PORT ANGELES — Elizabeth Ann Scarborough — a nurse, novelist and veteran of the Vietnam War — will give a public reading from her celebrated work The Healer’s War at Peninsula College this Thursday at lunch time.
Admission is free for all to this event, held in honor of Veteran’s Day, which falls on Wednesday.
Scarborough’s hour-long reading will start at 12:35 p.m. Thursday in the Little Theater at Peninsula College, 1502 E. Lauridsen Blvd., as part of the weekly Studium Generale lecture series.
The author will travel from her home in Port Townsend to share her work, and then open the discussion for questions, answers and the sharing of experiences.
The Healer’s War is based on Scarborough’s time as an Army nurse in Vietnam — something she did not, at the outset, want to write a book about.
“Vietnam had been a big, black hole in my life for 20 years,” she writes on her website, www.EAScarborough.com.
But Scarborough embarked on the project out of a sense of duty to her fellow veterans, and to the Vietnamese people with whom she worked. In her prologue to The Healer’s War, Scarborough wonders about forgiveness and about what happened to the people she met in Vietnam:
“One hope I have in writing this is that maybe they will read it or hear of it and find me,” she muses, “and we can heal together.”
What follows is the first-person account of Lt. Kitty McCulley, the recent graduate of a Midwestern nursing school.
Scarborough herself completed her training at the Bethany Hospital School of Nursing in Kansas City, Kan., and served in Vietnam from June 1969 to June 1970.
“[Bethany] was a very good hospital,” Scarborough said, where she was taught that everybody deserves care, regardless of ability to pay.
The Healer’s War starts with Lt. McCulley working in a field hospital in Vietnam. There, she acts on her belief that it’s her duty to attend to each wounded patient, Southeast Asian or American, civilian or military.
One of Lt. McCulley’s patients is an old man, Xe. A shaman, he wears an amulet around his neck; before Xe dies, he makes sure the nurse becomes the new keeper of the necklace. She discovers the amulet has magical powers, which accompany her on a journey.
The book won the 1988 Nebula Award, an honor presented to the author of the best U.S. science or fantasy fiction book of the year. And her fellow Vietnam veterans have let her know she did well by them.
“I’ll write fiction . . . but I won’t write bulls—,” Scarborough told the Peninsula Daily News in a 2011 Peninsula Woman profile.
Then as now, this veteran doesn’t tolerate anything that romanticizes war.
“It’s not just guys with uniforms against other guys with uniforms,” she said. “It’s civilians dying, civilians who are defenseless.”
In 1993, four years after The Healer’s War came out, Scarborough traveled to Washington, D.C., for the Nov. 11 dedication of the Vietnam Women’s Memorial.
She got to see people from her unit again, at the monument and at a dance. She danced with her fellow vets, defiant of their wheelchairs and prostheses.
Some, Scarborough added, still suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and some had children with birth defects, which she believes were due to exposure to Agent Orange.
“I was brought up to not preach at people,” she said. But “sometimes I have things I really want to say.” So Scarborough says it with fiction, in novels such as The Healer’s War.
Her body of work also includes the many books on which she collaborated with the late Irish writer Anne McCaffrey. Together they worked on the Petaybee Series, the Acorna Series and the The Barque Cat series.
To find out more, see www.EAScarborough.com, and for more information about Thursday’s program, contact Peninsula College’s Kate Reavey at kreavey@pencol.edu or 360-417-6489.
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Features Editor Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5062, or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
