The Women — A Vietnam Saga
Kristin Hannah’s novel isn’t to be missed
The Vietnam War ended over fifty years ago. Ancient history to most young people today.
At the time, despite the daily news reports filled with black-and-white footage of the carnage going on there, most Americans believed it to be a necessary war, to stop Communism from spreading. The futility of it rarely got a mention. After all, the French tried the same tactics in their former colony and got their backsides handed to them in 1954 at the battle of Dien Bien Phu.
Around 58,220 Americans died in Vietnam. Over 600,000 suffered life-altering wounds. After returning home to an ungrateful country, thousands more lived their lives under the cloud of the horrors they’d endured every day, suffering nightmares, addiction, and even cancer from Agent Orange, an herbicide used to kill vegetation offering cover to the Viet Cong, the enemy.
Some of those dead, wounded, and sufferers were women. Yet, not until 1993 did the U.S. government honor the combat nurses and other women who served in the armed forces in Vietnam.
When I heard about author Kristin Hannah’s newest book, The Women, I wasn’t sure I wanted to read it. I grew up during the years of the Vietnam War, an ardent opponent of the war. The waste of lives appalled me. I marched in a few anti-war marches. I did nothing to welcome the soldiers back, mostly because most of the boys I knew went to university and were thus exempt from the draft. I simply didn’t know anyone who served in Vietnam.
I’d read Tom O’Brien’s The Things They Carried and Karl Marlantes’s Matterhorn A Novel of the Vietnam War.
But, because I like Hannah’s The Nightingale so much, and few books on the subject of war spoke of the women, I opened The Women one afternoon around 4 p.m. And I didn’t stop reading until 1 a.m. The main character, a fledgling nurse named Frances — Frankie — McGrath, grew up in Coronado, California, the daughter of well-to-do country-club parents. Their son Finley, the golden child — as most sons were in those days — graduated from Annapolis. Soon he packed his duffel bag and headed to Vietnam. Frankie’s father, who never served in the military, kept Finley’s picture on a heroes’ wall in his office. One day, during one of her parents’ innumerable parties, Frankie escaped to that room to get away from the crowd. Rye Walsh, a friend of her brother’s and also a graduate of Annapolis, found her there. They started talking, and Rye told her that women could be heroes, too.
Soon Frankie decided to join the military, but only the Army would take her because she lacked the two years of nursing experience required by the other service branches. Awarded the rank of second lieutenant in the Army, Frankie boarded a flight in California and woke up to the steamy air of Saigon, gagging at the smell of rotting vegetables and human excrement.
With that, the story lights up like an unending mortar attack.
Gruesome true-to-life scenes of death and destruction follow. Frankie faced death, loss, and romantic disappointments, page after page. The only saving grace lies in her friendships with two other combat nurses, Ethel and Barb.
When her time in Vietnam ended, Frankie returned home only to find her parents, along with most people, disregarding her experience, not understanding the toll it took on her and the soldiers who served. Even the Veterans Administration failed to see the women as veterans. Hannah delved into this with equal ruthlessness, sparing no words in her portrayal of how difficult life was for Frankie and others like her.
Although the novel describes the Vietnam War from a female perspective, any reader, male or female, will gain a much better understanding of the war by reading it. And why the protests increased after Walter Cronkite began broadcasting more of the truth, beginning in 1968, called “The Cronkite Moment.” Then came The Pentagon Papers in 1971.
Even when the war finally and formally ended in 1973 with the Paris Peace Accords, Frankie felt no peace.
Hannah’s telling of the Vietnam War through Frankie’s eyes deserves to be read, not just for the writing — which is polished and profound — but as a reminder of the toll war takes on people.
And that’s very important now, as war rages in Ukraine and Gaza.
