Physical description

Hardback book with a torn dust jacket. Dust jacket is black and white with a colour photograph of a street scene in front of a hospital building.

Publication type

non-fiction

Inscriptions & markings

'Janice McCarthy' [black ink top of first page]

Summary

This warm, personal document by an ordinary Australian girl who worked in Vietnam does not pretend to enter areas of speculation and reporting where experts are confounded. It is simple, homely, informative, disarmingly honest, and clothes the shadowed image of a suffering nation with flesh, blood and heart. Out of it walk the unknown ones, the forgotten ones, the ordinary people of Vietnam.
In growing bewilderment Western readers have puzzled over millions of words about the politics and violence of Vietnam. Quietly, without fuss or humbug, Susan Terry lets in a little light and a lot of love. Here is something that is real, that one can accept and trust.
For one memorable year she worked with an Australian medical team of civilian specialists in Long Xuyen Hospital on the Mekong Delta and met life in the raw. She reports on the Viet Cong, on children, on anguish, on cities and villages, on Americans, on Buddhists, on happiness, on people at many levels of society, on fascinating facets of everyday life. She writes of lives transformed by the surgeon's knife, of ignorance, fear and death, of a wonderland of human emotion.
Perhaps unwittingly, Sister Susan Terry also reveals herself; young, fresh, and nice to know. To read her is to believe her. Her is something of truth out of Vietnam. (From inside dust jacket)