In 1968, Joan Furey joined the U.S. Army Nurse Corps and volunteered for Vietnam. On Thursday, November 19, she tells that story at the Castle at Fort Totten, in a talk hosted by the Bayside Historical Society as part of its Author Talk at the Castle series. The evening runs from 7:30 to 9 p.m., and veterans get in free.

A year in Pleiku

Furey graduated from the Pilgrim State Hospital School of Nursing in 1967. From January 1969 to January 1970 she served as a staff nurse in the post-operative and intensive care unit of the 71st Evacuation Hospital in Pleiku, in Vietnam's Central Highlands. She received the Bronze Star for Meritorious Service. She later earned a bachelor's degree in nursing from Stony Brook University and a master's in nursing from NYU.

Thirty years with the VA

After the war, Furey spent close to thirty years at the Department of Veterans Affairs. She served on the VA's Special Committee on PTSD, became associate director for education at the National Center for PTSD, and helped set up the first inpatient PTSD treatment program for women who had served in a war zone. In 1993 she became the founding director of the VA's Center for Women Veterans.

Her honors include the VA Distinguished Career Award, the Center for Women Veterans Trailblazer Award and induction into the New York State Veterans Hall of Fame. She appears in the PBS documentary VIETNAM and in the Apple TV+ documentary Vietnam: The War That Changed America.

What the evening covers

Furey will talk about why she enlisted and volunteered, and about the women who served in Vietnam more broadly, with a short slideshow on the experience of military nurses during the war. She will also explain how she came to co-edit Visions of War, Dreams of Peace: Writings of Women in the Vietnam War with Lynda Van Devanter, and read selections from it. A question-and-answer session and a book signing follow.

A last look at the exhibit

The talk falls on the final day of the Castle's exhibit Home Front & Front Lines: 250 Years of American Service, and the society invites guests to come early to see it before it closes.

Tickets

Admission is $10, $5 for Bayside Historical Society members, and free for veterans. Tickets are sold on the society's event page or by phone at (718) 352-1548.

Getting there

The Castle is at 208 Totten Avenue inside Fort Totten Park in Bayside. There is no subway nearby: take the Long Island Rail Road's Port Washington branch to Bayside station and continue by bus or on foot to Fort Totten Park.

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