Lamenting her immediate feelings of displacement among 5000 military men, the narrator, with an infectious candour and wholesome honesty, throws herself into the activities at the base camp hospitals. One of her main duties is to write letters home to Australia for the wounded soldiers. The visceral descriptions of the blood, sweat and tears shed by both soldiers and nurses are emotive, as are the captivating episodes on the terror and the pain, and the inevitable speculations about the absurdity of war. Unfortunately, these fascinating glimpses are eclipsed by Debelle Lamsendorf’s apparent fascination with the mundane aspects of the year, and her emphasis on anecdotes about shopping excursions, concerts and dinner parties.

Nonetheless, the sugary character of the ‘utterly green’ Aussie girl, although not wholly original, is endearing, and the author’s unwavering support for the troops is to be commended. This adoration, however, becomes overbearing, to the point where she demeans her own role and that of other Red Cross nurses in Vietnam. She makes the extraordinary statement towards the end of her story that no one would be interested in talking to her, a nurse, about her experience, preferring the ‘handsome soldiers travelling with us whom they wanted to greet as heroes, and rightly so’. What is this saying about the sacrifices made by women in Vietnam? It is a perplexing question to face at the end of such a book, and the reader, paradoxically, is left wanting more.