LifeWriters Talk About LifeWriting

Sharon Wildwind was one of only twenty thousand women to serve in the US military in Vietnam. For 12 months, beginning in May 1970, Sharon was an army nurse in two hospitals in 'Nam. This young woman of just 23 had to grow up fast amid the shelling and the bloodshed she witnessed in the army hospitals. On her return to the U.S., she had to learn to cope with nightmares, flashbacks, and other symptoms of post-traumatic stress syndrome.

In 2000, Sharon published the journals she kept during her tour in Vietnam as Dreams That Blister Sleep, a book that speaks with painful honesty about the horrific realities of war. She has just signed a contract to publish the first of a series of mystery novels, the hero of which is based on nurses she served with in Vietnam. In this interview, Sharon talks about how her writing helped her heal from the trauma of war.

Story Circle Journal: The title of your first book, Dreams That Blister Sleep, refers to the nightmares that began while you were in Vietnam and that you still experience to this day. Was the army addressing post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSS) at the time you came back from Vietnam?

Sharon Wildwind: I don't believe they were even admitting PTSS existed in 1970, but the denial was beginning to crack around the edge. There was absolutely no psychological support for veterans at the time I returned. It was veterans' support groups themselves, such as the Vietnam Veterans of America, and a few maverick psychologists, who formed some initial self-help groups. They often went to the Veterans Administration (VA) asking only for meeting space. Some were turned down; some were given space to meet but no staff support. Then the VA grudgingly admitted that there might be a problem for a few veterans. Finally the barriers began to break down.

SCJ: What about women veterans? Did you have the same experience?

SW: For us, it was even tougher, especially after the VA got involved in running support groups. In some cases, they banned women veterans from attending the support groups because they thought the guys wouldn't feel comfortable talking with a woman present. Many women veterans didn't live close enough to each other that there were able to form their own support groups. One psychologist, who was involved in forming the first support groups, said in a newspaper interview that there simply weren't enough women veterans for him to waste his time on them.

Non-military women—those in the Red Cross and missionaries and the like—weren't eligible for care in VA hospitals, and civilian general practitioners and many hospitals had no clue about PTSS.

I've also heard about women who did qualify for care in VA hospitals but were told, "You were a noncombatant. You couldn't possibly have a problem."

Sometimes the response was, "Serving in the military was an 'unladylike' thing to do and it affected your hormone balance." Oral contraceptives and getting pregnant were the most common recommendations for a cure.

At other times, women vets were told, “You have these problems because you grew up in a dysfunctional family. Because it was your family, not your military service, that was the main factor, the VA is not responsible for your care.”

And even when the response was positive—"Yes, you do have a problem and, yes, it was probably related to your military service"—women vets were often told, "We are so short of beds that we can't afford to admit women to the wards. We need our beds for real soldiers."

SCJ: At the Story Circle Conference (February, 2004), you talked about a turning-point moment in the early 1980s. You were watching a performance of the play, The Hostage. One of the scenes was a simulated attack, where "soldiers" rushed into the theatre. Tell us about that moment.

SW: That was the pivotal moment when for me, the world tilted. I was so shaken that I had to leave the theater. I went to see my friend Bob, also a Vietnam veteran. I couldn't stop crying. Finally Bob said, "You can't keep coming to me like this every time some memory about the war bothers you. You have to work on getting yourself well."

SCJ: What did that process of getting yourself well involve?

SW: There were three parts. The first was looking back at all the hundreds of photographs I had taken in Vietnam, many of which I had never even developed. The Canada Council gave me a grant in the early '80s to get those photographs developed. I came home from the photo store with two shoeboxes packed with photos. I dumped them out on the table. Then I started looking at things I'd forgotten about: Oh yeah, there was that picture on the wall in the emergency room…there was that sign…that's what Ed looked like…yeah, now I remember. So that visual reminder was very important.

The writing was enormously important. I started out putting my recollections into fiction because that gave me some distance and it also helped me claim the story. I was finally able to say, "This is not a fictional character's story. This is my story."

The third part was really acceptance. I did some things in Vietnam and I saw my country do some things in Vietnam that I'm not very happy about. Acceptance meant recognizing exactly what I had done and being able to forgive myself. I was finally able to say: "This is what I did at 23; I was naïve; I was manipulated. Those are not excuses; they are the reasons things happened. Now, at 57, I wouldn't do those things again and I know why I wouldn't do them."

SCJ: Was there a moment when you felt like, "Okay, now I'm over Vietnam"?

SW: In 1987, I went to Whitehorse in the Yukon and worked a three-month, temporary position as a nurse. While I was there, I took a winter survival course, which involves going out in the mountains with the temperature at 20 degrees below zero, digging a snow trench, and staying overnight in that snow trench, which is just like a coffin. There's you and there's one other person with you and a candle and all this snow and ice around you, and that's it. It was a very uncomfortable night and the purpose of it is to teach you that you can survive in sub-zero weather with nothing but the clothing on your back. We each had a down jacket, long johns, and heavy socks, but it was darn cold.

I came out of that snow trench at sunrise and saw the sun coming up over one of the Yukon Mountains and just said, "That's it. I'm reborn from Vietnam. This is the moment."

One of my new mystery series has a northern setting, which I love. I dearly love to write about the land up there because it is so beautiful and so wild.

SCJ: Tell us about the journal you kept in Vietnam and the creative path between leaving Vietnam and publishing your book.

