"When you are sitting there working on someone in the middle of the night and it's a nineteen-year-old kid who's ten thousand miles from home and you know that he's going to die before dawn-you're sitting there checking his vital signs for him and hanging blood for him and talking to him and holding his hand and looking into his face and touching his face and you see his life just dripping away and you know he wants his mother and you know he wants his father and his family to be there and you're the only one that he's got, I mean his life is just oozing away there-well, it oozes into your soul. There is nothing more intimate than sharing someone's dying with them. This kid should have had a chance to grow up and have grandkids, he should have had a chance to die in bed with his loving family around him. Instead, he's got this second lieutenant. When you've got to do that with someone and give that person, at the age of nineteen a chance to say the last things they are ever going to get to say, that act of helping someone die is more intimate than sex, it is more intimate than childbirth, and once you have done that you can never be ordinary again."
©1987 by Dusty
Return to Dusty's Prose or Poetry
Return to Dusty's Home Page
My Vietnam Related Websites:
Women in
Vietnam ~ Not only nurses served . . .
Dusty's Home
Page ~ Poetry and prose by a woman who was a nurse in Vietnam
Emily's
Poetry ~ By a Red Cross Donut Dolly
Battle
Dressing ~ The Journey of a Nurse in Vietnam
Tim O'Brien's
Home Page ~ National Book Award Winner and Americal Vet
Shrapnel in
the Heart ~ The most moving book you will read on Vietnam
The
Irish on the Wall ~ An effort to locate the Irish who died in Vietnam
Project Hearts
and Minds ~ Help put Viet Nam back together
All About
Vietnam ~ An annotated bibliography of books about Vietnam for sale
thru Amazon Worldwide!
Photos
from a Holts' Military History Tour ~ My trip to Vietnam, February 1998
Illinois
Vietnam Women's Memorial ~ Honoring all the Illinois women who served
My Other Websites:
Chicago
Theatre Z - A ~ This is the best theater town in the country!
Writers
Theatre of Chicago ~ And this is the best theater in town
Literature
of the Korean War ~ Don't let the literature be forgotten
Poetry
of the First World War ~ Owen, Hardy and others
Samuel
Pepys ~ One of my favorite authors
Gil
Thorp ~ THE Coach
Maybe
Later . . . ~ My Creative Nonfiction
Chi-COW-go
~ Cowz plus Commentary (this used to be a cow town)
Graham
Fulton, Scottish Poet ~ Charles Manson Auditions for the Monkees
Soccer
Literature ~ I'm a fan and I read
O'Leary Lantern ~
Fire! Fire! Fire!
Other Important Websites:
PreviewPort.com
~ Connecting Authors and Writers Worldwide
Remember
Oklahoma City ~ Civil Service and Military Employees will never forget
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| Page last updated September 19, 2002 | |