Book Home Before Morning

Home Before Morning by Lynda Van Devanter Home Before Morning Essay Lynda Van Devanter writes both a war book and an anti-war book. In the year that 22-year-old Van Devanter worked as a surgical nurse in South Vietnam, she traversed a long and weary path to get back home -- but she didn't quite get home before morning. She didn't ever again find that peaceful, confident, idealistic life that she left behind when she went to war in Vietnam.

Van Devanter relays a story that begins in a place of confident patriotism -- a place that must be familiar to most young people who decide that they must become soldiers. At the start of her mission, Van Devanter is as much pro-war as any soldier although her orientation is different. Her perspective is that of a nurse -- someone trained to help other heal -- and because of that, she will never be able to see the Vietnam War in the same way as other soldiers.

As it turned out, the members of the military who were assigned to medical services saw the war from a very distinct perspective -- one that could not be shared with others. The perspective of Van Devanter as a healer evaporated the moment she stepped foot on the ground in that faraway country where everything was out-of-kilter and very, very wrong.

By the time the surviving soldiers came home -- back to America, if that was where they hailed from -- no clarity about why they were fighting in the war remained. They had descended into the very deepest part of Hell, and it turned them numb on the outside and left them raw and hemorrhaging on the inside. Van Devanter was consumed by too much hopelessness from her time in a head-on collision with previously unimaginable horrors. There are times when memory serves and times when memory fails.

In the case of soldiers who were engaged in the Vietnam War, memory only fails. It fails because it lets the soldiers remember that which will paralyze their ability to connect with others. It fails because it permits vivid recall of that which haunts the soldier and brings him or her to a state of instant and fierce arousal -- ready to do battle, yet blinded by the past in the very moment when they need most of all to see a way forward.

Van Devanter had plenty of company in her quest to overcome the symptoms of PTSD that came to define and obscure her Post-Vietnam existence. Van Devanter suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) when she returned to the United States. She experienced flashbacks and nightmares. And she suffered from a recurring dream about a young man without a face -- because it had been blown away during the war -- whom she had helped to treat after his critical injury.

Van Devanter remembered asking him if he was in pain, and he squeezed her hand to let her know he was, so she ordered more pain meds for him. But the young man bled so profusely from his wounds that he could not be saved. This sort of encounter happened time and again to Van Devanter -- so many young boys were horribly disfigured and debilitated by their injuries. Van Devanter became depressed and drank heavily to numb her senses -- and to keep her from dreaming.

She couldn't keep jobs working as a nurse in civilian hospitals; she ended up on welfare and was unable to talk about her experiences in the Vietnam War for a long time. A particular event drove her to seek therapy: She was sleeping while on a visit to see friends living on Long Island, when the wail of a siren at a fire station nearby woke her up. To her mind, the sound was that of the alerts that announced the rocket and mortar attacks in Pleiku, South Vietnam.

She dove to the floor and crawled out of the house. Van Devanter was so unnerved by her response to the siren that she began a therapy program called "Walking Through Vietnam." The therapeutic approach including writing down her recollections of the war as they occurred to her. The experiences of Lynda Van Devanter were of a magnitude much greater than most soldiers since she faced extraordinary severely wounded people every day -- day after day. While a soldier might see someone injured every few days or several.