The Healer's War

The cover of the book had a review from the Minneapolis Star Tribune: "A Brutal and Beautiful Book", which certainly does a good job describing it. The author draws heavily on her own reflections and knowledge from the Vietnam War, as well as those of other veterans. Although the protagonist tells the story from a US military perspective, it is the moral conflicts and gruelling descriptions of the Vietnamese civilian experience that stand out. As she said in her afterword, it isn't a story with "white and black hats" or "sides". It reminded me a lot of David Drake's book "Redliners" (an excellent SciFi War novel), which he used to deal with his own Vietnam experience. Characters and images from this novel will stay with me for a very long time.