Linda Guerue was born in 1946 in Muscatine, Iowa, a town located on the Mississippi River. As the daughter of a World War II veteran, being patriotic was a part of daily life. Consequently, choosing to volunteer for the military was Linda’s choice. She’s a strong-willed woman, now working for Mt. Caramel Hospital, and she reveals that in the following interview conducted in her home in Pittsburg.

Linda being sworn into the military.

[I was]* born [in] 1946, in Muscatine, Iowa. [It was a] town about the size of Pittsburg, about twenty thousand [people], and it was on the Mississippi river. So it was very agricultural industry; and of course the river, the river and the whole flooding cycle were all very important to the town. [I have] one sister; she’s younger. My mom was a homemaker, and my dad was a carpenter. I always liked school, and I especially liked math. Well, of course, I’m a child of a World War II veteran. So you grow up with, especially in Iowa, being patriotic, serving your country. When I was in school I thought about going into the student nurse program. With that you get tuition paid, you get a salary, and you get active duty. You [also] go in at a higher rank. But my parents talked me out of that. They said because, “In two years you might not want to go. So you have money for school, just wait and decide then.”

When I decided, they didn’t argue at all. They were supportive. They never discouraged me. But, back in the ‘60’s when the Vietnam War was going on; every night on the news it was protests and people getting killed. I mean, Iraq you see a lot more live, you know, stuff happening. It was really tough because we were raised to support our country, to be proud to serve. At the same time, you see all these images, [and] all these protests. As a nurse, well, you’re not gonna have to kill anybody, and they needed nurses desperately. So I could serve, and I thought, “I’ll have a much better understanding of [what is] going on. I’ll come back and I’ll know; I’ll understand it better.” Which was not true. (Laughs) **

I was in the military from ‘69-‘71. [I] went through basic training at Fort Sam Houston, San Antonio, Texas. All the medical people still go through there. So I graduated as a nurse in 1968, and I went to the University of Iowa to work. I was gonna go on to school right after I graduated. Oh, the protesting, I mean on campus, was terrible; and so I thought, “Okay, I’m gonna go ahead and go.” In February, I went to basic training. [By] April, I was in Vietnam. Six months out of school, six weeks in the military, I’d never flown in an airplane before, you know. So, what do you do? You fly to Texas, and then I flew home; and then I flew to California, then I flew to Hawaii, Guam, and Vietnam. It’s like, I mean, you guys can’t imagine not flying, but just that [flying] alone was a big deal. I was green, green, green--very green. Oh, yeah! There were [women in the military]. There have always been women in the military, but not in combat roles like there is now. In Vietnam, there were just nurses, out in the hospital, out in the country. In Saigon, there were other [women]. They could be supplying, secretarial-type things--communications, medical. But only nurses and officers were out, and there weren’t that many women in Vietnam. We had one African-American, uh, I can’t remember her name.

I went in [to the army] as a second lieutenant and was promoted to a first lieutenant in a year. [We got paid] oh, I wanna say, two hundred dollars a month. Yeah, I believe [that women were paid the same as men]. Of course, you had your housing and everything, so you basically saved that money. And at that time, if you were in [the army] a year and you didn’t screw up, you’d become a first lieutenant. In civilian times, it was not like that, civilian times it took much longer. When we first got there [to Vietnam], we were in Long Bin. [On] the plane ride to Long Bin, no seats were in the plane.

The plane ride to Long Bin, no seats were in the plane.

When I went to Long Bin, and we’d been up--oh I can’t even tell you how long we’d been up. We couldn’t sleep. We couldn’t think because we were so excited. We were there, and then a day or two [later] we met with the Chief Nurse; and she basically had a map of Vietnam and the hospitals, “Where do you want to go to? These are our vacancies.”

And I had met this nurse in basic, and I said, “Well, where do you need two nurses?” That was Chu-Lai. So, that’s when we took that C-130, that crop plane up to Chu-Lai.

