Hypertext Magazine asked Rita Dragonette, author of The Fourteenth of September, “Why did you feel it was important to tell a story of the Vietnam War from a woman’s point of view?”
By Rita Dragonette
I’ve always been interested in the impact of war through the female experience, partly because my mother was an Army Nurse in World War II and saw much more action than my father. Her stories were very different from his—equal sacrifice and danger, but not the same standing. Twenty-hour surgery shifts in a tent on the front, range-of-motion triage on prisoners of war frozen in the fetal position in a liberated Stalag: how was that not as horrible as being shot at?
Vietnam was the war of my generation, and I’ve been curious that even after all this time there are very few novels from or about women involved in that war. At the same time, there are also few stories from what I always felt was an equal battlefield: the “front” of the college campus filled with young men all under siege from fear of the draft, which by the body-count days of 1969-1970 was considered a death sentence.
For many women during that time, the campus was where the “war” was taking place. There was a responsibility to do whatever they could, in a way, to compensate for the fact that they weren’t in actual danger of losing their lives. They led a lot of the antiwar activities and, above all, helped friends and boyfriends dodge—which often included risky behavior like not eating—or cope, which often included drugs. They held hands, dried tears, offered physical comfort, listened to them rage, mopped up vomit, talked them down from bad trips, experienced survivor guilt. It felt like they were in it, too—acknowledged or not, they were in it.
In The Fourteenth of September, I wanted to tell a story of a woman faced with a dilemma with the same emotional intensity as the decision facing the men of the day—do I go to Vietnam and probably die for a war I don’t believe in, or to Canada, and give up everything except my life? What would it be like if you understood that with a flip of a chromosome coin, you could be a Number One in the draft lottery? What would the story be if it weren’t Tim O’Brien in the canoe weighing the impact on his life of the crossing to Canada in The Things They Carried, but a woman? How direct could I make the parallel to convey that, in war, everyone has skin in the game?
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Rita Dragonette is a former award-winning public relations executive turned author. Her debut novel, The Fourteenth of September, is a woman’s story of Vietnam which will be published by She Writes Press on September 18 and has already been designated a finalist in two 2018 American Fiction Awards by American Book Fest, and received an honorable mention in the Hollywood Book Festival. She is currently working on two other novels and a memoir in essays, all of which are based upon her interest in the impact of war on and through women, as well as on her transformative generation. She also regularly hosts literary salons to introduce new works to avid readers. www.ritadragonette.com