Another Day, Another Fake Writer
“What do you pack/To take to a war?” Dana Shuster wrote in Battle Dressing, a collection of poems about her experiences as a Vietnam War combat nurse that won her the 1999 Houston Writers League Poetry Chapbook contest. Yet it appears that’s a question Shuster never actually had to answer for herself. Laura Palmer, who wrote about Shuster nearly twenty years ago in a book about the Vietnam Veterans Memorial called Shrapnel in the Heart, was recently asked if she knew for a fact that Shuster had served in Vietnam. Shocked by the question, “[I] asked [Shuster] if she could corroborate her service for me in specific ways,” Palmer reports in an email circulated to colleagues. “She could not. I learned that she was never in the military and never a nurse.” Palmer adds that since the revelation, Shuster has been hospitalized for psychiatric care and remains in therapy. “It is with profound sadness that I convey this information,” Palmer admits, “but it is important that the truth be known.”
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