This other nurse and I, they put us in barracks. It was a long building, and there was a hallway going down the middle. There would be two beds, and then a partition; two beds, and then a partition. It’d be the same on both sides. We’d been up forever, and it was hot, and we were nervous; and we were just getting ready to go to bed. Around [the barracks] we were fenced in. It was continuous wire, and then there was a guard. That’s comforting. So all of a sudden, we hear boots, thump, thump, thump, thump. And this man says, “Get your gear outside and be ready to go in thirty minutes.” We’re tired, but you know we’re in the army; you do what you’re told. So we get everything, [and] we drag it out there. We’re there by the guard and up comes this guy in a jeep and helps us load our stuff. We get in the jeep and drive around, and we drive around. We end up in these barracks, a bunch of barracks. He says, “Okay just leave your gear there. Follow me.” We go in, and it’s a bunch of guys having a party; and the guys says, “I told you I could get some girls.”

Linda and a fellow nurse practice using their gas masks.

Since the guy was an officer, he bluffed his way past the guard. I mean it was funny, but we were so tired. But, that was a funny moment. When you’re brand new, and here you’re thinking everything is so proper and this happens to you. (Laughs). That was a funny moment.

We called our shifts either, “seven P to seven A” or “seven A to seven P,” and you really didn’t get a day off. If you worked nights and you were going to come back on days, you got a day to sleep before you came back. If you worked days, you’d give them baths, the patients we had. We had recovery, and it’s not like we had scheduled surgery. We had patients coming day and night. You did the recovery; you monitored them closely for complications. You were their family; which maybe was the hardest part because you didn’t have to deal with families. When you got a sick patient, it’s hard enough to take care of a sick patient. But when you have the grieving family there, you have to take care of them; we didn’t have to think about the families. They could be grieving, but we didn’t have time to think about it. You just take care of their dressings, watch their vital signs. We had a lot of cardiac arrests, so you did CPR. We did more cleaning wounds, snipping, and debriefing, then you’d do in the states. We did a lot of procedures that civilians couldn’t do. If it was a quiet day, you could maybe take an hour and go rest. We sometimes would go to the mess hall and eat; but lots of times they’d bring food for the patients, and we’d just stay and eat it. We had an M-16 at the nurses’ station, [which was] not very typical; we had to keep track of that and be prepared, and we had a keep things locked up--especially at night--because we were right on Highway 1. So there were just a couple fences between [the highway and the hospital], and I think everybody knew that the hospitals you just kind of left alone. Although in Chu-Lai, a rocket did hit two hospitals. We were the surgical, the M.A.S.H. hospital, and they hit the evacuees hospital, and a nurse was killed there. So basically just take care of patients. Okay, I was six months out of school; I worked at the University of Iowa, which was a good thing because I was from a teaching hospital with interns. But it was different from the University of Iowa, because it was bigger, and they did a thing called delayed primary closure. Because they had a high infection rate--when you had abdominal surgeries, they’re layers, you have the fascia, the muscle, and then the skin. Well, if they close it all up and there’s infection, it holds it in. So, they leave the skin open. If there’s infection, it will drain. They go back and do delayed primary closure. I had never seen that before. So the first one I saw, I thought that they had forgotten to finish! But they said, “No, No, that’s what they do.” Everything in Vietnam was delayed primary closure; because everyone was infected. When you’re in a place like Vietnam, your money, your degrees, don’t count for very much. It’s what you could do to help the cause. Everybody was top notch. And if they weren’t, they were out of there. Here I am six months out of school in intensive care. My nurse--my chief nurse goes on R and R--and I’m the only nurse with all these medics; who teach me things. For example, we had patients who would go into recovery and some who would go into a state of intensive care. A soldier had come back, and he had been wounded and his dressings were full of blood. In the recovery room, you chart the level of consciences and then you talk about the wound. So [I wrote down], “Alert and oriented, and a large amount of drainage,” and I showed it to the medic. I said, “How’s my charting?”

And he said, “Ehh, that’s okay.”

I said, “Well, you act like something’s wrong.”

He said, “Well, that’s not really a large amount of drainage.”

And I said, “It’s saturated.”

He said, “A large amount is dripping on the floor, dripping off the bed.” So when you are taking care of patients that acute, you have to be really good and you have to work together as a team. I was able to emotionally handle it, yeah, nothing, nothing, compares to it. What we did, and now that I look back I think this was terrible, when we were done with all the baths and everything we’d make popcorn. I had a popcorn popper, the old fashioned kind; and one of the guys from the mess hall was from Iowa, and he said, “You know we have a case of popcorn, what are we going to do with popcorn at the mess hall?”

