When Susan Hunt boarded a plane to Saigon in the summer of 1967, she was twenty-two years old. After graduating from the Rhode Island Hospital School of Nursing, she enlisted in the US Army and volunteered for a one-year tour of duty in Vietnam. She hoped to work with children, a dream that came true when she was assigned to the pediatrics unit of the 91st Evacuation Hospital in Tuy Hòa.

Babinski has a distinctive voice as a writer-simple and direct, going straight to the heart. Recounting her year in Vietnam, she describes the damaged children she loved and cared for, the men she worked with and, sometimes, fell in love with, and-after the onset of the Tet Offensive in January 1968-the wounded soldiers she nursed and nurtured. She was forever changed by her year in Vietnam. She had absorbed the trauma of that brutal war. But rather than hating and fearing, she returned home with a deepened understanding of what it means to care for others. Readers of this book will see the Vietnam war through the eyes of this young nurse, a girl who became a woman-in just a year.