I don’t remember being taught much in school about Vietnam. The Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and World Wars I and II were covered, but our textbooks seemed to shy away from Vietnam. It wasn’t until I got to college, started reading books like Tim O’Brien’s haunting The Things They Carried, and later heard my dad talk about visiting the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC and seeing a lot of his students’ names on the wall that I began to know the horrors and effects of that long war. And now, after reading Kristin Hannah’s novel The Women, I know more about the sacrifices endured by the nurses who were front and center in dangerous areas, working diligently to save lives. Many of them who came home and wanted to share their stories were told “there were no women in Vietnam.” Through this novel, Hannah gives them the honor of shouting through the pages, “we were there!”
The story is centered on Frances “Frankie” McGrath and begins in 1966, when she is 20 and living on Coronado Island, California in her parents’ lavish home. There is a naval base nearby, and Frankie’s family has a history of serving in the US Navy. She and her beloved older brother Finley had an idyllic childhood on the island, riding bikes, swimming in the ocean, and eating ice cream. Their father is aloof and busy, and their mother is a socialite renowned for her parties. We meet them as they are throwing a going-away party for Finley, who is leaving for Vietnam to serve as a pilot. It’s a time of naiveté when no one really knows the full extent of the war, and they are celebrating.
Having attended nursing school, Frankie is bored with her prospects in California and not interested in taking after her mother, so eventually she signs up to be a nurse in Vietnam. The Navy, Marines, and Air Force won’t take her without extensive extra training, but the Army doesn’t require it, so she jumps at the chance. Throughout the novel, we find Frankie waiting for people to be proud of her for serving, but they never are; pride seems to be reserved only for the men who serve. There is a wall of “heroes” in her father’s study, and she yearns to be on it, but sexism looms large.
When Frankie arrives in Vietnam, the hospital and barracks are much worse than she expects, and the heat is unbearable. Fellow nurses Ethel and Barbara have been there for a while and take Frankie under their wings. The violence they all experience and the long hours of nursing almost break them, but the novel does a wonderful job illustrating the power of female friendship and how they lift one another up. There is nothing like being faced with death daily, holding the hands of dying young men, and the effects of napalm to force a person to push on and grow. The details about guts on display and limbs blown off are hard to read, but absolutely necessary. Young Americans, many of whom were only 18, were being thrown into impossible situations while the government lied to them. The novel is timely for many reasons, including its perspective that while our government has always lied to us and war is always horrible, this war was a particular fiasco. 10,000 women served, as well, many of them nurses, some of whom also died.
As part of her research, the author consulted with real women who served. She stated in her notes that the nurses didn’t want her to use fictional names for locations in the book, so she uses the names of real hubs and hospitals, and the details are fitting. When Frankie finally comes “home,” readers get a description of how poorly Vietnam veterans were received (spit on, yelled at, and more) and the effects of PTSD, which hadn’t quite been named yet. Frankie seeks treatment but is told over and over that because “women didn’t serve,” she doesn’t need a support group or therapy, so she turns to self-medication. Hannah has written two other novels about hardship and war that are as excellent and realistic as this one: The Nightingale, set in World War II France, and The Four Winds, about the Dust Bowl and the formation of unions.
As a reader, I didn’t connect with the parts of the book about the romances Frankie experiences. They tended to take a syrupy turn, and her naiveté didn’t ring true with me. She didn’t heed her friends’ warnings about how men lie, especially when they are away from their families in a foreign country with death all around them. But on the other hand, perhaps Frankie’s naiveté was a humanizing foil so that the whole novel wasn’t just about suffering. Because Frankie was raised a “good girl,” there was a stark dichotomy between the inside and outside of her bubble, and it all contributed to her journey. No matter her personal life, she became an excellent combat nurse, and though the skills she came home with were not appreciated or transferable for quite some time, they were hers to keep.
Speaking of naiveté, one terrific part of the novel captured the correspondence between Frankie and her mother. Frankie is living trauma every day and no one back home can relate, not even her own mother. Frankie is less-than candid in her letters so she doesn’t worry her family, but her mother is clutching her pearls back home:
Dear Frances Grace:
I only want to write good news, but the world has gone insane. The hippies aren’t so peaceful anymore, I can tell you.
Thousands of war protesters. Boys burning their draft cards. Girls burning their bras. Race riots. Good Lord. Our annual party was a rather diminished affair, I must say. All anyone talks about is the war. … People at the club are starting to wonder if the war in Vietnam is wrong.
That letter and others perfectly illustrate that no one can understand a situation unless they are in the trenches of it.
In the section of the book after Frankie comes home (she served two tours), she has many demons to face, including the relationship with her parents, which was also a bit chilly. They love her, but don’t understand her. A turning point for her is when she, while wrestling with full-on PTSD, goes to live on the farm that her nurse friend Ethel now owns with her husband, and their old friend Barbara also joins them. The hard work and proximity to her best friends do wonders for her. They all end up living different lives but stay connected: Ethel is living the farm life, Barbara eventually becomes a civil rights advocate, and Frankie pours herself into veteran’s rights and spreading the word about what it was really like in Vietnam really. The Women has many goals and subplots, and it all comes together to leave a lasting impression about war, family, friends, and perseverance.