Winnie Smith was an idealistic twenty-one-year-old first lieutenant in the Army Nurse Corps in 1965, the year that North Vietnam bombed the U.S. base in Pleiku and our involvement in the war became official. Filled with romantic notions about being a combat nurse, Winnie requested assignment in an intensive care unit in Saigon, where casualties were brought by helicopter just minutes from the battlefield. There she became one of the courageous corps of American women who witnessed the drama and horror of combat firsthand. American Daughter Gone to War is her powerful, poignant story, a narrative of one woman's struggle to survive the bloodbath she confronted on the ward, and the trauma that filled her life afterward.