“Well, bring it here.” So every morning, when we were done with all the baths and everything was quiet, we’d pop popcorn. But now, looking back, if you’d been wounded, it could really make you feel sick, the smell of popcorn; although no one ever complained about it. You know, probably because there was nothing we could do. If it was quiet, oh, you’d have squirt gun fights with syringes because syringes really squirt far. You’d do some silly things, but basically you’d take care of patients and watch the IV’s.

The hospitals were quonset huts; and then, while we were there, they brought in these things that were about six foot tall, about this wide (holds fingers indicating six inches) at the top and got wider at the bottom. They were steel filled with sand. That was all the way around the hospital. So when we had an incoming [attack], we took the patients, if we could, on the floor against the wall. A direct hit, it’s all over anyway; but if shrapnel would land from someplace else, it would protect them. Then if the patients couldn’t get out of bed, we would put the side rails up, and the extra mattresses, we would put that on top of them on the side rails, to try and protect them. I think [during] most of our attacks I was at work. If you’re off duty, you’d go into the bunker; but most of the time I was at work. You were so busy taking care of the patients it was pretty much over by the time you go to sit down. If you think it’s scary for you, if you have someone who’s an amputee, who’s hurting and can’t move, I mean you’re just trying to keep the patients calm. We were on the coast so we had navy shooting over us. So you’d hear the “wwhheeee, bomb.” You’d get real scared, and you’d say, “That’s out going, that’s outgoing.” You’d hear it again and say, “That’s out going.” How will you know in coming? Well you just do.

In monsoon season. It felt like it was really freezing, I don’t know it might have been forties or fifties [degrees]. It was wet, wet; you were wet all the time. I mean you were wet from the rain, but it was also so humid. I mean you’d have your clothes around light bulbs trying to keep them dry, so they wouldn’t get mildew. My parents sent electric blankets so my bed was dry. One day we had, oh, eight, ten guys come in from the same unit. One guy had been wounded, and so they put him on a blanket and they were carrying him from a helicopter, and like eight others [men]--I don’t know if they stepped on a mine or what--they were wounded. They came [to our hospital], and we took care of them. They were really worried, really worried, about the guys they left back there because they were really short [of men]. Later that night, in came the helicopter pilots that brought them in. They were like, “We really put our ass out there to bring these guys in; we’re making sure you’re taking good care of them.”

They got to see them, and we were taking care of them. Oh, about a week or so, the rest of the unit came in, to check on all these guys. I think that is just an example of the cohesiveness. The political, the politics--[whether] the war [was] right or wrong--when you’re there, we’re taking care of our guys and civilians; and they’re protecting each other. No matter the politics, someone is shooting at you, so you shoot back!

There were just lots of stories like that where people just stuck together. My husband would say, “You know, Linda, we would drink water you would not walk in.” It was just so awful. And when these guys came in from out in the field—You know when you wash dishes you’re hands get wrinkly?--imagine in monsoon season. You’re wet for a month. Their bodies were so shriveled up and wrinkly, so filthy; and now they’re wounded on top of that. You [have] got to pull leeches off. [There was a] high malaria rate, and some of the malaria prevention medicines would cause diarrhea, which is tough out in the field. They [the soldiers] wouldn’t always take their pills like they should. So, they’d come in, they’re running a fever, is it infection or is it malaria? [They have] shriveled skin and they got shrapnel all over. The condition for the troops was very bad. When they came in to visit a patient, whew, you could smell it coming. They hadn’t shaved or anything, and for us that was fine. But I had an experience once, where they went to mess and they wouldn’t let them in because they weren’t in proper uniform. I’m thinking, “Holy crap! That’s what we’re here for to take care of these guys, and you won’t let them come in and buy a beer or whatever.” [With] the military, there were some really good things, and then there were some really stupid things. You lose a lot of people. The nurses saw a lot more death than the guys out in the field; which of course, we did. It was really hard for the nurses to be involved in support groups or anything because you’re either their mascot, or you’re still insecure about it.

Linda’s room in the barracks.

[In the barracks] I had a room to myself; and it had three sides. There was a closet, and a bed. Then the fourth side was screened in with thin blinds--not like blinds, bigger than that--probably about six inch boards, to let air through. Then, I was on the second floor so I had no ceiling; it was just the corrugated metal. So when you worked nights and you tried to sleep, it was like sleeping in a camp oven because the metal, it just radiated the heat. The big thing to do was to get a blow torch, and you’d go over the wood; and it brings out the grain. It kind of made it look better.