SW: My journal was one of those little books from the five-and-dime with a white cover. I still have it. It's falling apart. I had roughly six square inches a day to write on and I kept it consistently every day.

When I came home, the very first thing I did, in about 1973 or 1974, was to put together a slide show with music. In 1976, I started writing the fictional part, which was never finished.

Then in the early 1980s, I got a grant from the Canada Council to develop the photos. Dreams That Blister Sleep was finished in about 1998 and published in March of 2000. So it took me 28 years to actually get it out. The delay wasn't because the book was impossible to write. It was just that I had a life: I had a marriage, I immigrated to Canada, I had a job, and I took a Masters degree and a third degree in literature. The writing was always there but I didn't allow myself that consistent time to work on it. Finally in the 1990s, I was fortunate to be able to take the time and make a book.

SCJ: I wonder if there needs to be a maturing process before we're ready for that book to come out of us.

SW: Certainly. In feminist theory, this is the mother phase. When you're in this phase, you're able to see the world through two sets of eyes, one inside of another. As Vietnam veterans, we're at that point right now that we can see our experience through the eyes of what we remember and we can also get some perspective on it. We can say, "Here we are 30 or 40 years later. This is what that experience meant to us." That's why I intentionally chose to put both the diary entries and my later reflections into my book. It didn.t seem complete without both parts—what I experienced and the significance I gave to it later. I couldn't have done that 20 or 30 years ago.

Those of us who went to Vietnam are in our 50s and 60s now. Recently I was in a group of people, all of whom were Vietnam veterans. I looked around and realized: "We're old. How did this happen?" I could see those 50- and 60-year-old faces, but I was also looking at the 25-year-old faces.

Vietnam veterans are gradually dying off. The group is starting to fracture and that will continue for another 30 or 40 years. So it started to become urgent to get this out into the world and to get it down from the two perspectives.

SCJ: Have you gotten letters from people who've read Dreams That Blister Sleep?

SW: A fairly young person recently wrote: My dad was in Vietnam and I never really knew him because he didn't come home but I'm going out now trying to find people he knew and trying to find out about that experience so I can know more about what he was like.

I get two or three letters a year, and that's fine with me, as long as the books are disappearing off the shelves. We did a 1500 print run initially through a small press in Edmonton, Alberta, and we're down to a couple hundred right now. We're going to have to make a choice soon about whether or not we're going to reprint. I know that there are some spelling and grammar errors and I'd like to go back and correct those. There's one piece in there where I've found some information and I'd like to go back and correct that part.

SCJ: Tell us about your new mystery novel, now under contract, and how you deal with post-traumatic stress in that story.

SW: Five Star Publications has just purchased Some Welcome Home, the first book in the Elizabeth Pepperhawk/Avivah Rosen Vietnam veterans series. I have five books planned and the cut line for the series is, "For these Vietnam veterans, adjusting to civilian life is murder."

The first book begins in July 1971, when Captain Pepperhawk arrives at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, having just completed a year in Vietnam. She finds a body in her officer's billet and the military police officer on duty that day is Captain Avivah Rosen. Pepper and Avivah become friends and go on more adventures together. The fifth book ends in May 1975, immediately after the fall of Saigon.

All of the continuing characters are either Vietnam veterans or families of missing or dead veterans. Post-traumatic stress will affect the characters in varying degrees. At least one of them will be severely affected by it and he/she (I'm not telling who has it) will constantly battle it through all five books. Other characters will nibble around the edges of it. At least one murder will be committed because of it.

There isn't a publication date for Some Welcome Home yet, but I hope it will be mid-2005.

SCJ: How difficult has it been to turn your real-life experience into fiction?

SW: The hardest thing is getting the readers to actually believe what I'm writing. The two critique groups that I belong to are now reading chapters from the second book in the series, which has the working title of First Murder in Advent. They have no reference points at all for the military experience or for post-traumatic stress. I keep getting critiques back with notes like, "This is so over the top, you must be joking," or "No one would treat a veteran this way." But in fact, I've usually toned down the events.

SCJ: Very many kinds of traumatic life situations and events can cause post-traumatic stress syndrome. What are the most important lessons you've learned about reducing the damage of PTSS?

SW: Don't downplay the stress to yourself, and don't let anyone else decide for you whether you have experienced emotional trauma. It's trauma if you say it's trauma.

Believe the experts when they tell you to get help within the first 48 hours after an incident, even if you really, really, really don't want to talk to somebody about what has just happened. If someone was bleeding heavily, no one would tell them, "Wait and see how this goes over the next month or so, and if you're still having problems, come back and see us." Severe trauma is the emotional equivalent of bleeding to death.

SCJ: Is there any advice you would want to give a young army nurse who was about to leave for Iraq?

SW: Several weeks ago, I read on one of the Web news sites that US officials had stated that conditions in Iraq were so different from Vietnam that no more than a handful of soldiers there would ever develop post-traumatic stress syndrome. So I'm not yet convinced that the awareness of PTSS has risen to where it needs to be.

What I'd tell that nurse is to be sure and take an emergency survival kit with you: the most special books you've ever read, even if they're books you read as a child; a blank journal; a camera; the phone numbers and e-mail addresses of the kindest, most supportive people you know; and music—your own really good, get-down, feel-good music. And use those things. It's going to be interesting to see how cell phones and email on the battlefield will affect post-traumatic stress in Iraq. It's a whole new ball game.

I'd also tell her how important what she's about to do is. No one can replace her.

—Interview and article by Jane Ross

Last updated: 06/28/04