Lynda Van Devanter was a United States army nurse, an activist for women veterans, author. When she went to the Vietnam war in 1969, she envisaged a heroic year of helping to save young United States soldiers' lives. Instead, her experiences changed her life and, she claimed, led to her early death at the age of 55. After Vietnam, she worked in several hospitals, and wrote and edited books.
Background
Lynda Van Devanter was born on May 27, 1947, in Washington, District of Columbia, United States. She was a daughter of Helen Van Devanter. She grew up in a close-knit Catholic family with four sisters. Her parents always encouraged her to find a way to contribute to society. They emphasized the obligation people had to be of service not only to our family, community, church, and country but to all of mankind. From the time she was a little girl, Lynda dreamed of being a nurse. She read books about famous nurses, bandaged people's cuts, nursed injured animals back to health.
Education
Lynda Van Devanter worked at a nursing home during high school. In 1965, she enrolled in the Mercy Hospital School of Nursing in Baltimore where she earned a medical degree in nursing in 1968. She earned a bachelor's degree in psychology from Antioch University.
Career
After completing six weeks of basic training at an army base in Texas, Lynda Van Devanter flew to Vietnam in June 1969. She was assigned to the 71st Evacuation Hospital in Pleiku province, located in the mountains near the Cambodian border. Within the first few weeks after she arrived, she found out that the hospital deserved its reputation. She worked exhausting, twelve-hour shifts in poorly equipped operating rooms. She treated young soldiers with missing limbs, terrible burns, and huge blast wounds on a regular basis. To make matters worse, explosions and sniper fire often occurred just outside the hospital compound. Over time, the constant exposure to death and danger took a toll on Van Devanter. She began to lose her faith in what the United States forces were trying to accomplish in Vietnam.
After completing her one-year tour of duty as a surgical nurse in Vietnam, Van Devanter returned to the United States. But her homecoming was not the happy occasion she had hoped for. As the Vietnam War dragged on, the American people became bitterly divided over United States involvement. Antiwar demonstrations took place across the country. Some people viewed Vietnam veterans, or anyone in a military uniform, as symbols of an increasingly unpopular war. Like many male veterans, Van Devanter found that many Americans seemed to treat her with disinterest or even hostility. Her homecoming experience was even worse than those of some male veterans because few people seemed to realize that women had served in the Vietnam War. Even the United States government did not provide support programs for women veterans.
Van Devanter's memories of Vietnam, combined with the lack of recognition and support she received upon returning home, took a heavy emotional toll on her. She felt angry and isolated from other people. For many years, she suffered from depression, nightmares, flashbacks, crying spells, and angry outbursts. Unable to put her memories of Vietnam behind her, she drank and smoked heavily, and she even considered suicide. She had trouble keeping a job as a nurse because being in hospitals reminded her of terrible things from the war. She later described her work record as spotty and her relationships as tormented and unfulfilling.
Then one night in 1979, while visiting friends on eastern Long Island, she was awakened by a siren from a nearby volunteer firehouse. It made the same sound as the alert that had signaled rocket and mortar attacks on Pleiku, and Ms. Van Devanter found herself compulsively crawling out of the house. That led her to enlist in a counseling program known as "walking through Vietnam."
For Van Devanter, the turning point came when she met Bobby Muller, a disabled veteran who founded Vietnam Veterans of America (VVA). This organization was designed to help American veterans deal with their painful memories and physical wounds from the Vietnam War. Encouraged by the support she received from VVA, Van Devanter decided that she wanted to help other veterans - especially women veterans - who might be struggling with the same problems she had experienced.
In 1980, Van Devanter founded the Vietnam Veterans of America Women's Project. The idea behind this project was to bring recognition to female nurses and other women veterans and to support them. Through the VVA Women's Project, Van Devanter began counseling women veterans and conducting seminars about Post-traumatic stress disorder. She testified before Congress and other government agencies on behalf of the 7,465 women Vietnam veterans. After retiring in 1984, she continued to write articles, edit volumes of poetry, give speeches, and conduct seminars.
Perhaps Van Devanter's most effective tool in reaching women veterans was her memoir Home Before Morning: The Story of an Army Nurse in Vietnam. She started writing the book in the late 1970s as a way to gain a better understanding and acceptance of her own experiences. When it was published in 1983, however, it also helped large numbers of women veterans feel less isolated and alone. It described her experience of the horrors of the war. She wrote that she and other nurses and doctors took to drinking, drug use, and sexual liaisons to find a distraction. Critics praised Home Before Morning for providing a woman's perspective on the horrors of war. But her book caused many nurses who had been in the war to protest that Van Devanter’s revelations about doctor and nurse behavior were highly exaggerated. On the other hand, many others came out in support of the author, some even claiming that the problems addressed in Home before Morning are actually understated.
Lynda Van Devanter's 1983 book "Home Before Morning" inspired the 1988-1991 television series "China Beach." One of her letters was included in the 1988 HBO documentary "Dear America: Letters Home From Vietnam." In 1979, she helped launch the Vietnam Veterans of America(VVA) Women's Project. In 1987, the VVA honored her with the Excellence in the Arts Award, and in 2002 she received a VVA Commendation Medal. She was named Woman of the Year by the American Association of Minority Veteran Program Administrators in 1982.
Quotations:
"Somewhere between 1945 and 1970, words like bravery, sacrifice, and valor had gone out of vogue. When I returned to my country I began to learn a very bitter lesson. In the eyes of most Americans, the military services had no more heroes, merely baby-killers, misfits, and fools."
Personality
Physical Characteristics:
Lynda Van Devanter was one of the thousands of American women who served as nurses in Vietnam during the war. Like many of these other women, she worked grueling shifts in a poorly equipped hospital and treated horrible wounds. Upon returning to the United States, she struggled with feelings of anger, depression, and hopelessness with little support from either the United States government or American society. In fact, she found that women veterans were even more isolated than their male peers. Determined to help other women in the same situation, Van Devanter founded the Vietnam Veterans of America Women's Project in 1980. She also wrote a book about her experiences, Home before Morning, which brought national attention to the contributions of women veterans.
Suddenly in the fall of 1993, she became extremely ill due to her exposure to Agent Orange while in Vietnam. Essentially, her immune system was waiting for something to take it over. For ten years, she fought a disease that didn't have a name, didn't have an explanation, and didn't have a cure - this battle went on about nine years longer than doctors had expected. Even though the toughest of times, she continued to speak about her experiences and lobby on behalf of women veterans. She died of systemic collagen vascular disease.
Connections
For 16 years, Lynda Van Devanter had been married to Tom Buckley. She had a daughter Molly Stillman, and a stepdaughter Brigid Buckley.
Mother:
Helen Van Devanter
husband:
Tom Buckley
Sister:
Susan Van Devanter
Daughter:
Molly Stillman
Molly Stillman started a lifestyle blog called Still Being Molly in 2007 to bring joy to people. On her blog, she talks about everything from ethical fashion and clean beauty, her passion for ending human trafficking, child sponsorship with Compassion International, clean beauty and her favorite mascaras, real food, and some easy recipes, her life as a wife and mother. The blog exists to inspire women to walk joyfully and confidently in purpose, and to know that they were created with a purpose for a purpose.
