When her family receives word that her brother has been killed in action in Vietnam, Frankie McGrath decides that she’s going to do her utmost to earn a place on her father’s wall of heroes—portraits of McGraths who served in America’s wars—by enlisting in the US Army Nurse Corps. Unlike her brother, however, Frankie will face constant denials of her service because there “were no women [serving] in Vietnam.” Kristin Hannah’s emotionally grueling novel, The Women, tells her story and the story of many other women who served in the ANC.
Frankie is a naive young woman when she enlists in 1965. She’s lived a privileged life on California’s Coronado Island in a rich family. She earned a nursing degree and has a bit of experience working in a hospital, but none of this prepares her for what she’s going to see in Vietnam. The Army sends her to posts increasingly close to active fighting during her two tours, and she has to get used to power cuts, artillery strikes, and terrible heat during surgery. Her comrades in the Nurse Corps help her acclimate (though no one got to her fast enough to warn her about where to find safe drinking water on her first day). Frankie will be friends with some of these nurses for the rest of her life.
A large portion of The Women is about Frankie’s troubled life after she demobs from the Nurse Corps. No one wants to hear her talk about what it was like in Vietnam. Her father barely speaks to her; her mother is only interested in getting Frankie’s life “back on track” by getting her married to a nice boy. But the sound of fireworks can send Frankie diving for cover. She is angry all the time. She keeps getting in trouble at her new nursing jobs by taking charge in medical emergencies the way she used in Vietnam. The only people who understand Frankie are her friends.
These paragraphs barely skim Frankie’s story. To be honest, the blistering pace had me struggling with this book. In the note at the end of the book, Hannah shares her inspirations and research about women who served in the US military during Vietnam. It was clear to me that a lot of this research was put directly into Frankie’s character arc. That is to say, Frankie seems to experience almost everything that ever happened to a member of the ANC: falling in love with a soldier who lied about not being married, being turned away from Veterans Affairs when she asked for psychological care, alcoholism, witnessing the aftermath of atrocities committed by US forces, sudden deaths of friends, anti-war protesting, miscarriage that might be the result of exposure to Agent Orange, and so much more. This book gallops through all of this so quickly that, for me, the emotional impact of most of it was blunted. I never got a chance to metaphorically sit with Frankie and feel the weight of what a woman like her would’ve had to carry in her memories. Consequently, very little of The Women felt real to me.
I am grateful to Hannah and this book for reminding us readers that women were very much in Vietnam. They saved lives. And they were there in the soldiers’ last minutes if they couldn’t be saved. And, after the war, their service was denied or downplayed for decades by so many. I might have issues with this book’s structure and pace, but I hope that a lot of people read it, so that they can learn about the heroic women of the US Army Nurse Corps.
