MWSA Book Review

Write Home For Me: A Red Cross Women In Vietnam

Author: Jean Debelle Lamensdorf
Publisher: Random House Australia
Genre: Memoir

Reviewer: Bill McDonald--MWSA Founder

Available:  contact the author direct at jlamensdorf@comcast.net or 610-388-0268

An Australian Women’s Memoir of The Vietnam War


When a women journalist wanted to get involved with her generation’s biggest story, she volunteered with the Australian Red Cross and went off to Vietnam and the war. Author Jean Debelle Lamensdorf gives a year of her young life to discover not just the war but also a part of her very own self. What she writes about takes the war and puts it into a very personalized story about the people and her journey. Those memories of her experiences are captured wonderfully in her book “Write Home For Me: A Red Cross Women In Vietnam”, which was first successfully published in Australia.

There are many books written by veterans about wars and battles but there are very few out there that express a women’s perceptive on what war is like. Even though Jean Lamensdorf is not a combatant, she was there to witness the physical and emotional damage that is done to those who are. Her sensitive writing style and insights of those she meets is first-rate story telling. She is a good observer of human nature and one senses that she cared a great deal about those men she was there to help. It was not all comfortable and easy for her, as she even had to face a crazy gunman. She writes about those who are wounded and killed and those who work with them. The book could have been be a real downer but she adds a little humor, some insightful comments and a ray of hope to a chronicle of compassion and service.

You are not going to read another book like this one about the Vietnam War experience—this is a book well worth adding to your collection. It is an honest look back at a war that many try hard to forget and very few really understand. The book is a non-fiction account that reads at times like a novel. It is both entertaining and moving and certainly will leave the reader a little richer in spirit for having read it.