In theory, this should be right up my alley. A fantasy novel set during the Vietnam War. I can neither confirm nor deny that I've run that D&D campaign multiple times. I'll even go for Magical Realism Vietnam War a la Apocalypse Now or Going After Cacciato. In some ways, given the shambles of the actual war, it serves well enough as a playground for psychological drama above logical sense.

The first half plays it pretty straight. Lt. Kitty McCulley is a nurse in Vietnam in 1969, much like our author. Her life consists of 12 hour shifts on the ward, treating a rotating cast of wounded GIs and a long-term group of Vietnamese patients. Americans don't stay long, either well enough to head back to their units or hurt enough to be medevaced to Japan. The Vietnamese lucky enough to get care at a medical facility are there for quite a while. There's a lot to be said about Xinhdy, a cheerful woman with a hip wound; Ahn, a little boy who lost a leg; and Xe, a holy man who lost two legs. When she's not on the ward, Kitty is dating helicopter pilots and suntanning at the beach. The memoir is pretty solid, as far as these things go. I've read a lot of memoirs from the soldiers perspective, and for them a date with an American nurse was the white whale-holy grail of things to do in Vietnam, and it's fascinating to see that sexual environment from the other side. The never very pretty Kitty has her pick of sexy, charming, crazy liars.

The second half of the book, the fantasy part, is where it comes apart. Xe bestows an amulet on Kitty that lets her see auras and heal by touch, and then dies. When a new surgeon comes in and begins kicking the Vietnamese out of the ward to die, Kitty finagles an evacuation for Ahn. She and the boy are shot down in the jungle, where they wander through an increasingly unlikely series of encounters. They meet a crazy GI who's the lone survivor of his squad, and gain the loyalty of a village by fighting a giant snake and healing the victims of an airstrike. Then Kitty is captured by the VC and rescued by the Americans, only to have a General propose to kill her in case she's been subverted. At the end, it's back to The World, only to find America unusual and strange. Kitty drifts around in a nurses version of a PTSD fugue, working night shifts and edging towards suicide, only to find salvation when her flight to LAX arrives at the same time as a planeload of boat people refugees.

The memoir worked well enough, and I'm a fan of the 'lightly fictionalized' memoir genre, since few people have lives that nicely match a three act structure. But I didn't much like the magic. Auras are a cheap trick to tell readers the emotions of characters rather than showing. The ability to heal by touch is a power fantasy for a nurse, in the same way that to kill by will is a power fantasy for a warrior, but Kitty doesn't do much with it. And while the parts of the story set in the hospital felt very grounded, the parts set in the hinterlands of Vietnam felt very floaty and imaginary. You can be there, without being there.