Lynda Van Devanter

You may think I'm silly, getting all worked up over a death that happened eight years ago, but until I went searching on Google to remind myself of the title of Lynda Van Devanter's shattering book on her time in Vietnam, I had not known that she had died in 2002. She was only 55 years old, and it was Agent Orange that killed her.

HOME BEFORE MORNING was one of the many books I read in the 1980s to make sense of the American war in Vietnam. I knew that women were there as nurses and as other...