Back in the mid-1980s, my husband and I found a television show that we grew to love.
"China Beach" was a one-hour drama, a portrayal of what it was like to have served as medical officers during the Vietnam War, and it held our attention like nothing else available at that time.
My husband had lost friends in Vietnam. I had worked as an American National Red Cross employee, an assistant caseworker in a U.S. Naval hospital during the late 1970s. I worked with women who had served in Vietnam, and their stories were both interesting and horrific. Their lives were forever changed by their service.
The woman who had interviewed and hired me had married a military officer after the war ended, and they both struggled to adjust to life after that highly charged time. Within the year after I had taken the job as her assistant, they both decided to leave the military life and head for the quiet North Carolina hometown where Suzanne had grown up.
I visited the couple in their new home one weekend. I had looked forward to this with great anticipation, so happy that they insisted, repeatedly, that they so badly wanted me to visit.
I was stunned to realize I could sense incredible tension between them. This once-happy couple, Suzanne confided in me, could not find their footing in an existence in which nothing happened, day after day.
"We aren't bored with one another. I think we are searching for the adrenaline that once defined us and each day sort of feels relentlessly dull," she told me. I wrote this in my journal, along with my feelings of disbelief about it all.
Recently, my husband found a streaming platform that carries "China Beach," and we are enjoying it again, 40 years later. In the first several episodes, I was distracted by the actress portraying an American Red Cross worker. She had her red cross pinned on the wrong side of her lapel, with the black A.R.C. pin on the other lapel needing to be switched. I could still feel exactly what that blue dress felt like, and I am still blown away by the fact that the women serving had to wear dresses, even in Vietnam.
I have always felt great respect for those who have served our country, no matter the era, no matter the service. I grew in ways that can't be defined simply by becoming close friends and co-workers with people who had spent years far from home, unsure they would see tomorrow.
Homesickness, my second boss told me, morphed into something inexplicable.
"I hadn't been in 'Nam all that long before I knew I wouldn't ever fit at home, ever again." She had served as a triage nurse and found nursing stateside dull in comparison, opting for a management position within the American National Red Cross.
All these years later, I still think of her and hope so much that, in time, she and those she served with were able to assimilate their service memories in positive ways.