Review: Vivien Horler
The Women – a novel, by Kristin Hannah (Macmillan)
In November 1993, almost 10 years after the end of the Vietnam war, a bronze statue was unveiled in Washington DC to commemorate the contribution of the 10 000 enlisted American women who served in South-East Asia.
Around 90% of them were nurses, while others were in air traffic control, military intelligence and in administration.
The nursing work on the front line was brutal, and the wounds, both physical and psychological they and their surgeon partners had to deal with, were horrendous.
Yet for years the American public was able to ignore, or even deny, that US military personnel were in Vietnam. And if that was the case for men, it was even more so for women. In many cases broader America flatly rejected the notion any American women were in Vietnam at all.
This moving novel, based on hundreds of real experiences, focuses on a small group of Vietnam nurses, chief among them Frankie McGrath, who does two year-long tours in the Army Nurse Corps.
Frankie is inspired to join up for two reasons: her beloved older brother Finley has volunteered, and she figures if she is trained in time, she will overlap with him. Also, she comes from a military family and in her father’s study is a “heroes’ wall” with photographs of uniformed grandfathers and great-grandfathers going back to World War 1.
At a farewell for Finley at her parents’ California beachside home, Frankie wanders into her dad’s study where a friend of Finley’s is gazing at the pictures. He asks her why there are no pictures of women, and she says that’s because it’s a heroes’ wall.
The friend says: “Women can be heroes.”
Frankie giggles, but the friend says: “I mean it, Frankie. It’s 1966. The whole world is changing.”
Frankie has been raised to be a lady, to become a teacher or a secretary, to find a suitable husband for whom she will run a pleasant home, be a member of the country club, know how to lay a table and arrange flowers, and bring up charming children.
No one has ever said to her before that women can be heroes. Her world tilts.
The day Frankie enlists comes the news: Finley has been killed.
But she has signed on the dotted line, and is deaf to her parents’ entreaties.
The next two years are exhausting, terrifying and bloody. But she also finds extraordinary and lasting friendships among her fellow nurses, romantic love, and sees unimaginable courage – on the part of soldiers, South Vietnamese civilians, and the medical personnel she serves with. It is an education she could never have imagined at school at St Bernadette’s.
And then in March 1969, her war is over, and she flies home, five years before the official end of the war in 1974.
At this point we are only midway through the book, and I wonder what else can be coming. It turns out – as anyone who saw the 1978 film Coming Home with Jon Voight and Jane Fonda might recall – just because your “in-country” war is over, that doesn’t mean it’s all back to sunshine and apple pie.
In March 1969, making her way home in uniform, people spit at her at the airport, and cabbies ignore her wave. People shout: “Nazi! Child killer!”
Frankie is bewildered. Two years of trying to save lives, and ease the physical and mental pain of horrifically wounded young soldiers, and she is a target of anti-war protestors?
It gets worse.
The next day her mother takes her to lunch at the country club.
Frankie feels a sense of collision. “How could this cool, white, moneyed world exist in a bubble, while in Vietnam a war was raging…?”
The family doctor stops at their table, and says: “Home from Florence already?”
Someone drops a tray with a crash, and Frankie dives for the floor. People stare as she gets up, shaky and clammy. She tells the doctor she’s sorry, she just got home from Vietnam
The doctor lets go her hand and tells her: “There are no women in Vietnam, dear.”
She assures the doctor there are. He says her father told him she had been studying abroad.
She turns to her mother: “Are you fucking kidding me?” Her mother tells her to cool down, she’s making a scene.
She responds furiously: “You think this is a scene? No, Mom. A scene is when a soldier comes in off the battlefield holding his own foot.”
Eventually she seeks help at a veterans’ hospital. When she tells a psychiatrist what she has been through, he looks at her kindly and asks her if she is menstruating.
She might have served in the Army Nurse Corps, he says, but she never saw combat. So she not really a veteran. And she doesn’t qualify for his help.
It turns out the way to deal with the pain, the horror and the memories is to suppress them. No one wants to know. Shut up. Keep it to yourself. People don’t want to hear about the guys who did see combat, and they certainly don’t want to know about the nurses.
But gradually, things begin to change. The Tet Offensive and My Lai see the war start to feature regularly on the nation’s TV screens. People become increasingly aware. And a form of healing follows.
Everything in this novel is true, and really happened to people like the characters in it. While Ukrainians can hardly ignore the war in their country, news reports from Israel indicate the Israeli media, with some brave exceptions, are doing their best to ignore what is happening in Gaza, the West Bank and further afield, all in Israel’s name. People simply don’t want to know.
Like every other Kristin Hannah novel I’ve read, this is a story with a big theme, and is an absorbing, thoughtful and meaningful book.