Linda Guerue (on the right) and a fellow nurse in uniform.

[They provided] a uniform I’m not sure about linen. Because there was, like, a twin bed, and you know the army cots, they’re smaller. I think they provided the sheets. You know, your toilet articles and stuff, there was an exchange where you could buy that stuff. Then you’d have stuff sent from home too. They provided food.

[The uniforms] that we were issued were greens, like the skirt and the jacket; but we didn’t wear it to work. Then we had some white uniforms that were cotton, but we didn’t wear those either because those were stateside. Then there were fatigues; we wore fatigues. They were green; and they were jungle fatigues, so they were lighter, lighter weight. They were actually pretty comfortable. Yeah! [We wore them off duty]. When we got in country in Long Bin, when they were issuing a lot of that stuff. We’re in line, and we’re getting boots. These were boots that were leather around the foot, but they had, uh, like nylon up the ankle, so they were a little bit cooler. Then they had a steel toe, because of these bungee sticks. They had pits that people would fall in; and this was in case you did, they were trying to protect your feet from things like that. Anyway the guy says, “What size would you like? And I said, “Well, I wear a size seven.” And he said, “Well, your feet swell over here.”

So I got a size larger, a size eight. Well, they were men’s sizes (Laughs). So, for a year I stomped around in men’s size eight boots. My feet never did swell that bad (Laughs).

A lot of people drank. I wasn’t much of a drinker. There was…well that was pretty much it. I mean, everyone was twenty-one, and boy, at that time in the army you could buy a pitcher of beer cheaper than you could buy a coke. They really pushed the booze.

Linda (on left) and friend on the beach at her station.

There was an Officer’s Club there; but what worked best for me was that at nights we were on the beach. By the South China Sea, which was warm, wonderful water. I’d go swim, and then go sit on the beach. It was really wonderful. The people who didn’t have that, I’m not sure what they did; maybe I would of done more drinking. The beach was really wonderful, and then you’d meet lots of people and that was something.

The string of Chinooks, which showed whether they lost an aircraftsman or not, as you can see, no smoke.

One of the things they would do, [is] the troops would go out, and helicopters were the transportation; and they’d be in a string like that (indicates straight line). When they’d come back, they’d come down the coast because their air field was south of us; and they would have like smoke grenades, and when they came back streaming smoke, that meant they didn’t lose someone. If they came back, and there was no smoke, they lost an aircraftsman. In that picture, I don’t think there is any smoke at all. So, they’d probably lost somebody. So, you were never away from the war. On the beach there were guard towers because they could come by water too.

Being an American woman, you’d have guys walk up to you on the beach. Well, first they’re afraid to talk to you because you’re an officer; but they would say, “Can I take your picture?” “Well, sure. What for?” “Well, because you’re the first round-eye, I’ve seen in six months.” Well you [also] weren't supposed to fraternize with the enlisted.

At Chu-Lai, there was a marine air wing, an Ameri-Cal Division, where “Stormin’ Norman Schwarzkopf” was, you know Norman Schwarzkopf? And, oh, Colin Powell. They were both at Chu-Lai. They were with the Ameri-Cal Division, they were young once too.

Bob Hope at a USO show in Vietnam.

You were supposed to stay in the uniform, because they thought if you dressed too provocatively, you could, uh, incite the problem. You were not suppose to destroy government property; by like cutting off your sleeves, which I did--that’s how I know. You cut off the sleeves of your uniform, that’s government property. So, you’d have to be in proper uniform. You’re not supposed to sneak off at night and go for helicopter rides, I did that. You’re not really supposed to be on helicopters because they’re afraid you’re going to get killed, you know?

[Your hair], well, it had to be under control. I mean it had to back. It could be long, but it couldn’t be flopping around. The rule was you had short hair when it was off your collar. If it was that long, you kept it wrapped up in a pony tail. You couldn’t [be pregnant]. One of our nurses got married, got pregnant, and [then] got discharged. Also, a male nurse, in the army was a nurse. In the navy they were just core man; they wouldn’t let them be officers.

27^th Surgical Hospital, Linda posing in front of the hospital.

