The oldest of four children, Jay Ellen Barrett entered the Army’s Student Nurse Program as a means to pay for two years tuition at Duke University. Upon graduation in 1970, she received a commission in the Army Nurse Corps and a three-year commitment to serve in the U.S. Army. She provides considerable detail about her experience and the initial training for nurses at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas. She was 23 years old when she arrived in Vietnam in July 1971, after gaining seven months of experience at the Army hospital at Fort Riley, Kansas. She emphasizes feeling “very much alone.” She details her various duties in the surgical ward and emergency room, including sick-call, combat and heat casualties, triage, amputations, infections and various ailments, such as malaria, hepatitis, leptospirosis, and "some really strange jungle diseases that I had never heard of before.” She speaks candidly about a sergeant being “fragged,” diversity, and the fear she felt (and still vividly remembers) when an incoming round landed next to her hooch. She describes her worst day as the first day she responded to a casualty in the emergency room, “I didn’t know what to do. And I wasn’t sure what to do. And I didn’t know what I was capable of doing, or what I should be doing. … as I was learning what my role would be.” Her best day was the day one of the Vietnamese nurses adopted an orphaned infant who had been brought in injured, “He went from a scared little child in the corner of his crib to a little boy who was walking around and smiling.” In that era, Army policy prohibited homosexuality, and she describes a gay Soldier being “sent home” because the director of nursing “did not approve.” She addresses the moral conflict of caring for enemy patients, and also caring for soldiers that were in Vietnam supporting secret missions, such as Chinese, Koreans, and U.S. Marines who had reportedly been withdrawn in 1971. She describes being a woman and an officer amongst thousands of male Soldiers. She left Vietnam as a captain and received orders to Fort Carson, Colorado. Lieutenant Colonel Barrett retired from the U.S. Army Reserves in 1991.

Key Words: Army Nurse Corps, Klu Klux Klan, racism, bachelor officers quarters (BOQ), debriding, cricothyrotomy, 4th of July, Phu Bai, drugs, detox, conscientious objectors, “fragging”, O+ blood, China Beach, Women’s Memorial, Vietnam War Memorial, “the American War.”