A short life of the author
Lynda Van Devanter (27 May 1947 – 15 November 2002) was an American Army nurse and memoirist whose book Home Before Morning: The Story of an Army Nurse in Vietnam (1983) was the first major memoir published by an American woman who served in the Vietnam War. The book shattered the near-total silence that had surrounded women’s experience of the war and told a story that was in some ways more devastating than the combat memoirs that preceded it: a story not only of the horrors of treating catastrophic wounds in a field hospital under fire, but of the institutional betrayal that awaited the women who served when they returned home — the Veterans Administration that denied their claims, the antiwar movement that reviled them, the military establishment that ignored them, and the society that had no category for female combat veterans.
Life Before Vietnam
Van Devanter grew up in a Catholic, patriotic, middle-class family in Arlington, Virginia. She was an idealistic young woman who volunteered for the Army Nurse Corps in 1968 at twenty-one, motivated by a genuine desire to serve her country and to help the wounded. She was assigned to the 71st Evacuation Hospital in Pleiku, in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam.
Vietnam
Van Devanter served in Vietnam from June 1969 to June 1970, during some of the heaviest fighting of the war. As a surgical nurse at an evacuation hospital, she dealt daily with the most extreme combat injuries: traumatic amputations, burns, abdominal wounds, head injuries. The hospital was frequently under rocket and mortar attack. She worked twelve-to-eighteen-hour shifts in conditions of unrelenting physical and emotional stress.
Home Before Morning describes the reality of combat nursing with a directness that is still difficult to read: the sounds, the smells, the impossible triage decisions, the young men who arrived alive and died on the table, the moments of dark humour that kept the staff functioning, and the relationships — with other nurses, with doctors, with patients, with Vietnamese civilians — that provided the only emotional sustenance available.
The book is also frank about the sexual dynamics of the military: the unwanted advances, the pressure to socialise with officers, and the pervasive assumption that women in the military were either maternal figures or sexual opportunities.
Coming Home
The second half of Home Before Morning — and in many ways the more important half — describes Van Devanter’s return to the United States. She was met not with gratitude but with hostility (antiwar protesters spat on her at the airport), indifference (her family and friends had no language for what she had experienced), and institutional failure (the VA refused to recognise her PTSD symptoms, telling her that women did not serve in combat and therefore could not have combat-related trauma).
Van Devanter suffered severe PTSD: flashbacks, nightmares, emotional numbness, alcoholism, failed relationships, and a persistent, corrosive anger. Her account of these years is one of the most unflinching portrayals of post-traumatic stress in American literature — made all the more powerful by the fact that the condition was not officially recognised by the VA until 1980, more than a decade after her service.
Advocacy
Van Devanter became a leading advocate for women veterans’ rights. She served as national women’s director for Vietnam Veterans of America and was instrumental in the campaign to include women in the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. — the statue of three military women, dedicated in 1993, was in part a result of her activism.
She also edited Visions of War, Dreams of Peace: Writings of Women in the Vietnam War (1991), an anthology of poetry and prose by women who served.
Legacy
Home Before Morning was a direct inspiration for the character of nurse Colleen McMurphy in the television series China Beach (1988–1991). Van Devanter served as a consultant on the show, which brought the experience of military women in Vietnam to a broad audience for the first time.
Van Devanter died of a systemic collagen vascular disease in 2002, at age fifty-five. The disease was linked to her exposure to Agent Orange during her service in Vietnam.
Collecting Van Devanter
Home Before Morning (1983, Beaufort Books) in first edition with dust jacket brings $30–$80. The book is out of print in hardcover but available in used copies. Signed copies are very scarce and command premiums. Visions of War, Dreams of Peace (1991) brings $15–$30 in first edition.