(1944- )
Vietnam War nurse and author. Winnie Smith spent her youth in North Carolina and New Jersey. She attended nursing school in New York and joined the army in 1963. In 1966, she was sent to Vietnam for a year’s duty.
Winnie Smith’s account of her 1966-1967 tour of duty as a nurse during the Vietnam War is an important contribution to American women’s war memoirs. Like other nurses’ writing from this war, Smith’s American Daughter Gone to War bears witness to the physical and psychological injuries borne by combatants and nurses and by Vietnamese civilians as well.
In the tradition of World War I nursing accounts and Lynda Van Devanter’s better-known Vietnam memoir, Home before Morning, Smith’s book claims the legitimacy of the woman’s war experience, challenging the authority of a male-centered war story while at the same time showing the extent to which her own war experience is intimately related to the men she nurses. American Daughter Gone to War is not overtly political; the interrogation of the war in Vietnam is primarily revealed through her relationships with her patients and with combatants. She details her own responses with a refreshingly unselfconscious candor. The result is both one woman’s story and a reflection on the larger experience of war for men and women.
