Cover by Braldt Bralds
The Healer's War is a 1988 science fiction novel by American writer Elizabeth Ann Scarborough. It won the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1989. [1] The story is about a military nurse during the Vietnam War.
The Healer's War is a 1988 science fiction novel by American writer Elizabeth Ann Scarborough. It won the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1989. [1] The story is about a military nurse during the Vietnam War.
The plot revolves around Lt. Kitty McCulley, a Military Nurse during the Vietnam War.
Kitty is transferred from one area of the military hospital after accidentally killing a child, by giving her an overdose. Her new area is the orthopedics wing, where there is a pleasant staff, and patients who are awake and able to talk. The hospital takes care of both soldiers and Vietnamese citizens.
The first half of the book is spent telling the story of Kitty and her time treating and becoming friends with patients, her love life (and what it is like being one of a few women on a military base), and the contrast between Vietnam and America.
Kitty meets a revered Vietnamese holy man, Zu, who is one of her patients that needs surgery. No jewelry is allowed to be worn during surgery, and with a lot of effort and help from other patients, she convinces him to take off the necklace with the amulet. However, he insists that she wear it. Kitty starts to see auras around herself and others, and initially brushes it off as feeling sick. She returns it to Zu after surgery. Kitty later learns, from a GI following Zu around that he is a revered healer.
Over time, various people seem to be doing better, but things take a turn for the worse when a new Surgeon takes over the orthopedics ward.
The surgeon hates everyone from Vietnam, because his brother was killed in action. His brother’s sacrifice motivated him to join the military. He does everything possible to transfer/ release all of the Vietnamese patients. In most cases, this is a death sentence, as the American hospital has the resources to keep a sanitary environment.
When Zu dies, he gives kitty his amulet.
One boy, who had lost a leg, was almost healed, but was going to be discharged, so Kitty worked with her lover, Tony, a pilot, to move him to a separate hospital without permission.
The helicopter is shot out from the sky and goes down over a jungle.
Kitty’s amulet allows her to see auras, which allow them to avoid the Vietcong.
From there, they spend a decent amount of the book meeting a bunch of characters. William, an American GI who is the only survivor of his squad teams up with them, only to start attacking them when he unknowingly has PTSD night terrors. Later, he gets into a mode where he is looking for Vietcong and almost kills them. Kitty is able to navigate them away safely, because she can see when he has a dangerous aura.
They end up in a Vietnam village, where kitty helps fight off a snake that is killing villagers. She is able to heal a woman who was bitten by the venomous snake using the amulet. Later, the village brings her more people to help save, and kitty is able to connect using other people to use their collective energy to heal.
During this time, kitty starts to dream that she is some of the people who had touched the amulet/ helped her heal others, building intense bonds. She is able to experience/ feel/ understand them, even with language barriers.
She meets a villagers who were raped by GI’s, and sees a fuller picture of how Vietnamese villages live in a catch-22 of being threatened/ bombed by either the Vietcong or the Americans based on their actions, and are caught in the middle.
The Vietcong overtakes the village and the villagers are able to convince the captain to take her hostage but keep her safe. She becomes separated from her child companion and hopes for a better life for him.
Kitty is then faced with seeing the decent side of the Vietcong, who take care of her. Soon, though, she experiences the same people murdering a family. She helps heal a Vietcong soldier who is wounded, but his commander later shoots him because he would slow them down.
Kitty talks with the commander, who touched the amulet and is now connected to her - he points out how the amulet is dangerous in the hands of any military and will be abused. He doesn’t want to let her heal villagers, so she doesn’t become a folk hero, but also how the US military will exploit her amulet powers if they learn as well.
When kitty is rescued, the Americans don’t believe her story and she is exposed to inhumane / evil sides of the US military.
She gets transferred to a military hospital. While there, it isn’t clear if she’s going to be Court marshaled for going AWOL or sent back home. She gets awarded with a silver star, but feels ashamed; this was how a patient she took care of in the hospital earlier in the book acted toward receiving a medal. Eventually kitty is able to safely make it back home to America.
