Just a few days ago, the image of my new memoir - Girls Don’t! A Woman’s War in Vietnam - was visibly splashed across our Return Voyage website. Seemingly, it’s an unusual fit on a website devoted to the rebirth and wisdom of the Native Hawaiian people and their culture.
But neither ‘Iokepa nor I were able to imagine: this twenty-five year labor, now reaching-fruition, not finding a home on our very personal website. Many thousands of good folks who’ve heard us speak across the continent in these past 13 years will attest: the work we do, the words we speak, the lives we share – are nothing other than personal. There is very little distance between our lives, and yours.
You know us; we know you. We’ve made a point of it. And so have you.
Hence, this shared new memoir: the story of a gutsy, 23 year old girl determined not to be excluded from the possibilities open to her brothers. Proving her feminist credentials (mostly to herself) in a place of extreme macho - a war. She’s acting at an earlier time, when - in a resounding echo of our own - events threaten to shatter the core solidarity of the American nation.
An earlier time, when the limitations on a young woman, and the struggle to defeat those boundaries, was front and center. I was girl who was ubiquitously labelled, “Outspoken and adventurous.” Yet I knew full-well how much I didn’t permit myself to say or do.
I was unable to write this story when I was fresh out of Vietnam and Cambodia in 1971; I was still too much of it. I refused to write the story in my career-rich twenties, thirties or forties because I believed that the entire story of the war had been written well and fully by others. Only now, does the dissonance of a brutal war lived through the forbidden sensibilities of newlyweds (girl reporter and boy soldier) – seem reconcilable.
Only now do I have the distance to see that young woman, in all her chutzpah and her fears, all her certainty and her ignorance, all her empathy and blindness – with the distance to admire, enjoy, and pray for her.
Only now, has the Women’s March and #MeToo movement convinced me that there is a powerfully awakened audience for a story that is so much more than ancient history. A story that is still one that women live and relive, while we try to imagine what is our piece of – and our place in - this world we inhabit.
For me, memoir is that literary form which cuts so close to the bone; that spares the reader not a single truth – and refuses either emotional disguise or shelter. It is not memoir if it does not do that.
Girls Don’t! A Woman’s War in Vietnam is personal. Distance does not serve the purpose of truth in this dual-level story: the War for the soul of two nations; the war for gender equality. The first-person voice in this book extinguishes distance, exposes deception, and puts their emotional fodder in our faces.
Readers and friends. Let’s take another Return Voyage together.