'A Healing'
Submitted by N.O.V.A. July 2005
Times Picayune	11-22-1998


*************************************************
Copyright. All rights reserved.
http://www.usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm
http://www.usgwarchives.net/la/lafiles.htm
************************************************  


Connie Stevens plopped onto an overstuffed couch in the Fairmont Hotel lobby, tucked
her black velour-clad legs and black velvet heels under her, and began talking about "A
Healing," the documentary she made on a pilgrimage to Vietnam in 1995 with 100 of the
approximately 11,000 women who served there during the war.

Back in 1969, Stevens and Bob Hope sang and danced for the American troops. Like Neil
Armstrong, who had just walked on the moon and went to Vietnam to shake hands with the
soldiers, the entertainers reminded them of home - which 58,000 of them would never see
again.

"When I saw some footage I had, I realized that I had an obligation. And this was a way
to pay back this generation for the life that I was able to lead," said Stevens, whose
role as Cricket Blake in the '70s TV series "Hawaiian Eye" - and as one of Eddie
Fisher's exes - are the ones most people remember first. The owner of a $65 million
cosmetics company, Stevens didn't shoot this film - available on video - for money. She
made it for personal reasons.

"I went to Vietnam as a young star, owning the world," she recalled. "I had just had my
second baby (Tricia Lee Fisher; Joely was first). ... No, I don't remember how old I
was," she said, waving the question away.

"So life was good. There was just this awful war.

"I spent a lot of time holding dying young men's hands ... and it has a way of leveling
you.

"I've regretted not being more vocal about it."

And vocal she is now, through two hours and 28 minutes of film she shot with two
cameramen. She narrates at tour stops; she interviews several nurses, whose pain is
palpable as they tell their raw stories, which are at first full of love and hope, then
post-war, of depression, addiction, self-mutilation, alienation.

"It's a perspective of the war that is nurturing. It's not out of anger, it's out of
sorrow," Stevens said.

And yes, it's long. But most of the audience at a recent benefit screening sponsored by
the New Orleans District Nurses Association at the Prytania, which was two-thirds full,
were undaunted.

"(The nurses) were so articulate, I just couldn't cut away from them," Stevens said.

One of the most engaging of the film's stars is Renee Hopwood of Los Angeles. As a
young Navy 4th class petty officer in 1970, she worked in intensive care aboard the USS
Sanctuary as one of two black women (among 25) and 2,500 men. In addition to the
horrors of injury, there were other problems to navigate.

"The sexual issue overrode the black/white issue," said Hopwood. "I guess the sexual
harassment we had to deal with bonded us."

Back home, things were worse. In 1976 when Hopwood was discharged, "I had the
education, I had the knowledge, I just didn't have the heart anymore."

Army 1st Lt. Lily Lee Adams was an intensive care nurse at the 12th Evac Hospital in
1969 and '70. For the first three months of duty, she nursed American amputees and
soldiers who'd suffered severe burns; "they always wanted their mothers." Adams and
others at Chu Lai, the largest former U.S. military base, also cared for Vietnamese
children who'd been injured by land mines and grenades.

"It all sounds so horrible, but I always got a sense of peace," Adams says in the film.
"Some of their souls are with me."

Photos of the women in uniform at 21, 22, 24 (Hopwood at a tender 17), are paired with
their 1995 interviews throughout the film. So are photos of dozens of landmarks then
and now, including USOs, field hospitals, downtown Ho Chi Minh City and the U.S.
embassy in the former Saigon, which finally fell into North Vietnamese hands April 30,
1975.

Stevens and one cameraman were the first Americans allowed inside the deserted embassy
in 20 years. They walked the halls, felt the walls and climbed the ladder to the roof
and the heliport, the endpoint of evacuations during the city's fall.

Stevens confided, "I didn't breathe the whole time I was in that building."

Also particularly poignant in the film is old footage of a hillside full of Army troops
in Long Binh, about 40,000 of them, rakishly dressed in O.D. green. The camera pans
their young faces - the average soldier in Vietnam was 19 - as they are singing pretty
badly with Stevens to "Silent Night." It was Christmas 1969.

Punctuated throughout the film are smatterings of significant songs: "Wouldn't It be
Nice" at its innocent beginning; "Run Through the Jungle" during old battle footage.

The war had another personal angle for Stevens: Pvt. F.C. Ralph Megna Jr.

"My brother used to write to me about doing 'clean-up' in the villages," Stevens said.
"He said he'd chase VC down holes. He talked about losing this guy but finding another
one in a tunnel in a hospital bed and wondering if he should have killed him. I
thought, well, he's stoned, he said he had to numb himself during this. There couldn't
be a hospital bed in a tunnel," recalled Stevens.

The three-level, 180-mile Cu Chi Tunnels - which housed North Vietnamese hospitals,
kitchens and more - appear in the film.

Though Megna survived the war, he came home with severe emotional scars that Stevens
believe were responsible for his death at age 41.

"If we counted those who died later, the (memorial) Wall would be an awful lot longer."