Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,973
By This is the grave of Lynda Van Devanter.
Born in 1947 in Washington, D.C., Van Devanter grew up in a conservative Catholic household that put a lot of emphasis on the military. So, being perhaps a bit more adventurous than her parents expected or maybe had hoped, she decided to join the military as a nurse. That meant Vietnam. She had just graduated from a nursing school in Pittsburgh–this was before nurses were usually expected to have four-year degrees. It was 1968 and she was 19 years old. She later wrote, “if our boys were being blown apart, then somebody better be over there putting them back together again. I started to think that maybe that somebody should be me.”
Well, she got what she wanted. She spent a full year in Pleiku, which was near a lot of front lines and she dealt with everything that meant to American soldiers. She saw a lot, that’s for sure. It traumatized her. She realized that everything she had learned about the military and patriotism and all that were total lies. She returned to the U.S. in 1970 and was really struggling with getting back into society, as did so many veterans. We usually think of this as a male problem and of course it often was, but it wasn’t exclusively so. She joined Vietnam Veterans of America and got some of the help she needed. Now a very different person than she was when she was a sheltered Catholic girl, Van Devanter was determined to make sense of her life and pull it back together the best she could. She went back to college and pursued the issue of post-traumatic stress disorder, which was really just being defined at the time and went a long way to help us understand the experiences of veterans. So she got a degree in psychology and worked to bring that information to veterans, particularly women. In 1980, she founded the Women’s Project in the VVA to focus on women’s experiences.
Then Van Devanter started to write about it. She published Home before Morning: The Story of an Army Nurse in Vietnam in 1983. She dedicated the book to all the unknown women caught up in wars and wrote significantly about the struggles to return home and how her year in Vietnam had basically destroyed her life. This came out at the moment in which the nation was starting to take the reality of Vietnam a bit more seriously. Yes, it was the time of Rambo but the books were also coming out that would make up the many excellent Vietnam movies of the late 80s and early 90s telling the real stories of soldiers, often in a very unglamorous way.
This leads us to the reason we still remember Van Devanter today–her book was the basis for China Beach. I don’t really remember watching the show–it wasn’t the kind of thing my parents watched and as a 14 year old when it came out in 1988, I wasn’t exactly looking for serious goods like that. But especially in its early years, China Beach was highly acclaimed and was maybe one of the first Serious Shows that laid the groundwork for the prestige TV that was to begin a decade later. You could make good TV and put it on the networks and people actually would watch something more substantial than Falcon Crest or Mr. Belvedere. Or some people would–the show always did struggle with ratings, especially for the cost of making it. It really would have been a better show on HBO a decade later. But it made Dana Delaney something of a star and deservedly so.
Unfortunately, Van Devanter had heart disease, which she believed was caused by exposure to chemicals in Vietnam. She died in 2002, at the age of 55.
Lynda Van Devanter is buried in Chestnut Grove Cemetery, Herndon, Virginia.
If you would like this series to visit other Vietnam veterans, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. So many are still alive, more than I would have thought. But Elmo Zumwalt is in Annapolis and the person in charge of Agent Orange is well worth a visit and perhaps the unveiling of defoliating chemicals. Shelly Ramsdell, who was a founder of Veterans Against the War, is in York, Maine. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.