Joan Craigwell shares her personal experiences in Vietnam, and her unique insights and perspective as an Air Force officer, a nurse, a woman, and an African-American in a busy evacuation hospital. She discusses the challenges and remembers the good that they did. Ms. Craigwell says that the common theme among the 11,000 or 12,000 military women, especially nurses, that were in Vietnam was overwork. “I was there 18, 20 hours a day, not being able to go to the bathroom. … you could go to the bathroom-- you'd pass right by it-- but you'd think, oh, my God, if I go in the bathroom, somebody might die.” When the beds were filled, particularly during Tet, “if someone would die or if someone was transferred over to the intensive care unit, then we would take a patient off of a litter that was on the floor and put them in the bed. And then you could never catch up. You could never, ever catch up. Orders were constantly being written. … by the time you thought you had finished, there was some other incident … you were just on a roll all the time.” The other difficult thing she thought was common among all of the nurses was “not getting to know your patients.” As she reflects on the impact of the war on her own and others’ lives, she points out that, “No one will ever be like they were before they left. That's an impossibility. You can't. War changes people in many ways.”