The last part of the story is kitty trying to reintegrate.
She has been changed by war and finds her life to be meaningless. The guy she liked and wrote to got a girlfriend, who he never mentioned, and then she finds a stack of her unopened letters from him.
She tries to be a nurse, but she’s getting her work done early because she’s used to being interrupted to help new wounded patients coming in.
The people she is meeting in hospitals are all depressed. She starts crashing her cars as she is out of it.
At a low point, she is about to kill herself when she wishes that someone cared enough about her to have taken her to Disneyland. She then decides to take herself to Disneyland.
At the airport in LA, Kitty gets distracted by groups of frightened Vietnamese refugees. She spends the week coming to the airport everyday to look through the new arrivals, hoping to see her friends/ patients.
Kitty ends up finding new meaning to her life, and the book ends with her planning to start helping refugees from Vietnam.
Phan Thị Kim Phúc, referred to informally as the girl in the picture and the Napalm girl, is a South Vietnamese-born Canadian woman best known as the nine-year-old child depicted in the Pulitzer Prize–winning photograph, titled "The Terror of War", taken at Trảng Bàng during the Vietnam War on June 8, 1972.
The Huế massacre was the summary executions and mass murder perpetrated by the Viet Cong (VC) and People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) during their capture, military occupation and later withdrawal from the city of Huế during the Tet Offensive, considered one of the longest and bloodiest battles of the Vietnam War.
The Strategic Hamlet Program was a plan by the government of South Vietnam in conjunction with the US government and ARPA during the Vietnam War to combat the communist insurgency by pacifying the countryside and reducing the influence of the communists among the rural population.
Le Ly Hayslip is a Vietnamese-American writer, memoirist and humanitarian. Through her foundations, she has worked to rebuild cultural bridges between Vietnam and America following the Vietnam War.
Đặng Thùy Trâm was a Vietnamese doctor. She worked as a battlefield surgeon for the People's Army of Vietnam and Vietcong during the Vietnam War. Her wartime diaries, which chronicle the last two years of her life, attracted international attention following their publication in 2005.
A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain is a 1992 collection of short stories by Robert Olen Butler. It received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1993.
The Cambodian jungle girl is a Vietnamese woman who emerged from the jungle in Ratanakiri province, Cambodia on January 13, 2007. A family in a nearby village claimed that the woman was their daughter Rochom P'ngieng who had disappeared 18 or 19 years previously; the story was covered in most media as one of a feral child who lived in the jungle for most of her life. However, some reporters and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) questioned this explanation and suggested that she instead might be an unrelated woman who had been held in captivity. The woman stayed with the family until 2016, when a Vietnamese man claimed that the woman was his daughter who had disappeared in 2006 at age 23, following a mental breakdown. He was able to provide documentation about the woman's birth and disappearance, and shortly after brought her back to his village in Vietnam. He received the support of her adoptive family as well as the approval of immigration officials.
The Brinks Hotel in Saigon, also known as the Brink Bachelor Officers Quarters (BOQ), was bombed by the Viet Cong on the evening of December 24, 1964, during the Vietnam War. Two Viet Cong operatives detonated a car bomb underneath the hotel, which housed United States Army officers. The explosion killed two Americans, an officer and an NCO, and injured approximately 60, including military personnel and Vietnamese civilians.
Monkey Bridge, published in 1997, is the debut novel of Vietnamese American attorney and writer Lan Cao. Cao is a professor of international law at Chapman University School of Law. She fled Vietnam in 1975, at the end of the Vietnam War. In addition to Monkey Bridge, Cao also co-authored Everything You Need to Know about Asian American History with Himilce Novas.
Colonel Phạm Ngọc Thảo, also known as Albert Thảo, was a communist sleeper agent of the Việt Minh who infiltrated the Army of the Republic of Vietnam and also became a major provincial leader in South Vietnam. In 1962, he was made overseer of Ngô Đình Nhu's Strategic Hamlet Program in South Vietnam and deliberately forced it forward at an unsustainable speed, causing the production of poorly equipped and poorly defended villages and the growth of rural resentment toward the regime of President Ngô Đình Diệm, Nhu's elder brother. In light of the failed land reform efforts in North Vietnam, the Hanoi government welcomed Thao's efforts to undermine Diem.
