going to be Court marshaled for going AWOL or sent back home. She gets awarded with a silver star, but feels ashamed; this was how a patient she took care of in the hospital earlier in the book acted toward receiving a medal. Eventually kitty is able to safely make it back home to America. The last part of the story is kitty trying to reintegrate. She has been changed by war and finds her life to be meaningless. The guy she liked and wrote to got a girlfriend, who he never mentioned, and then she finds a stack of her unopened letters from him. She tries to be a nurse, but she’s getting her work done early because she’s used to being interrupted to help new wounded patients coming in. The people she is meeting in hospitals are all depressed. She starts crashing her cars as she is out of it. At a low point, she is about to kill herself when she wishes that someone cared enough about her to have taken her to Disneyland. She then decides to take herself to Disneyland. At the airport in LA, Kitty gets distracted by groups of frightened Vietnamese refugees. She spends the week coming to the airport everyday to look through the new arrivals, hoping to see her friends/ patients. Kitty ends up finding new meaning to her life, and the book ends with her planning to start helping refugees from Vietnam. References 1988 American novels 1988 science fiction novels Nebula Award for Best Novel-winning works Novels by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough