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

"Records the memories of a war in the words of those women courageous enough to walk into hell." --San Francisco Chronicle

A decade after America pulled out of Vietnam, the seeds of the often heart- wrenching oral history, A Piece of My Heart, were sown when writer and filmmaker Keith Walker met a woman who had been an emergency room nurse in Cu Chi and Da Nang. She and 25 others recount the time they spent "in country" as part of 15,000 American women who volunteered or served as nurses and in the military. After working on too many mutilated young men, one nurse tells of wanting to ask her mother to "check around and see if she could find one whole eighteen-year- old." Like male veterans, many returned with post-traumatic stress disorder. They found it hard to shake the numbness that made a war zone bearable or to settle into a life minus manic highs and lows. "The one thing Nam did for me was that I felt like I could walk on water," says a nurse, a conviction that made later jobs seem worthless or impossibly bland.