When Heaven and Earth Changed Places is a 1989 memoir by Le Ly Hayslip about her childhood during the Vietnam War, her escape to the United States, and her return to visit Vietnam 16 years later. The Oliver Stone film Heaven & Earth was based on the memoir.
Rufaida Al-Aslamia, was an Islamic medical and social worker recognized as the first female Muslim nurse and the first female surgeon in Islam. She is known as the first nurse in the world.
Najangalude Kochu Doctor is a 1989 Indian Malayalam film, directed by Balachandra Menon. The film stars Srividya, Thilakan, Balachandra Menon and Revathy in the lead roles. The film has musical score by Darsan Raman.
Smoke on the Potato Fields is a 1977 Czechoslovak film directed by František Vláčil. It stars Rudolf Hrušínský. The film is an adaptation of Bohumil Říha's novel Doktor Meluzin.
The Thuy Bo incident was the killing of civilians by U.S. Marines from 31 January to 1 February 1967, during the Vietnam War in Thủy Bồ village in Điện Bàn District, Quảng Nam Province 15 km southwest of Đà Nẵng, in an area close to the foothills of the Central Highlands and situated near the Bo Bo Hills. Vietnamese communist sources claim that the Marines massacred civilians here and the memorial erected to the event records 145 civilian deaths, mainly women, children and elderly men. US sources claim that 22 civilians were killed in two days of fighting between Marines and the Vietcong who occupied the village.
Women in the Vietnam War were active in a large variety of roles, making significant impacts on the War and with the War having significant impacts on them.
Waging Peace in Vietnam: U.S. Soldiers and Veterans Who Opposed the War is a non-fiction book edited by Ron Carver, David Cortright, and Barbara Doherty. It was published in September 2019 by New Village Press and is distributed by New York University Press.
Cheriyo Darling is a 1996 Sri Lankan Sinhala medical mystery romantic comedy film directed by Roy de Silva and co-produced by director himself with his wife Sumana Amarasinghe for RS Films. It is the third film of Cheriyo film series, which is sequel to Cheriyo Captain. It stars Joe Abeywickrama, Dilhani Ekanayake and Bandu Samarasinghe in lead roles along with Tennison Cooray, Ronnie Leitch, Freddie Silva, Wimal Kumara de Costa, Ravindra Randeniya, Sanoja Bibile, Sumana Amarasinghe & Damith Fonseka in supporting roles. Music for the film is done by Somapala Rathnayake and it is the 863rd Sri Lankan film in the Sinhala cinema. Widely regarded as one of the greatest Sri Lankan films ever made, Cheriyo Darling is the only film in history to get a rating of 70 or more in the official 'Films.lk' Sinhalese Cinema database.
The court-martial of Susan Schnall, a lieutenant U.S. Navy nurse stationed at the Oakland Naval Hospital in Oakland, California, took place in early 1969 during the Vietnam War. Her political activities, which led to the military trial, may have garnered some of the most provocative news coverage during the early days of the U.S. antiwar movement against that war. In October 1968, the San Francisco Chronicle called her the “Peace Leaflet Bomber” for raining tens of thousands of antiwar leaflets from a small airplane over several San Francisco Bay Area military installations and the deck of an aircraft carrier. The day after this “bombing” run, she marched in her officer’s uniform at the front of a large antiwar demonstration, knowing it was against military regulations. While the Navy was court-martialing her for "conduct unbecoming an officer", she was publicly telling the press, "As far as I'm concerned, it's conduct unbecoming to officers to send men to die in Vietnam."
Terry Marvell Whitmore was an American soldier, deserter and actor.
 | This article about a 1980s science fiction novel is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. See guidelines for writing about novels. Further suggestions might be found on the article's talk page. |