MARSHALL : In the combat zone (fülszöveg)
Vietnam's significant but unheralded contingent of American women was made up of the first females to operate under the continual combat conditions of guerrilla warfare. Yet in the years since the war, their voice has remained strangely quiet while male novelists, journalists, and veterans explored the war and its consequences. Now, as interviewed by Kathryn Marshall, twenty of those voices speak, in monologues full of the uncomfortable alienation of a neglected minority from an unwanted war.
Some went because they "wanted to do something to help," others went on a dare, and still others never intended to get there. The flight over –"there were about three hundred GIs on the flight and two of us females" – launched them into their new world, where most of them functioned as caretakers and helpmates to the men who fought the war. They were nurses, decoders, secretaries, cartographers, clerks, air traffic controllers, and "Kool-Aid Kids," choppered to heavy combat areas to boost morale. In the midst of the war of greatest technology, they witnessed the most futile devastation. Alone as never before, they formed unique friendships they could not recreate in the States.
The twenty women featured in In the Combat Zone share little more than the common bond of Vietnam. Their stories are at the same time vitriolic and patriotic, funny and sad, sympathetic and cool. Their experience offers not a unified portrait of fhe war, but a heightened, eclectic vision of female disaffection. "The gist of it is . . . ," says Ruth Sidisin, "that the women saw as much as the guys did, but in a different way."
|
|
|
| KATALÓGUS | TARTALOM |
 |
 |
|
 |