Susan Hunt Babinski

In Just a Year: Coming of Age in Vietnam

Available on Amazon.

When Susan Hunt boarded a plane to Saigon in the summer of 1967, she was twenty-two years old. After graduating from the Rhode Island Hospital School of Nursing, she enlisted in the US Army and volunteered for a one-year tour of duty in Vietnam. She hoped to work with children, a dream that came true when she was assigned to the pediatrics unit of the 91st Evacuation Hospital in Tuy Hòa.

Babinski has a distinctive voice as a writer—simple and direct, going straight to the heart. Recounting her year in Vietnam, she describes the damaged children she loved and cared for, the men she worked with and, sometimes, fell in love with, and—after the onset of the Tet Offensive in January 1968—the wounded soldiers she nursed and nurtured. She was forever changed by her year in Vietnam. She had absorbed the trauma of that brutal war. But rather than hating and fearing, she returned home with a deepened understanding of what it means to care for others. Readers of this book will see the Vietnam war through the eyes of this young nurse, a girl who became a woman—in just a year.

Biography

Soon after arriving back in the United States in 1968, Second Lieutenant Susan Hunt resigned her commission and began to participate in anti-war marches while still identifying strongly with other Vietnam veterans. In 1970 she married Hubert Babinski. After earning a master’s degree in child and adolescent psychiatric nursing from New York University, she accepted a job as a psychologist at the Bronx Children’s Psychiatric Center, where she worked for the next twenty-eight years. She earned her PhD in applied psychology from NYU in 1996.

While attending the dedication of the Vietnam Women’s Memorial on the National Mall in 1993—an event of immense significance for nurse veterans like Babinski—she learned that the 91st Evacuation Hospital, where she served, had been declared an Agent Orange Center. She was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2016 and died in 2018 at the age of seventy-three. After her death, her husband, Hubert F. Babinski, PhD, and Rebecca Williams Mlynarczyk, PhD, edited the manuscript of her book for publication.

Publication: Spring 2023