[The name of my unit was] 27^th Surgical Hospital. There was a male officers quarters, and a female officers quarters. Well, in basic, they were teaching us. So, it was a classroom. We’d march, did that kind of stuff--learn language, operate a radio, it was like a game, you know. Then they taught us how to take care of [patients], put in chest tubes, tracheotomy, showed us about guns. We shot a few pistols, and [they also taught us] the damage a bullet does. Still, we were students. Once we were in Vietnam, you were thrown in. They kind of left you alone, unless you screwed up, or cut the sleeves off your shirt or something. (Laughs). They were stricter, more protective of us [women], I think. Like the street clothes. We could wear street clothes every Sunday [when] a few nurses could go to the General’s mess--which was a nice dinner with the General and the General’s staff. We could wear street clothes then which seemed hypocritical to me. They didn’t worry about us looking good for the General, but they did seem to worry about us looking good for everyone else. I think they treated us well. After I got back, several years after I got back, I received a survey from the University of Washington that they were doing on women veterans. They asked about sexual harassment, and if you were raped. I was just like, “Um, No!” You were protected. Yeah, I think we were. Well, one night [when] I got off work, I had to go from the hospital to the quarters. I was on the second floor, and it was dark, eight or nine o’clock. I went into my room, and all of the sudden the door opens and there is this strange man I’ve never seen before. I said, “Hello?”

And he goes, “Let’s make love.”

And I said, “Oh, honey, I just got off work, can we go get a drink first?”

And he said, “Okay!”

I just walked over to the Officer’s Club, and I ditched him. So I wasn’t afraid. One night I was going to resign my commission because I thought that was something I could do. I was upset about something. So when I got off work, I walked right out the gate, to this road, and I put out my thumb. A two and a half ton truck stopped, and at first they said, “M’am, you should not be on this road at night. This is Vietnam.” Then they asked me where I wanted to go, and I told them where I wanted to go. I knew a JAG lawyer, it was a marine. They took me there, and I walked in to see my friend, I said,

“I wanna resign my commission.”

Oh, and they laughed, and laughed, and laughed, and they said, “Where did you get the idea you could do that?”

I said, “Well, I’m a volunteer.”

And they laughed, and laughed, and laughed, and said, “No, you can’t resign your commission.”

[We kept in touch with our families] by letters and tapes. Little cassette tapes, no it wasn’t cassette tapes, it was little, tiny, reel-to-reel tapes. You’d make a tape and send it; then [they would] answer back. You could hear their voices, it was good. We could phone, once in a while, we could phone; and then they had what they called MARS phones. MARS phones were HAM radio operators. They [would] connect us to someone in Vietnam by HAM radio, and it’d go to a HAM radio somewhere in the United States. [Then] they would phone your parents. So you’d call, and once the connection was connected, you’d have to say, “Over.” Because the HAM radio was just a one-way line. You’d say, “Hi Mom and Dad how are you? Over.”

They’d say, “Oh, we’re fine, you know Aunt Claire and Uncle Chuck are here, we’re doing this... Over.” I mean, now these people with their satellite phones it’s incredible what they do now. To do it live, was really something. So my experiences were not bad, [we were] very protected, very protected.

I left because my time was up. I went to a diploma school, so I didn’t have my bachelor’s degree. I got my bachelor’s degree with the G.I. Bill’s help. My second year in the army I was in San Francisco; and when I went back, my parent’s had moved to Illinois. I went back there and worked a few months. I was a pretty young, angry person back then. I ended up going back to California. I wanted to work at the V.A. because I was very supportive of the military. The V.A. didn’t have any vacancies so I started working at the public health service hospital--which was [where] we took care of merchant marines, coast guard, and Indians, Native Americans. I was on a male orthopedic floor, and so it was perfect. Because it was male patients and a lot of them were veterans, it was just what we’re used to. Nursing, you can pretty much walk in and start; but for the guys, it was hard getting jobs because they were “baby killers.”

Emotionally, I think I was very fortunate. As much as it was tough being so green going into the army, I think I was very fortunate having a year, when I came back, to be in the army because it gave me a chance to be around military people and kind of get back to normal. I mean, I know nurses that dropped out of society like guys did. They just bum around because it’s so hard to come back. It is so hard to come back. As much as for a whole year you want to go back because the one thing, I suppose, is that adrenaline. You’re good, and you worry about some green person getting people killed. I purposely didn’t go back. I really wanted to, if I wouldn’t have gotten married, I would have stayed in the army longer. But it’s really hard to come back, back home, because everything after that is a let down. When you come back and people are petty, you just don’t tolerate it very well.

