“Hope you have a great Memorial Day, but remember what it means.” Cathleen Cordova
On this holiday, I wanted to quote Cathleen Cordova, a writer friend of mine who emailed me this link as one of the best Memorial Day videos she’s ever seen. Click here.
Cathleen has two essays in our anthology, Written Across the Genres. One is titled, “Cooking with Mama” about her mother who made cooking an act of love. The second essay is titled, “Round Eye in a World of Hurt.” These are lines in the first paragraph of her second essay:
“When People hear that I served in Vietnam during the war, they usually say, ‘How in the world did you end up there? Were you a nurse? You were awfully brave to go.”
She wasn’t a nurse. She joined the Department of the Army assigned to Army Special Services because it was her way to support her country. Cathleen says, “I was not brave, just too young and naive to be afraid. The GIs called Vietnam the ‘world of hurt,’ home was ‘back in the world,’ and all American women were known as ’round eyes.”
The essay ends with, “That’s my story in a nutshell. I don’t regret my service in Vietnam. I did the best I could for those who had to be there. And if I could, I would do it all again for our military men and women of today.”
A longer version of Cathleen Cordova’s story is published in #Times They Were A-Changing, Women Remember the ’60s & ’70s, edited by Kate Farrell, Linda Joy Myers & Amber Starfire and published by She Writes Press, 2013.
Julaina Kleist-Corwin
Editor of Written Across the Genres
Author of Hada’s Fog
