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Excerpt from an interview about her
experiences in Vietnam, 1972–75

Published in Kathryn Marshall's In the Combat Zone: An Oral History of American Women in Vietnam, 1987

"I'm sure things are desperately poor [in Vietnam] and probably still incredibly beautiful. But whatever's happened, it's their [the Vietnamese's] country now, and I'm glad of that."

Thousands of American women served in Vietnam during the war years. In fact, some estimates place the total num ber between 33,000 and 55,000. The U.S. Department of Defense estimates that nearly 7,500 of these women served in the American military, while the Veterans Administration places the number of American military women in Vietnam at over 11,000. The numbers are uncertain because the government did not keep separate military records by gender at that time. In addition, there were no official records of...