Her own Vietnam
(Book)

A novel.

From the publisher. For decades, Della Brown has tried to forget her service as a US Army nurse in Vietnam. But when she receives a letter from a fellow combat nurse, once her closest friend, all the memories come flooding back: Della's nightmarish introduction to the Twelfth Evacuation Hospital, where every bed held a patient hideously wounded in ways never mentioned in nursing school. The day she learned how to tell young men they were about to die. The night her chopper pilot boyfriend failed to return from his mission. She must also confront the fissures in her family life, the mystery of her father's disappearance, the things mothers and daughters cannot -- maybe should not -- know about one another, and the lifelong repercussions of a single mistake. An unflinching depiction of war and its personal costs, Her Own Vietnam is also a portrait of a woman in midlife -- a mother, a nurse, and long ago a soldier.