Bringing It All Back Home by Philip F. Napoli

According to O’Neill, the recruiters weren’t exactly picky. She jokes that they were passing a mirror under her nose to make sure she was alive. That was the extent of the examination they gave her.
    The recruiter turned to O’Neill and said, “Well, what about you?”
    O’Neill’s response was rather blunt. “You’ve got the wrong person , ” she told him.
    But the recruiter went on, appealing to her one vulnerability—her wish for financial independence. He explained that if she committed herself to joining the Army Nurse Corps, the military would give her a monthly stipend in her last year of nursing school. This tapped into her—as she terms it— Catholic guilt. She felt she owed her parents for her expensive education. She quickly figured out that she would be able to pay her parents back for at least one year of tuition. Further, as some recruiters did at the time, he tempted her with visions of international travel. “You could go to Japan; you could go to Germany. We have all these places you can go, including Hawaii,” he told her.
    She thought, “Jesus. I’ve never been much out of Fort Wayne. That would be interesting.”
    Still, O’Neill was smart enough to weigh the recruiter’s claims against the practical realities of wartime, knowing she could end up in Vietnam. When she expressed her personal opposition to the war, his reply was classic. “You don’t have to worry about that,” he said. “There is a waiting list a mile long to go to Vietnam.” He reassured her that she would never find herself there. In the end, the thought of being able to pay her parents back, and the idea of international travel, won out.
    O’Neill now compares this decision to those she made during her time in community theater, where she had a penchant for taking roles that were often counter to the person she was. For anyone who knew her, the notion that Sue O’Neill would join the military would have seemed almost laughable.
    With less than a day’s thought, she signed on for the role of Army nurse. She called her father from Chicago. “Dad, guess what? I just joined the military.” Her father had served in a noncombat role in the Navy during World War II. She assumed that he would be proud of her and her plan for straightening out her “wayward ” life. Instead, there was dead silence on the other end of the phone for several seconds. In those days, long-distance phone lines could be faulty, and for a moment she thought their connection had gone dead. But then he spoke.
    â€œI guess you know what you’re doing.”
    O’Neill’s next thought was “Oh, shit. I don’t know what I’m doing.”
    O’Neill accepted her military payments for the first year. Occasionally, a form would arrive, and she would return it incomplete with a note claiming that she didn’t understand it. This seemed to work for a while, as she did not hear from anyone in the Army. At the end of her training, O’Neill took her certification exam from the Indiana State Board of Nursing. Awaiting her grade, which delayed her military service yet again, she stayed busy working as a counselor in a Jewish girls’ camp in New Hampshire. She recalls that being exposed to a class of very different young women was a learning experience. As they fantasized about their future weddings, set in their parents’ picturesque backyards, all Sue could imagine was a wedding in her Indiana backyard, complete with dogs and miscellaneous stuff .
    Finally, at the end of summer 1968 she received her grades and orders assigning her to Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas. Up to this time, she had only traveled long-distance by car. This was her first airplane ride, and she spent the flight vomiting. She suspects that it may have had a lot more to do with apprehension about her unknown future than motion sickness. When