justifiedsinner
6/25/2013
The novel is self described as a Fantasy novel of Vietnam. It recounts the adventures of a nurse in the Army Nurse Corp stationed in Vietnam. The fantasy, more magical realism really, comes from her being given an amulet by a dying Vietnamese holy man that allows her to see peoples auras and to heal.
The novel consists of three parts Part 1 "The Hospital" is a fairly realistic account of life in a field hospital. Here she meets the holy man and is given the amulet. In part 2 "The Jungle" she crashes in the jungle in a helicopter. She and a young Vietnamese amputee are the only survivors. She has various adventures including fighting a venomous python (sic), being captured by the Vietcong and being nearly excuted by an American general. Part 3 "The Homecoming" is short and tells of her disappointing homecoming and her adjustment to civilian life. Most of the "magic" occurs in part 2.
Part 1 was an engrossing desciption of life a a wartime nurse. Part 2 an inauthentic and rather hackned adventure story. Part 3 a too short description of her attempts to deal with the real pain of adjustment.
It's a shame she didn't write a memoir. Sometimes fiction can reveal truths that real life accounts cannot touch but sometimes, as in this case, it just distances the wrter and the reader from the often painful truth.