Susan Hunt Babinski

Soon after arriving back in the United States in 1968, Second Lieutenant Susan Hunt resigned her commission and began to participate in anti-war marches while still identifying strongly with other Vietnam veterans. In 1970 she married Hubert Babinski. After earning a master’s degree in child and adolescent psychiatric nursing from New York University, she accepted a job as a psychologist at the Bronx Children’s Psychiatric Center, where she worked for the next twenty-eight years. She earned her PhD in applied psychology from NYU in 1996. While attending the dedication of the Vietnam Women’s Memorial on the National Mall in 1993—an event of immense significance for nurse veterans like Babinski—she learned that the 91st Evacuation Hospital, where she served, had been declared an Agent Orange Center. She was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2016 and died in 2018 at the age of seventy-three. After her death, her husband, Hubert F. Babinski, PhD, and Rebecca Williams Mlynarczyk, PhD, edited the manuscript of her book for publication.