[When I saw the protests I felt] furious. Oh, yes! I was in San Francisco, and after I got back I went and saw M.A.S.H., I was very upset. How could people laugh at this? M.A.S.H. the T.V. show, [when] enough time had elapsed, I could laugh at it; but not right away, I still had feelings about it. I think the protesters have some guilt that they have to deal with because they didn’t go. I’d give a presentation; and two men came up to me and one of them said, “You know I would have gone, I had bad hearing.” You know, like they were feeling guilty.

And another said, “When I went for my physical the doctor said, ‘Do you wanna go?’ and the guy said, “No, but I’m being drafted.’”

Well, he said, “Well, you’re in college. Do you wanna go?” and the doctor deferred him, medically deferred him.

He didn’t ask for it. Of course he didn’t say, “No, I wanna go.” He felt guilty over that. I think there’s a lot of guilt, guilt over people that went and came back safe and sound, and there’s guilt for people that didn’t go. I was very upset, [when] I was a student nurse in Chicago--when that Democratic convention was in what…1967? With all the protests, and me and my boyfriend lived up on Lincoln Park. You can camp in Lincoln Park, but they came in by the thousands, and they just flopped all over Lincoln Park. They would walk, thousands, down the streets. Stop traffic, and tie up everything. Of course, then the convention and all that, you know. When they got beat up, I didn’t feel a bit sorry for them. You know, they didn’t belong there. So, yes, I was very upset. I still get upset thinking about it. One other little thing. I took, at Labette, a course on the history of the Vietnam War. In that course we learned that the protesters probably prolonged the war because within the government people were trying to wrap it up. But then you have these radicals out on the street and the World War II generation, who didn’t really want our people there, but they [also] didn’t want to agree with these whackos. It really hurt the cause. I don’t think I’d ever felt hatred before I went to Vietnam. You are just so angry, and you don’t know particularly who you’re angry with. Angry with them [the enemy], angry with the government. When I got home, I was angry with my parents. I thought, “Yeah you’re not gonna give a damn about what’s going on over there now that I’m not over there. But there’s still thousands and thousands…” You know you’re just angry. It changed me.

I have a son. [He didn’t go into the military]. He figured out early on that you could get hurt because his dad was a veteran and he was wounded, pretty seriously. He figured it out. Yeah, he didn’t want to do that (Laughs). He’s no fool.

[The best part of the military was] the comradery. I can speak personally for the medical people. Your purpose was really clear; [it] was to take care of soldiers. You never had to beg someone to work. It was more like you had to say, “Go get some sleep; we’re okay.” You know on M.A.S.H. when they had the helicopter came in and the people come? That’s how it is. You know, the regular helicopters wouldn’t hold many patients. So, that wasn’t too much of a problem. But the Chinooks, which are the big ones with two rotors, they could hold a lot of people. Then you’d help with that. People always came, people always came.

A Chinook.

All in all, it was fun. I got to go to Hong Kong, and I got to go to Bangkok. When I got to go to Bangkok, I went with this nurse that I met in basic, and she had a cousin that lived there. We figured he was C.I.A.. No really. He lived with his family, and so we got to see Bangkok. But he lived out in the country, along a river, and he had a big boat. Big boat, and not a fancy boat, you could live on it. They had a house, but he was a “map maker” and he would go up the coast of Vietnam while he made maps. We got to go on his boat up the Chow River where big ships come in, and their boat was big enough to get in there. But it was a channel, and they had these long, skinny boats selling stuff--like here was a banana boat, or a coffee boat. To be able to see other cultures was neat. The Vietnamese people, you know, you either loved them or hated them. They were really nice people, and we had Vietnamese people working in the hospital, either as nurse’s aide or translators. They were some wonderful people. I guess the one’s we were fighting against were doing what they believed in, too. I think the guys could be more rational about that, [more] than the women. I mean, they were a soldier fighting for their cause. I think women--they used to say they couldn’t be in the military in combat because they’re too vicious (Laughs). But I can kind of see that too, it’s more emotional, more personal. To a guy its okay, we’re here to fight, just a little more, and I’m outta this. Oh, absolutely! Yes, I would do it all over again.

*[ ] Indicates words not said by Linda Guerue.

**( ) Indicates actions done by Linda Guerue.

This oral history was researched and prepared by Sally Miller-Downing. Spring 2006