It has been over fifty years since the real American women portrayed in this play went to Vietnam to serve their country. Of the eleven thousand women who served in the Vietnam war, sixty-seven died, but only eight have been recognised and commemorated on the Vietnam Veterans wall in Washington, D.C. The majority of women who went to Vietnam served as nurses, but there were also those who worked for the US Governmental agencies, the Red Cross, and the Peace Corps. Until now, very little has been told about their experiences, and there are no official lists of who they were. This play seeks to redress the balance. At the same time, it conveys a very different perspective compared with a traditional war movie. These women were inspired to travel to conflict zones, not in order to fight but to support the men who were compelled to fight. They endured some degree of battle trauma, but they also suffered serious personal trauma through their close proximity to the physically and mentally wounded troops. On their return to the US, they were not encouraged to speak out about their experiences.

The playwright, Ashley Adelman, specializes in documentary, or 'Verbatim' theatre, that focuses on women's history. In Their Footsteps has been performed all around NYC as well as touring the US. The production was very well received at the Edinburgh Fringe and had its Australian premiere in Sydney earlier this year. This production features an all-Australian cast, although one of the actors was born in California. They bring a confident authenticity to their roles as five women who relate their real-life stories, describing their naivety about the jobs they were applying for; the highs and lows of serving in a war zone; the disillusionments they went through as well as the outright tragedies that they witnessed, and above all, the lifelong friendships that they forged. We assume, and we are ultimately told, that these stories are based on a series of interviews that were given by five women. The process of turning these taped stories into a drama which is performed by five modern women brings the whole experience closer to us. The actors re-enact the innocence of the early days of recruitment, the energy and optimism of youth, and the subsequent physical trauma of caring for dying soldiers and sheltering from overhead bomb attacks.

The director, Carly Fisher, describes the work that is involved in creating Verbatim Theatre: "Hours and hours, day upon day of research has gone into each of the performances that you will see on the In Their Footsteps stage as we became more and more determined to tell these stories correctly. This culminated in us speaking with Ann Kelsey and Judy Jenkins Gaudino, two of the brave women who shared their stories through this play on Zoom last week, an opportunity that gave this whole experience even more meaning and significance. But research can only take you so far: then you need to inform these characters and scenarios with life, with the lived experiences of real human beings. And what a privilege it has been to work with the phenomenal humans who breathe more than just life into the women we portray on stage, but also breathe empathy, charisma, and passion into them".

We hear from a nurse, a Red Cross volunteer (self-described as a 'Donut Dolly'), a librarian, an intelligence officer, and a woman who works in the service club. The Red Cross volunteer and the service club worker see themselves as therapists and morale-boosters, tempering the brutality of military life with levity and humanity. The intelligence officer is ignored and ridiculed when she warns her superior officers of impending enemy manoeuvres. The librarian despairs of being asked to provide anything more erudite than Playboy Magazine, while the nurse is increasingly distressed at the number of civilian women and orphaned children she is having to treat. The women have to constantly enforce boundaries to ensure they are not mistreated by the soldiers, but there are also terrible stories of other women who suffered serious injury or even death because they allowed or were more often forced into intimacy.

When the women finish their term of service, some travel to other countries with a newfound sense of freedom, but all five of them return to the US to an indifferent welcome and settle uncomfortably back into civilian life. They are racked with nightmares and disturbing memories, suffering guilt over the actions they took that may have implicated innocent people. The final line: "No war is worth it," sums up the futility of so much that is labelled as heroism. These women would be unlikely to call themselves heroines, but their story is the understory that has to accompany any heroic tale: they describe the human frailty and vulnerability of our fighting forces, as witnessed first-hand.

A first-class all-female production that brings yet another neglected aspect of women's history into the spotlight and also highlights the dilemmas of war that afflict every nation. This is a story that men and women alike will connect with, and it is especially poignant in the context of the current invasion of Ukraine. It deserves a standing ovation, no matter where it is performed.