Vietnam story: Judy Hartline Elbring

As we all know, books can change lives. This is a case in point. When I found Women in Vietnam: The Oral History, edited by Ron Steinman, that's exactly what happened. I'd read quite a few books about Vietnam—the war of my generation—but I hadn't read a thing about the women who served there, most particularly the nurses. I stayed up half the night reading the testimonies of the nurses Steinman interviewed who served in Vietnam.  All the nurses' stories are stories of courage, but one nurse's story struck me especially deeply: Judy Hartline Elbring's.

Elbring volunteered to go toVietnam in 1967. (All nurses in Vietnam were volunteers.) She might have been shocked by what she encountered, but, as she told Steinman, "There wasn't time to be scared. There wasn't time to worry about anything except the immediate job at hand."  
                                                                        

Then she saw what it was really like.:

"To see a kid who's not that much younger than I am. He's my brother's age, and some of them are younger. They're eighteen and nineteen years old, and they're kids and they're skinny and they've been in the jungle too long and they haven't eaten well and the bones in their face show, and their uniforms are dirty and they smell bad, and now they're going to die. 

"I remember after we were through work and had done all we needed to do, there would always be a few of them that were behind a curtain in the area where we used to keep them. I would go back there with them, and I would pet them until they died because, I was like their mother, their sister, their girlfriend. I would stay with them until they died, because too many of them died alone, and that's not right. That's just not right."
                                                                              

Judy Hartline Elbring

So some of you mothers who lost sons in Vietnam, know that it might be that Judy Hartline Elbring was there with your boy, easing him into his dying, helping him in his hour of being taken away, so that he didn't make that journey alone.

She came home. She wore her uniform, and she was vilified. So she stopped wearing it. "There was no one to talk to about this." Nevertheless, she went back for a second tour. Her brother, a marine, was going to Vietnam, and she wanted to be there in case he was wounded. He was, and she was able, because of her rank as a captain and simply because of her will, to be airlifted to his base and to take care of him. 

She came home again. Then, the ensuing years. "I was just a nurse. I did my duty as I needed to do my duty. But what I didn't get was that I hadn't been welcomed home, and if that's important to me, it's got to be important for other women too. I had no idea this was still affecting me. I had no idea that not saying anything could carry this long a toll on me, on anyone. The part that scares me is, how many women are sitting on their anger, are sitting on their sadness?"
 
She ends her account with the picture in her mind of boy who died, a boy for whom she could do nothing. "He stays with me. I don't know why he stays with me, but he does. He comes back in my dreams. They're helpless dreams in a way. They're all the things I can't do anything about. I would love to be somebody's good dream. Oh God, wouldn't that be wonderful? I'd be very proud to be somebody's good dream."

I was so haunted by her qualities, I went and found her on the web. She lives in California, and she and her husband run an organization called Life Partners that helps couples with their relationships. I sent her a fan letter. She replied with a handwritten letter thanking me. So I had more than I ever could wish for: a letter from my new hero. I’m sure, through the years, she’s been more than one young wounded soldier's good dream.     
                                                     

Vietnam Women's Memorial

The Courage of Thomas Lanier

I'm living in New Orleans, not far from where Tennessee Williams once lived.

He lived in several places in the French Quarter, and my current apartment is close to where he sets A Streetcar Named Desire.

I have always looked to him for courage, and now that I am growing old in his favorite city, even more so.

Every so often I pick up the marvelous biography of his early life, Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams.  It's a highly under-appreciated book.  I like to to read about those early struggles of his, many of which took place just a few blocks away.

You get the impression in letter after letter, journal entry after journal entry, that, no matter how bleak the situation was for him, it never came close to dissuading him.  He hocked his typewriter, he hocked his only suit, he hocked his bicycle to pay the rent, to pay for food.  He wrote.  He never stopped writing.  He was a courageous writer, a courageous man.

                                                                 

     

                                                    

Brave and funny.  I remember seeing him on a Chicago talk show once with three or four other people.  One of them was a Catholic priest.  Tennessee had recently converted to Catholicism.  The priest, knowing this, said, "I shall pray for you."

Without missing a beat, Tennessee said, "I don't require your prayers."

Years ago, I read something he wrote in a preface to one of his plays: "...time is short and it doesn't return again. It is slipping away while I write this and while you read it, the monosyllable of the clock is Loss, loss, loss, unless you devote your heart to its opposition."

I can hear it, the ticking. 

Give me courage, Tennessee.

Oh Diana!

In the late 1970s, I belonged to the Midtown Squash Club in New York City.  It was a great little club.

One of the members was Diana Nyad.

She wasn't Diana with a capital D then, but she was getting there.  She was an amazing athlete to watch.  In incredible shape with a fierce drive and whiplash power in her stroke. I loved to watch her play.  Everyone knew her.   

But we didn't know what she would become.  A world-class squash player? An Olympic athlete of some kind?  The first woman to summit Everest?  All I know is that she put me in awe.

Through the years I heard about her from time to time.  I don't recall under what circumstances.  But then she began this Cuba to Florida swim, trying and trying.  She came front and center into the news.

I saw that she was on Twitter, so in the spring of 2012 I contacted her and told her I used to watch her play squash years go and that I loved watching her.  She replied.  "1970's huh?  Time sure flies."  We exchanged, oh, maybe five or six tweets.  It was such a treat to be "talking to her."

And now she's done it.  She tried and tried and if at first she didn't succeed, she did.

                                                           

And what did she say when she emerged from the water after 50-some hours in the ocean swimming?

"You're never too old to pursue your dreams."

She's sixty-four!