Customer Reviews

Home Before Morning: Story of an Army Nurse in Vietnam

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I read the book in the context of one person's experience, not for a global understanding of the Vietnam war. It was a moving and informative look at the life of a person who paid a painful price for her service.

This was probably one of the first books I read on Vietnam. Part of my attempt to put my experiences there into some kind of perspective. I found the book deeply moving. It also opened my eyes to the experiences of those who consistently saw more of the horror of war then many of the rest of us did. I am in sharp disagreement with the review by Mr Versaci. This is an excellent look at the experiences of the physicians and nurses who took care of us.

Lynda Van Devanter's Home Before Morning is a thoroughly engaging narrative about her "coming of age" as an army nurse in the Vietnam War. Her moral, political, and emotional growth throughout the novel follows a classic pattern: she is initially naive about war and guided mainly by her untested ideals, she goes to Vietnam and "loses her innocence" about war and its nature, and she grows and develops as a result of this "loss." This pattern recurs again and again in Vietnam narratives (e.g., Platoon and Philip Caputo's A Rumor of War), and its familiarity lends much emotional weight to Van Devanter's story. In all fairness, however, the power of her experiences cannot be denied. As an army nurse she sees a great deal of the bloodshed, and she is in a particularly important position to "put a face" on the dead and wounded, which she and co-writer Christopher Morgan do very effectively. However, while this book is a powerful introduction to the realities of the war, it tends toward the melodramatic (particularly when Van Devanter becomes involved with a doctor), and it never really explores some of the deeper issues about the war that her experiences raise. For readers looking for books on the Vietnam War that exhibit both top-notch prose and an insightful exploration of the ambiguities of War, I would suggest Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried and Going After Cacciato, as well as Michael Herr's Dispatches.