted men and women became enlisted persons, obscuring the exact number of women). But also, the military has always been guarded in its statistics about women who enter any war zone. In 1983 the official estimates said that seventy-five hundred military women and the same number of civilian women had been in Vietnam during the war years.
 
I was amazed that fifteen thousand women had been in Vietnam and yet I had heard nothing about them in the aftermath of the war. I think I was typical of the majority of Americans; as the meager file of clippings I had collected indicated, there just had been very little information about the women in any of the media. Why hadn’t movies been made about their war, their homecomings? Was it because there were so few of them relative to the male soldiers, or do we actually have a kind of blind spot about the subject? I did a bit of speculation.
 
According to military policy, women are not supposed to be in life-threatening situations in a war zone, and therefore we have never developed an image of that in our minds. We think of men in combat, and women safely in the rear echelon in offices and hospitals.
 
But in Vietnam there were no safe areas; so, it seems, we must have been unwilling to admit the possibility that women were indeed in dangerous situations. If we didn’t think about them being there, then they were not in danger.
 
After a couple of months, I went back to talk to Rose. I told her I wanted to start work on a book and thought that it could help her in the work she was doing for women veterans. I said that it was about time the women’s experience in Vietnam was heard; she agreed to help me get started.
 
Although I became very involved, very quickly, the existence of this book is still somewhat of a miracle. Because of the lack of information about women in Vietnam and the fragile threads of communication among them, they were difficult to locate. I must have written twenty-five letters that were unanswered. Another ten came back “returned to sender.” A dozen phone calls turned up “wrong numbers.”
 
When I did contact a new person, it was sometimes equally hard to persuade her to talk about her experiences over there. More than one canceled her interview after a pleasant, positive conversation on the telephone, suddenly changing her mind at the last minute. I was turned down cold by several women even after having been directed to them by a friend, and more than one was quite hostile in the process.
 
Then, because I had promised each person the right to read and approve her transcript before releasing it, six stories were never returned to me. I spent a year telephoning and writing these women, offering encouragement, trying to persuade them to go over the transcript and send it back. Some said they intended to do so but “never seemed to find the time.” I didn’t realize it at first, but most of them were having a great deal of difficulty reading those stories—going back yet again to the memories of Vietnam.
 
The women began to trust me as I became acquainted with them. I was referred from one to another once it became clear that I was making a book in which their stories would be allowed to stand on their own, that I wasn’t going to exploit or alter the material for my own purposes, that I cared.
 
In a short period, I was completely involved in their “cause.” As each new interview was completed, I learned another subtlety of the power that Vietnam held over them. There was a lot of emotional exchange taking place here; bonds were formed as they shared their memories with me. I found myself becoming a kind of messenger, passing information from one person to the next, relating the reactions to Vietnam that they held in common. Several remarked, “Other women have talked about having this problem?”—realizing they weren’t alone in those reactions. My understanding increased along with their awareness of one another as the bits and pieces of their stories emerged.
 
This involvement became the heart of my motivation to continue the work. Granted, I was gathering material for a book, and it would, no doubt, be a very special book. But I was completely caught up in the process of meeting and listening to these women. It was as if I were on the other side, a part of the women’s experience, rather than a writer working on a book about that experience.
 
I asked each of them to tell me about Vietnam (as much or as little as she was willing to recall), a little about how she got there in the first place, and then to follow up by talking about her life after coming home. For some, the memories came easily, but for others, recalling their experiences in Vietnam was a painful process. During many of the interviews there were long silences on the tapes. They are indicated in this book by a series of dots. But the dots can’t possibly describe a moment when, at a dining room table late at night with tears welling in a woman’s eyes, a sentence would drift away. There were times when the flow of a memory would take the person to such an unpleasant place that she would hesitate and then shift her trend of thought to avoid it. Some pauses lasted until the silence in the room became impossible to endure: during one woman’s attempt to describe the scene in her hospital during the Tet offensive, there developed a pause of at least three minutes. I turned the tape recorder off.
 
And this was not an unusual incident. I found myself asking fewer and fewer questions; in fact, I made a serious point to interrupt only when a word or phrase was unclear. I became unwilling to influence the flow of recollection even if it meant that a degree of continuity or clarity might be sacrificed. There was a transformation taking place, a magical kind of presence reached by each woman at some point during our meeting, where past and present became one. I recognized it; it was made of the same substance that I had sensed in that first conversation with Rose.
 
In these stories the women speak casually of the extremes of their experience in Vietnam: Red Cross women being fired upon in helicopters on their way to fire bases and outposts or stranded in a jungle clearing with no help in sight; nurses routinely working twelve-hour shifts six days a week and often much longer during mass casualties while rocket attacks went on outside their hospitals; a Special Services worker being flown out to a safe area during the Tet offensive, her helicopter lifting off as the mortar rounds walked in across the field.