Customer Reviews

Battle Dressing

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Dana Shuster's poem "Hello David" is already considered a classic of the Vietnam War but this collection of her poems raises her to the level of the best of the Vietnam Poets. Reading this collection of her poems will open anyones eyes to not only the Vietnam War Nurse's point of view but all Vietnam War Veterans. The collection is full of humor, love, fear, hate, dreams and memories. It takes the reader through the entire experience from going to Vietnam, being in Vietnam and returning from Vietnam during the War. This small collection covers every aspect of the war and is written by the hand of genius in using language. You wont find another book like this anywhere. Suitable for the whole family and easy and simple to read. A must for anyone interested in the "Vietnam Experience". Country Joe McDonald

Dusty is easily the finest poet of the Vietnam War, and this is a wonderful way to experience a longer collection of her work. I highly recommend it!

I have not read this bok yet, but am waiting anxiously till after the holidays for it. I have been greatly impressed by Dusty's other works. Her poetry can tear your heart apart. It has been very meaningful to me

I've read some of Dana Shuster's works and found them moving and with a real air of authenticity. Like many, I was shocked to discover that Dana Shuster had actually never been in Vietnam and that no record existed of her ever having served. Reportedly she's confessed and is in therapy. That leaves me with mixed feelings; obviously she has talent, because how else could she convince so many people? But her talent will be forever tainted by the deception, which is too bad.

...was so much owed by so many to so few.

The words were spoken by Winston Churchill while expressing the debt his country owed to the RAF fighter pilots who inflicted Hitler's first defeat in 1940 during The Battle of Britain.

The same words could be used to describe the debt owed to the military nurses and their Red Cross sisters who flew 12,000 miles into a war zone to care for the wounded and the dying from a largely conscript army whose average age was 19 (in WW II it was 26.)

I have only ever known of three Army Nurses who served a second Tour in Vietnam. Dusty, aka Dana Shuster, Diana Dwan Poole, and Captain Mary 'Chris' Banigan, who sadly passed away earlier this year. Ask any Nam Nurse who served even one Tour what it must have taken to go back a second time and they will shake their heads. Yet Dana Shuster did go back.

Dana takes you behind the ranks of bungling self-serving politicians, the failed or absent strategies, to show you the human cost of a war that made no sense to the people fighting it, even as it was happening.

As Country Joe rightly said, Hello David is a classic by anybody's standards, and remains one of the most stark, chilling snapshots of the daily quota of heartbreak that the Nam Nurses had to endure every 72-hour working week. As Dana asks, who will give her something for her pain?

Yet Dusty also captures what was perhaps the most unforgivable aspect of the Vietnam War - the blaming of the troops, (who were routinely called 'baby killers' on their return to the US) and the Nurses, Red Cross workers and WACs who risked their own lives to support them.

Yet even when she writes about being pelted with beer cans, her transcendent sense of humor brings her to reflect on the philosophical question of whether the beer cans were half-empty or half-full.

I was lucky enough to obtain a signed copy of Battle Dressing, which Dusty signed 'Blessings and peace'. Right back at you, Dana.

Welcome home, ANC.

While there is no doubt that Dana Shuster has a talent for poetry, it must be acknowledged that she is a complete and total fraud. She never served in Vietnam, never served in the military, and never was a nurse. If this were fiction that would be fine, but she claimed to have served in Vietnam, witnessed the horrors of a Vietnam operating room, came home and suffered from Agent Orange and PTSD. The problem is that none of it is true! She made the whole thing up. Thus given the fact that she lied about serving in Vietnam, and that the poetry is based on utter fiction, I have to give it one star. I would give it zero stars if I could.