Women Can Be Heroes Too
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This is the story of Frances (Frankie) McGrath who comes from a family with generations of men who have served in the Navy. A photo of each man is hanging in her father’s study, creating a “Hero’s Wall.” Frankie has one sibling, a brother, Finley, who will soon be on his way to Vietnam. On the eve of his departure, there is a going away party for him. At the party, Frankie meets her brother’s friend, Rye Walsh. As they look at the wall of photos together, he tells her that women can be heroes too.
For Frankie, a newly minted nurse at age twenty, this is a novel idea, but one that echoes in her head after her brother leaves for his tour of duty. Ultimately, she joins the Army Nurse Corps. (The Navy wouldn’t send her to Vietnam due to a lack of experience.) Instead of being proud to have another hero in their midst, her parents are appalled. It’s not exactly that they fear for her life, but instead that they are embarrassed by her actions. Women do not go to war! As she goes off to serve her country, they tell friends that she is traveling in Europe instead!
The first half of the book focuses on the nightmare that faces Frankie in Vietnam. She had been told by the recruiter that she would be in a big hospital, far from the front. She was also told she’d get to see her brother while in-country. Both are untrue and in the case of Finley, he dies when his helicopter is shot down – and this happens before Frankie even leaves for her tour of duty.
I’m certain that no medical professional is ever prepared for war, but this is especially true of Frankie who is so new to nursing. Thus Frankie – and the reader – are in for some gruesome “on the job training” as she is sent to the Thirty-Sixth, a four-hundred-bed evac hospital sixty miles from Saigon. Here they care for the VSI, very seriously injured. Thankfully, she shares a hooch (a hut) with two more experienced nurses, Ethel and Barb, who teach her a lot and become her lifelong friends. She also becomes friends with – and learns a lot from – Jameson (Jamie) Callahan, a doctor about ten years her senior.
Romantic feelings develop between Frankie and Jamie but are hindered by the fact that he is married. Later, Finley’s friend, Rye shows up in-country and becomes the love of her life. But both men are in the military and in harm’s way, so these relationships are possibly doomed from the get go.
We fear that Frankie is likewise doomed when she is rewarded for her many and growing skills by being transferred to the Seventy-First Evac, near the Cambodian border. This puts her in the deep jungle and in heavy fighting.
All of this happens in the first half of the book, but the story really takes off in the second half when Frankie returns from TWO tours of duty in 1969. As we all know from American History of this era, she finds a world that is opposed to the war and hostile to the veterans who served in it.
The new part that Kristin Hannah brings to the tale is the fact that most people do not believe any women served in the war. Even the Veteran’s Administration is unable to help Frankie with her PTSD because of this belief. And in Frankie’s case, her parents are still blind to her sacrifices in war, and completely unwilling to talk to her about it. And so we follow some emotionally fraught years for Frankie as a civilian.
I was in a relationship with a Vietnam vet for a decade and so I can tell you that Kristin Hannah does an excellent job of describing the emotional pain and suffering of this group of people over a very long period of time. And it was all made more poignant by the fact that women veterans suffered in a unique way up to and including the way Agent Orange harmed their bodies.
The book ends in 1982 when the Vietnam Memorial was dedicated in Washington D.C. Thousands of veterans gathered for the event. As the author writes:
“At the Mall, an American flag fluttered in the cool breeze above a trio of bright red fire trucks. Supporters filled the grassy area, lined the Reflecting Pool, waited for the parade of veterans: children on their parents’ shoulders, families huddled together, mothers holding framed pictures of their lost sons, dogs barking, babies screaming. Five jets flew overhead; one peeled off from the rest. The missing man formation. The welcome home these veterans never received.”
It was a beautiful finish to a harrowing tale.
But then there was one more painful part of history that the author shares after the book’s last sentence. It is a photo of the Vietnam Women’s Memorial in Washington, D.C. It took until 1993 for that sculpture to be created and dedicated.
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Click here to learn more about The Women on Amazon.
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Two other Kristin Hannah books I have reviewed:
Click here to read my review of The Great Alone.
Click here to read my review of The Four Winds.
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