Reviewing The Women
by Kristin Hannah is proving to be a hard task to serve this epic tale being published
in February the justice it deserves. In Part 1, Frankie McGrath decides to join
the Army Nurse Corps to go to Vietnam, inspired by the enlistment of her
brother into the Navy as well as the importance her father places on being a
hero. The narrative follows Frankie throughout her service with the Army Nurse
Corps, with Part 2 dealing with her struggle to rejoin the world she left
behind for Vietnam.
Frankie,
who was raised on a walled and gated estate on Coronado Island in California,
is unprepared for just how primitive all the facilities are when she arrives at
her post in the Thirty-Sixth Evac Mobile Hospital in Vietnam in 1967. She is
soon overwhelmed by the absolute horror in the aftermath of the wounded
arriving in a background of screaming injured, shouting of orders by the nurses
and doctors, and the smoke, all the smoke. Two nurses, Ethel Flint and Barb
Johnson, school Frankie in combat nursing, and the three build a friendship
that will take them into life after the war where people keep telling them,
there were no women serving in Vietnam.
The
war is raging during Frankie’s first tour of duty. Often the only thing she can
do for injured soldiers is to hold their hands until they die. The damage
inflicted by mortar and bullets is at first overwhelming, but Frankie, like all
the other military nurses, is forced to step up and do things she was never
trained for like removing a spleen and closing the operation. With only three
doctors assigned to her location, she learns more and more under their
direction. After her time is served, she extends her tour because she realizes
with the shortage of medical personnel, she is sorely needed.
Romance
enters the picture when Frankie is pursued by Dr. Jamie Callahan, one of the
doctors she works with. When she learns that he is one of those “war bachelors”
her father had warned her about, she shuts down the relationship before it
blooms. The last time she sees Jamie, his helicopter starting his pathway home
has been shot down, and he becomes just another soldier with devastating
injuries that will most likely claim his life.
Soon
after, Frankie is assigned to the Seventy-First Evac near Pleiku, nicknamed “Rocket
City,” where the fighting is even heavier than her first posting. There, Frankie
reunites with one of her brother’s Navy buddies, pilot Joseph Ryerson Walsh. After
Rye swears he is no longer engaged to a woman in the States, Frankie allows
herself to enter into a relationship with him, spending R&R together in
Hawaii.
As
if life in Vietnam is not hard enough, the women start hearing about how the
homeland they left behind becomes divided by war and politics, how Vietnam
heroes are not given the welcome back that they deserve. Barb becomes extremely
active in protesting the war once she becomes a civilian again, and as often as
she can, she includes Ethel and Frankie in the activities of the group, Vietnam
Veterans Against the War.
While
waiting for Rye to return to America, Frankie learns his helicopter was shot
down, and there are no remains. Between the devastation to men’s bodies, the change
of the Americans’ hearts about the war, and her own heart broken not once but
twice, Frankie spirals down, becoming dependent on the pills, booze, and
cigarettes she was introduced to in Vietnam. When she seeks help from the
Veterans Administration, she is turned down once and then twice as only the men
who fought in the war were recognized as veterans.
There
is so much to unpack in this historical fiction that pays tribute to those women
who served and sacrificed only to be overlooked by others except
for those they nurtured and those with whom they served. One day, Frankie will
visit The Vietnam Memorial Wall in Washington, D.C., which includes the names of
eight women, all of them nurses.
Kristin
Hannah started her writing career solidly in women’s fiction with books like Firefly
Lane but she moved to combining her women’s stories with historical fiction, giving readers works about
World War II in The Nightingale (2015) and Winter Garden (2010), and
the Great Depression in The Four Winds (2018).
My review
will be posted on Goodreads starting December 9, 2023.
I would like
to thank St. Martin's Press and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in
return for an objective review.
