Auburn’s Sarah Blum began writing “Warrior Nurse: PTSD and Healing” in 2016, offering the harrowing account of her wartime service in the bloody battlefield hospitals of Vietnam in 1967.

She also wrote crucially of her healing years later from the trauma that unknowingly had hitched a ride on her return to the United States in 1968, but for which she would need years of treatment.

It took nearly 10 years to shepherd the new book, recounting her story to its official launch at Seattle Opera House’s Tangney Hall on March 14, 2025.

“The book launch was fabulous all around for me. I felt very loved and supported by so many friends that I sing with in veterans choir, drum and play music with, and do theater with,” Blum said.

Although her Red Badge Writing Project teacher, Warren Etheredge, who has shepherded her writing for years, could not be there physically, he recorded a video that was “a very sweet message for me and about me.”

Seattle Opera’s Zach Martin sang “I Believe” as recorded by Frankie Laine.

Pam Binder, New York Times and USA Today bestselling author and president of the Pacific NW Writers Association, spoke about Sarah Blum, her credentials, her previous book and third degree black belt in aikido, which was something “not a lot of people there knew about me,” Blum said with a chuckle.

The song Blum had most requested, “Til the White Dove Flies Alone,” composed for the dedication of the Women’s Vietnam Memorial, was sung last.

Blum also read selections from her book, and took questions from well wishers, friends, colleague and fellow veterans as she signed copies.

“It was wonderful,” Blum said.

Accprding to the book, Blum, a decorated Vietnam war nurse veteran ,earned the Army Commendation Medal as an operating room nurse at the 12th Evacuation Hospital Cu Chi, Vietnam, during the height of the fighting in 1967. Because Cu Chi sat on the edge of the Hobo Woods, where all the fighting took place in 1967, her hospital handled mass casualties regularly and their operating room became the largest user of fresh blood in all of Vietnam.

According to the book, Blum “greeted her brother soldiers of Vietnam with their wounds and amputations, cared for them directly and saw how their physical wounds did not heal when their heads and hearts were deeply affected. She was awarded a certificate of achievement for exemplary service as head nurse of the orthopedic ward at Madigan Army Hospital in 1968, where she was also the assistant director of nursing on evening and night shift in 1970.

Blum’s first book, “Women Under Fire,” was published in 2013. It was a revelation of sexual abuse in the U.S. Armed Forces. As that book makes clear, “this criminal activity — demeaning, degrading and despicable — is far too prevalent in each of the armed services.”

“Action is needed — comprehensive, effective and swift — before sexual abuse rips out the very heart of the military,” U.S. Army Col. Lawrence Wilkerson (Retired), former chief of staff to secretary of state Colin Powell, and Distinguished Visiting Professor of Government and Public Policy at the College of William and Mary, wrote of “Women Under Fire.”