Keith Walker - A Piece of My Heart: The Stories of 26 American Women Who Served in Vietnam

I had been involved with the Vietnam veterans community for several months, working on a photo essay about them, but had yet to locate a woman who was in Vietnam during the war. Then in February 1983, I was introduced to Rose Sandecki, director of the Veterans Outreach Center in Concord, California, and arranged an interview with her. For an hour and a half Rose told me of things I couldn't have imagined: how close to the war women actually were, the details of her daily routine as an emergency room nurse in Cu Chi and Da Nang, how deeply the experience had affected her life.

Then she told me of her efforts to locate other women across the country who might be experiencing the problems that she and a dozen of her peers in the Bay Area discovered they shared. They all had experienced difficulty in readjusting to life even after being back from Vietnam for as many as fourteen years.

I was stunned by what Rose told me, yet there was something beyond that, something in her eyes, an intangible, haunting presence that really drew me inthat interview was to determine what I would be doing for the following two years and would lead to the making of this book.

Rose asked me why I was interested in Vietnam veterans. I wasn't really sure myself, but in my explanation I remember speaking of a need to examine my own feelings about the war and maybe reconcile the conflicting emotions that I still carried with me. During the war I was teaching college in the San Francisco area and was constantly aware of the students dilemma in dealing with Vietnam. The young men were facing the draft, and because I had been drafted and sent to Korea when I was their age, I had definite opinions on that subject. I was strongly against our involvement and in sympathy with the people in the antiwar movement, but having been a soldier, I couldn't abandon the people who were going over there. Their lives were on the line, whether or not our government was right in sending them there. I guess you could say, to use a contemporary phrase, I was able to separate the warriors from the war.

Twelve years later I found myself wondering about these people, wanting to hear their stories firsthand. What had it really been like for them in Vietnam? How were they doing today?

Immediately after meeting Rose, I shifted all my efforts into research on women who were in Vietnam. I learned that before 1982 the official estimates had varied from five thousand to fifty-five thousand women in-country, an inconsistency that seemed absurd. The fluctuating figures were due, in part, to the integration of the service records during those years (enlisted men and women became enlisted persons, obscuring the exact number of women). But also, the military has always been guarded in its statistics about women who enter any war zone. In 1983 the official estimates said that seventy-five hundred military women and the same number of civilian women had been in Vietnam during the war years.

I was amazed that fifteen thousand women had been in Vietnam and yet I had heard nothing about them in the aftermath of the war. I think I was typical of the majority of Americans; as the meager file of clippings I had collected indicated, there just had been very little information about the women in any of the media. Why hadn't movies been made about their war, their homecomings? Was it because there were so few of them relative to the male soldiers, or do we actually have a kind of blind spot about the subject? I did a bit of speculation.